From Likes to Leads: How Beauty Schools Can Win with Social Media

Presented by Chelsea [Last Name]

Introduction

Social media is no longer just a place to scroll—it’s a powerful marketing engine for beauty schools. With billions of users and more than two hours of daily average usage, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have become critical for brand visibility, lead generation, and enrollment growth.

In this session, Chelsea shared how beauty schools can use both organic and paid strategies to boost brand awareness, build community, and turn social media engagement into measurable enrollment results. Drawing from her digital marketing background—and a recent big move from Utah to Boston—she offered a practical, no-fluff approach to getting real results online.

The Role of Social Media in Your Marketing Ecosystem

Social media should be treated like your digital billboard—a high-visibility tool that reinforces your brand, keeps you top of mind, and allows you to speak directly to your audience. While traditional billboards depend on constant repetition to make an impact, social platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer a smarter approach. They allow you to:

• Target specific audiences

• Engage directly with users

• Track performance in real-time

• Build both trust and traffic

If you’re not showing up on social, you’re missing out on where your prospective students already spend their time—and make decisions.

Organic Social: Laying the Foundation

Organic content refers to the unpaid posts you publish on your school’s social channels. This content plays a crucial role in creating a consistent and trustworthy brand presence.

Key Benefits of Organic Social:

• Builds Trust: If a prospective student clicks an ad and sees your last post was two years ago, it raises questions. Consistent, relevant content signals professionalism and activity.

• Creates Community: Organic posts allow you to respond to comments, share student success stories, and foster an inclusive, engaging atmosphere.

• Captures Feedback: Comments, messages, and post engagement are valuable data points. Use them to refine your messaging, programming, and customer service.

Content Pillars to Focus On:

1. Educational – Program info, instructor spotlights, FAQs

2. Entertaining – Trends, challenges, behind-the-scenes moments

3. User-Generated Content (UGC) – Share student work and testimonials

4. Authentic Storytelling – Highlight the day-to-day journey of your students

Simplifying the Content Process

Creating content doesn’t have to be overwhelming. A few efficient strategies:

• Schedule quarterly photo and video shoots with a professional

• Document campus events, student life, and special milestones

• Create a folder or shared drive where students can submit content

• Provide a school-owned iPad or phone for students to use during class

• Appoint a social-savvy student ambassador to help manage posting (with guidance)

The goal is to gather content consistently without interrupting the student experience.

Paid Social: Amplifying What Works

Paid advertising is how you take your best content and put it in front of the right people—at the right time.

Why Paid Social Works:

• It increases visibility beyond your existing followers

• It supports time-sensitive campaigns like scholarships or enrollment deadlines

• It allows detailed audience targeting based on demographics and interests

• It’s measurable, scalable, and adaptable

Paid social isn’t just about boosting posts—it’s about strategy. Use video, carousels, and testimonials to test what resonates with your audience, and invest more in what performs well.

The Power of Tracking

To measure success, it’s essential to track your campaigns properly:

• UTM parameters help you trace where traffic is coming from

• Meta Pixel allows you to track conversions and retarget users

• CRM integration helps connect the dots from click to enrollment

Make sure every campaign is tied to a clear call to action—and that you can follow the lead through the entire funnel.

Organic + Paid: A Unified Strategy

The best results come when organic and paid efforts work together. Here’s how:

• Organic builds trust and keeps your pages fresh and active

• Paid drives leads and gets your message in front of new audiences

• Together, they create a seamless experience from first impression to application

Avoid relying on only one side. Organic supports brand depth, while paid provides speed and scale.

Best Practices for Social Media Success

• Post consistently and be authentic in your tone

• Use varied formats: videos, reels, carousels, stories

• Engage with your audience—don’t post and ghost

• Track performance and optimize based on what works

• Stay informed on platform updates and trends

• Combine organic and paid for a well-rounded strategy

Final Thoughts

Social media can be one of your school’s most effective marketing tools—when it’s used with intention. From building brand awareness to driving enrollments, a strong social presence helps you meet your audience where they already are.

With the right mix of creativity, consistency, and strategy, beauty schools can use social to not only attract attention—but to actually convert it into leads and enrollments.

View Transcript:

Chris:
Euphoria as scoring the game winning goal and a tightly contested lacrosse game. Hint, she’s into lacrosse and coaching it. And okay, her vast experience working with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok. Make her the MVP of your next winning paid social media campaign. If you’re looking to score on any social media platform, just pay attention to what she has to say. Chelsea has recently graduated from the University of Utah, my alma mater. She graduated with her MBA, and then she has recently moved to Boston, Massachusetts so that her husband can pursue his academic career at Boston College. So Chelsea, you’re going to be talking about the title of your session is Likes to Leads, driving Brand Awareness for Beauty Schools With Social Media. I think everybody’s excited to hear this session. We’re excited to learn about social media. We know it’s important. I’ll just go ahead and give you the floor and take it away.

