Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I'm your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I'm so glad you're here now. Let's dive into the show. Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, the show where spa CEOs get the tools and strategies to scale with ease. I'm Daniela, and today we are diving into a platform that is often overlooked but absolutely critical when it comes to building real business partnerships, strategic partnerships. These relationships are the type of relationships that will help you scale with ease. I'm talking about LinkedIn, not Instagram, not Facebook, LinkedIn. And if you're thinking, Wait, isn't LinkedIn for Job Hunters, just hang on. I'm going to change the way that you look at it. So let's go ahead and start here. When it comes to growing your spa partnerships are absolutely gold. We want to be able to collaborate with other local businesses. So when I say local businesses, I'm talking about wellness centers, fitness studios, nutritionist luxury real estate agents, bridal shops, event planners, permanent makeup studios. I mean, there's so many lists of business types that also serve the same clientele as we do in our spa, and so we want to be able to find them locally and start to build connections and relationships with them. LinkedIn, hands down, is the best platform for that. So what's really cool about LinkedIn is their search tools, so you can easily filter by location, by industry, even by company size. So that means it's super easy to find other business owners in your local area who you actually want to know and collaborate with. You might be wondering, well, why wouldn't I just use Instagram? Let me give you some stats. Okay, so first, LinkedIn has over 1 billion members worldwide, and the majority, more than 50% are professionals between the ages of 25 to 34 so over half of LinkedIn users are from high income households. That is the type of professional network that you want to tap into, right? We're looking for partnerships. We're looking for businesses that are standing on their own two feet and that are working well, that we can create a relationship that's mutually beneficial. We don't want to have a relationship where it's just one side is the giver and the other side is the taker. Okay, so real, strategic partnerships that work incredibly well. Both sides are providing value to one another. Okay, so if we compare LinkedIn to Instagram, sure, Instagram has over 2 billion users, but it's definitely younger. It's more casual. We've got 76% of US adults, age 18 to 29 are active on Instagram, and so if we're thinking that, hey, we in the spa space, we are targeting a more mature, a more sophisticated most of us, right. We all serve different age demographics. But if we have such a high percentage of 18 to 29 year olds on Instagram, is that where your clientele is okay, maybe for some of you, but not for everybody. And when we're looking at building strategic partnerships, I can tell you from myself, like I like to look at my own behavior, yes, we absolutely have an Instagram account for Addo esthetics. Am I on there? No, my team handles that. Where am I? I'm on LinkedIn. If you send me a message on LinkedIn, it will be me that responds to it. If you send me a message on Instagram, it will be my team that responds to it. Okay, so that is normal for so many business owners that I have spoken with. So if you want to get straight to the CEO, the founder in your local area of these businesses, LinkedIn is the place to do it. Okay? So here's another key difference on LinkedIn, about 70% of users engage with content shared by companies, and the posts that are featuring CEOs get three times more engagement. So that means when you show up and share your insights as a spa CEO, you're not just posting into the void. People are ready to listen, connect and collaborate, and I want to just highlight something. I said, you know, on LinkedIn, 70% of users engage with content shared by companies. We want to lead with your personal brand first. So your personal profile is what you want to be building on LinkedIn. People want to connect with people. It's great to have your company up there to be able to tag it and kind of do the slow build, but really focus on people to people connections and relationships on LinkedIn. Okay, so people are ready to listen. So if you are serious about growing your spa, not just client by client, but through building strategic partnerships with other businesses. LinkedIn is not optional. It is essential, all right, so you've got to leverage these networking features to help you build a local community. You can create cross promotions, you can create referral pipelines. You can get in front of other people's audiences, and you can position yourself as a leader in your local market. So if you haven't yet, what I want you to do right now, unless you're driving, unless you're doing your workout. I don't know when everybody listens, but I know we get a lot of commuters and doing your makeup or doing your workout. If you are able, as soon as you're able, I want you to go to LinkedIn. I want you to refresh your profile. I want you to update your profile. I want you to create a profile, if you have not done that yet, and I want you to start playing around with the possibility doing some searches, finding other business owners in your local area that you can connect with and build relationships with. Okay, this is so incredibly powerful as an overall strategy. This is a foundational strategy. And when I talk about the difference between a foundational strategy and a tactical strategy. The tactical strategies sit on top of that foundational strategy, ads, SEO, those are tactical those the strategies can shift and change, but relationship marketing is foundational. This is something that for years and years and years, you have heard, and you will continue to hear about the power of your network, the power of relationships that create opportunity and success. It's how you get in the right room. Okay, so start using LinkedIn like the CEO that you are. I want you to do this for yourself. Okay, so if you found today's episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe. Leave a review and share it with another spa CEO who is ready to elevate their business. Find me on LinkedIn. Send me a connection request. I would love to connect with you over there, and I will catch you on the next episode.