NHBF focuses on helping Members to run successful and profitable hair and beauty businesses by providing advice, specialist support and tailored services to meet the unique challenges of running a salon or barbershop. Their website is the hub of communications, so it's vital that information is accessible, relevant and easy to find. The site design is critical to their aesthetically driven audience and NetXtra are proud of our collaborative efforts including periodic refreshes to the site inline with the brands evolution. Our work with NHBF has encompassed the following.

Objectives and solutions

Communicate and grow

NHBF have progressive strategies to grow and extend their reach. Our work has included providing a mechanism for publishing advice, fact sheets, campaigns, news and blogs along with enabling online joining. The Engage CMS also collects newsletter subscriber data which passes into the CRM as leads flagged for follow-up by their membership team.

Improve visibility through search

Using the Engage CMS’s ability to assign weighted search items and auto-suggest results based on the ‘did you mean?’ functionality has enabled site administrators to associate their terminology with terminology likely to be used by their audience (encompassing slang, substitute and equivalent words).

Create opportunities for engagement

NHBF recognised that extending their events offering to provide a wider variety of regional and national events and training opportunities for members and prospective members would improve their engagement. Because this aspect is integrated with their CRM they are able to update availability of places in real time and follow up on bookings from non-members (sales leads). This has been further enhanced through launching their coveted competitions and awards which can now be entered online.

Provide valuable resources

A big part of the NHBFs role in the industry is in providing resources such as contracts that can be bought and downloaded along with a comprehensive supplier directory. Many of NHBFs online resources are accessible without charge as a member benefit, promoting this helps with lead generation attracting non-members to join.

Impact

The 2020 pandemic period presented the hair and beauty industry with significant challenges with restrictions being placed on trade. NHBF represented the industry to Government, helped to disseminate vital information to the industry and provided vital business support at a critical time. As a result of their proactive approach and responsive actions they have seen dramatic growth in digital connections with 1000% increase in website visitors year-on-year, Instagram followers growing from 5.5k to 72k and Facebook likers from 14k to 85k. Their social media posts now regularly see over 900 likes and 200 comments (with a recent post attracting 1,800 likes and 550 comments!). 

They have been able to harness those social media engagements by directing people to register on their site to download valuable resources. Their ‘back to business’ guide was downloaded 33,000 times generating 25,000 new leads for their non-member newsletter. All of this engagement has resulted in the NHBF growing by 1,800 members to 7,300 members since February 2020. 

Future growth

Work currently in progress with NHBF includes revisiting the design of their ‘MyNHBF’ members area to expand the features and functionality available through self-service. In addition, a new mobile app for NHBF is currently in UAT. The app integrates with the Oomi CRM and Engage CMS to deliver push notifications, personalised resources, news, blogs and events content to users.