Chelsea:
Great. Okay. Let me share my slides here. Okay, awesome. Yeah, like Chris said, just a quick background about me. We moved to Boston in August, drove from Utah to Boston with our four month old puppy, and so my life has changed quite dramatically. But the thing that has stayed the same and I’m grateful for this, is sticking with Uzel through that move. So appreciate Uzel through and through, and I’m excited to be talking to you guys again this year. Talking about social media, once again, we’re talking about how social media plays into awareness, getting people to know who we are and how that fits in our holistic marketing strategy. So first things first, I want to take a step back and think about the various marketing channels that we have at our fingertips these days. It can be quite overwhelming at times. And before smartphones, computers, we didn’t have to worry about all of that, but we still had avenues for marketing.

(02:15):
And those avenues were things like print ads, brochures, flyers, pamphlets, ads in magazines and newspapers, direct mail marketing, I would even say radio spots and TV commercials are more or less traditional marketing and billboards. And I kind of want to focus in on billboard advertising for a second. So traditional billboards, you guys all know ’em, you’ve seen ’em. They’re up along the freeways in downtown cities. I think of Times Square in New York City a lot when I think of billboards. But a traditional billboard, unlike New York City, is just a printed poster basically. And it sits on that billboard for let’s say six months. So I’m thinking I 15 in Utah, someone who’s commuting from Utah County to Salt Lake City. If a brand has purchased a billboard on either side of the freeway, that person who’s commuting back and forth from Utah County to Salt Lake City is going to see that ads specifically twice a day.

(03:32):
Now, if they’re working 40 hours a week, that’s five times a week, four, six months. So that’s a lot of time to see someone’s brand. And that is the whole goal of Billboard marketing, that we’re just blasting our brand and our products in as many faces as we can. We’re trying to get as many views as possible. Well, we like to compare billboard marketing with social media. We call it the digital billboard here at Zel Media. Social Media has that same goal. We’re blasting our brand and our products, our programs in front of as many people as will take notice and who will be interested. The difference is with a traditional billboard, we’re definitely limited on our targets. We’re limited on our location targeting. Our audience is more passive because I’m driving that same route every single day of the week. I might identify it one day and maybe the next three days I don’t even see it.

(04:43):
And then with social media, billboards, it’s highly targeted and it can be engaged with traditional billboards. There’s no avenue for us to immediately engage with the brand. But with social media, they can interact with us directly on our posts, through our profiles, our business pages, or go to our website. They could call us from social media too if they wanted. And that’s a huge plus when it comes to social is that immediate ability to interact. It’s also measurable. We can track how many people are viewing our content or interacting with us. We can’t really track. We can estimate how many people are viewing our billboard, but we can’t actually have an identifiable number with that. So let’s talk about why we are actually using social media. I mean, we kind of did, but here’s a few facts. So over 5.4 billion active social media users across all platforms today worldwide. As of this year, the average time spent on social media every day is about two and a half hours. So two and a half hours times five, 4 billion is a lot of time spent on social media. And nearly half of consumers, about 48% said that they interact more with brands more often on social media than they did six months prior, which is pretty cool. And social media also is the leading source for brand awareness among internet users. Age 16 to 34 sounds like a beauty school student to me.

(06:28):
And all of this information I gathered from Sprout Social, if you want to fact check me. But social media is really cool because it’s truly harnessed the power to get people to engage with our brands directly and we can engage back with those consumers, in this case, potential students. So moving forward, we’re going to talk about two key components when it comes to social media marketing first, organic social. And if you guys were on earlier and listened to our friend Johnny from Beauty as a Business, he talked a lot about this stuff as well too. So you’ll hear some of the same things. I’ll also probably end up leaving some things out just because of time. Go back and listen to Johnny’s thing on the replay when you guys get it. So first of all, we consider the organic social media strategy as the long-term strategy.

(07:25):
Organic social media is that non-paid approach to using social platforms when we want to connect with our audience through content. So that’s what we’re posting directly from our business pages, our business profiles, the benefits of organic social. The most important I think, is that it builds trust and credibility over time. Fast forward, if we’re sending out paid advertising and I click on it and instead of going to the website, I want to see what they’re doing on social media first. That’s a great way for people to research who brands are. I’m going to their profile page. And if I see that the last post is from 2019, well, did the pandemic take them out? Are they even there? The ad feels a little scammy to me, and I just don’t believe that this school really is available, quite honestly. So the more consistent posting that we’re doing, the more that we’re interacting with people on social media, the more that we’re just there, the more people are going to trust us even if they just met our brand.

