Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (or a pile of hair clippings), you’re at least vaguely familiar with the advent of artificial intelligence in the last two years. Tools like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, proving exceptionally valuable while raising serious questions about the future.

As polarizing as AI tools are, there’s no denying that they are powerful and quite useful in the right context. With access to vast amounts of data, AI programs are particularly advantageous for generating advertising ideas, creating content, performing market research, and more.

With AI arguably being the future of marketing, many barbers wonder if they should invest in such tools. Here, we explore that question and dive into why you should use AI to market your barbering biz.

AI – Barber Marketing's New Best Friend

Barbering is still an analog trade. You learn skills and hone them into expertise. You provide tangible services to your clients. You need a physical space to perform your work.

So, how does a digital tool like AI fit into a barbering business strategy?

The answer is very simple—it improves your marketing capabilities while saving you a meaningful amount of time!

Social Media Savvy

Love it or hate it, social media has become a dominant force in business marketing, especially for small businesses trying to make their mark. When leveraged properly, social media platforms can make a massive difference in the marketability and success of your barbering shop. On the flip side, they can also be tremendous time and resource sucks.

AI tools like ChatGPT can help you be more effective on social media while saving you a lot of time in terms of analysis, scheduling, and content creation. For example, AI can evaluate your audience’s behaviors and preferences, provide insights based on them, and schedule your content at the ideal times—all without your direct involvement.

Captivating Content Creation

Content is king whether you’re advertising on social media or through other avenues. You need to generate content that grabs people’s attention, encourages them to engage, and boosts your barbering brand’s exposure.

Some barbers are skilled content creators, but most find their time and efforts better spent on other aspects of their barbering biz. As such, streamlining content creation while keeping it compelling is key. AI does just that, allowing you to create phenomenal marketing content with minimal time invested.

From captions to scripts to images, AI excels at generating consumable content that accounts for keywords, trends, and your target audience.

Meaningful Market Research

The best content creation and social media strategies are rendered practically useless if they reach the wrong people. If you want to build your barbering biz through marketing—which is almost always the goal—you need to have a strong understanding of the market that you are targeting.

Proper market research involves identifying your target customer’s demographics, interests, and motivations. It is typically an in-depth process that requires time, resources, and commitment. Thankfully, AI streamlines your market research and helps you reach meaningful conclusions in a fraction of the time.

It does this by using database material to learn about your audience, conducting surveys to generate more insights, evaluating feedback from similar audiences, and analyzing all of the information to give you an actionable report regarding your market and how to best reach it.

Superb SEO

If you want to drive traffic to both your digital assets (social media platforms, website, etc.) and your physical barber shop, search engine optimization is essential. This is, in its most basic form, utilizing keywords and metadata to boost your search engine rankings and become more visible to existing and potential customers. Consider it a competitive edge.

With AI, you can conduct SEO research and optimization to ensure that your keywords and metadata are relevant and contribute toward your goal of attracting the right audience.

The advantages of leveraging AI to assist you in your barber shop marketing strategy are many. The points mentioned here are poignant but only scratch the surface of the potential uses for AI. From lead generation to improved customer service, you can use AI in several other profound ways to build your barbering biz.

That said, it is important to understand the limitations of AI. While it is an undeniably effective tool that is continuing to progress, it is not the end-all-be-all of marketing (or anything else). Setting realistic expectations, investing in other skilled humans, and using AI to fill specific gaps in your marketing plan is key to ensuring that AI fits your needs and doesn’t disappoint.

For more barbering biz insights, including the latest innovations that can benefit your shop, be sure to subscribe to NAOB and visit our blog!