(08:41):
Another benefit is that it encourages community building and also keeps our audience engaged and loyal, right? So whether they were previous students, current students, or future students, we want to provide an opportunity for them to feel comfortable talking with us, reaching out to us, sharing what they’re doing at our schools. And also this helps grow and expand that community around the schools, expand that community that we already have. And lastly, social media actually provides super valuable customer insights. The comments that people are leaving on our posts or the messages that we get, the reviews that are being left, how people engage with us. We can take that information and apply it to how we should improve our programs, our admissions route, and specifically our marketing. People are telling us whether we know it or not, people are telling us what they think about us and how we should improve. So long-term play, we want to emphasize how organic social media results in a sustainable long-term brand loyalty compared to the quick wins that we see with paid ads. And we’ll talk about later.

(10:06):
Oh, it’s not going to the next slide. There we go. So how are we going to do this again, Johnny talked a lot about this and we’ll just touch on a few key points, go back and listen to his when those come out. But we want to come up with a content calendar or schedule before we start thinking about specifics. We want to first think about how are we going to encourage people to engage or communicate with us? So first things first, we have to regularly be posting, right? Create that credibility, making people feel like we’re real providing this two-way communication. If people are responding to us and what we’re posting, we want to respond back to them, create an actual conversation. And that’s exactly what my third point is. We can also instigate conversations. An example of this might be Instagram stories. There’s all these options to share polls or ask questions and have people respond.

(11:13):
If you’ve seen those text box and Instagram stories, something we could ask that we are actually curious about. What’s stopping you from joining beauty school? What’s stopping you from starting your career in cosmetology? And then you’ll see a flood of answers come in and you’ll be able to identify pain points that are causing people to stop the enrollment process, right? It might be financial, it might be the timing is off. It might be a lot of things, but you’ll be able to identify that and help people ultimately enroll from there. Just knowing those things. My next frame here, what do we want to share? So a few content pillars that I just briefly want to touch on. Again, go see Johnny’s presentation. Educational pieces are exactly what people want to see when they’re researching schools. Tell us about your school, who you are. Tell us about your programs, even things like, did you know this about this beauty product?

(12:15):
Or sorry, my mind just went blank. I’ll go to the next one. We want entertaining content. So if you’re on TikTok, there’s those trending dances all the time. Get your students involved, get your instructors involved. I love a good comedy piece that shows up in my scrolls, something to make me laugh using trending sound bites or music as well. I love seeing behind the scenes content too. I think a lot of young people think about beauty school being in the salon, working with the mannequin heads or working with clientele, but it is so cool to see what goes on in the classroom interacting with instructors as well. Get all of the different sides of how the students will interact with the school once they’re there. And then the last thing, we harp on this all the time, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before, user generated content.

(13:19):
We want to make sure we’re encouraging our students to post about our schools, right? Tagging us. And that allows us to then utilize that in our own marketing as well. And my third frame here is actually gathering the content, which I know is a huge pain point for a lot of you guys. It’s like pulling teeth, trying to ask, Hey, where’s the content from your school? Can we get more pictures from classroom or whatever? And I know it’s the worst, but here’s just a few of ideas to help maintain constant B roll to utilize in marketing. The first is hiring for photo shoots, maybe once to twice a year, maintaining updated quality shots and also video pieces. I’m going to skip down to my third bullet point first, documenting events you guys might have. School competitions are one graduations. People love to see what’s actually going on.

(14:26):
And what are the exciting things that happen at beauty schools? And going back to my second bullet point, we want to ask students to share their work. So two ways that I’ve thought of that we can kind of utilize this or ask for this is maybe having a shared cloud folder where we’re asking students, if you guys are taking video or photos for content, please share that with us. Upload it to our folder. And then now you have it to utilize for the school’s marketing, right? Another idea is having maybe a school iPad. The students can check out an iPad for the day or maybe an hour or two while they’re there to film or take photos of what they’re doing for their work. And then it’s right there. It’s right there for you to use to post later. You can also invite the students to put the content together for you and post for you.

(15:27):
Obviously, you probably want to get those approved before they actually publish it, but then your work is done, the students are doing it for you. So those are just a few ideas. If you guys have more ideas of how you like to get content and B-roll, put those in the chat. Let’s brainstorm together. And while you guys are doing that, I’m going to move on to our next slide. Paid social media. We’re not going to spend as much time here because a lot of what we’ve just talked about for organic can be utilized in paid social ads as well. So paid social advertising. Why do we do it? It’s so that we can expand our reach past what the algorithm is allowing us to reach, right? We already are showing things to our followers and the people who like our pages and whatnot, and the algorithm is allowing it to reach to the explore feed or the for you pages.

(16:26):
But we want to be able to get to a very specific audience that will actually engage with us and people who may have never seen us before, they now are being introduced to our brand and what we have to offer, and they might really be highly interested. So paid ads allows us to quickly scale our reach to that broad, highly targeted audience. We can get immediate visibility for those time sensitive promotions that we might have. So maybe you have summer scholarships that you want to promote, or you have an urgent start date and you have a few seats that you need to fill. Those are great ways to promote those through paid advertising. And paid advertising also supports your organic strategy by reaching those users who haven’t discovered you yet by putting money behind those high performing organic posts. That’s a great way to get in front of people.

(17:27):
You already have a lot of, you can show that you have a lot of high engagement on a specific post. So why not expand that to broader audience who say, oh, these guys must be the real deal. They’ve got all these comments, all these likes. I’m going to check them out. And then here’s just a few other points on this. I want to focus in on point number four here. Tracking results through website pixel events, and U-R-L-U-T-M parameters. This is a huge thing for paid advertising. We get to take credit for any leads or enrollments that might’ve started at the paid social, or maybe they made it all the way through just by clicking our ad. And we can track that. We can identify that and take credit for those leads and enrollments that way through pixel fire events and attaching those UTM parameters to our links on our ads.

(18:34):
Alright, paid advertising on where and how we know where to do paid advertising. It’s all of these platforms right here that you see all of the platforms that you’re used to using on your own meta platforms, TikTok, especially even LinkedIn if you wanted. But what’s great about doing paid advertising on social is that there are so many options for different types of ad formats. Different ad placements are targeting. I’m going to just keep repeating myself. Targeting, targeting, targeting. That’s our digital billboard coming into play, getting in front of as many people as we can, and we have the ability to test things. I can put up a still image ad versus a video ad. Which one’s going to perform better? Maybe the video ad is working better. Okay, now I want to test the video ad against a carousel ad maybe. And we just constantly are testing what’s been working for us or best practices against new ideas, right?

(19:44):
That’s really cool about paid social and getting in front of the right people at the right time with the right message. And lastly, we want to talk about how this is all working together within our larger strategy. So organic and paid. We’ve been talking about they have this synergy that works together. So paid social amplifies the reach of top performing organic posts. It also just promotes people to more people to check us out. And organic social allows us to build more trust and engagement, making our paid ads feel more authentic rather than scammy. And then when it comes to that holistic strategy, let’s think about the other digital channels that we can do marketing through SEO and blogging website can be included in that email marketing, paid search display, and let’s say programmatic. So there’s a few social media. The point of incorporating social media, both paid and organic, is so that it drives people to those new avenues.

(21:05):
If we’re driving people to visit the website through our paid ads, we hopefully have them hit a landing page where they can fill out their information, submit their information. Now we can send them emails, that’s our email marketing, but also our admissions team can start calling too. Well, maybe we’ve just hit them with an ad a few times they’ve seen us. What if they go directly to the website? What if they’re searching for us on Google? Now that’s our job being done. And the best is when we get enrollments, or I should say leads to enrollments straight from social that fills the best. So the moral of the story is that we want to let people know who we are. And the best way to do that is through social media, both organic and paid, right? Don’t be neglecting your community engagement. If they’re responding to you, you should be responding back, but you should also be initiating that conversation as well, right?

(22:08):
Ignoring data, don’t do that. Make sure that you’re keeping track of what’s going well and what’s not going well, and utilize that to your advantage. And do not rely on paid social media. If you’re relying on paid social and you’re neglecting your organic side, you’re going to lose people. That’s a big no-no. And if you are only focused on your organic, why not spend a little bit more and push out to reach more people? So last few points. Be authentic and consistent. Mix up your different content types. Do video, do still images and optimize and test, right? Optimize your profile, making sure that you are staying on top of your own branding and yeah, testing creative one against another. The last thing I want to point out, do your research. Stay on top of what’s trending in social media right now. Stay on top of what people like to see and what people are not liking to see. And that should give you enough to get at least started or keep going. I hope this motivates you to improve your strategy or keep fighting through it. And so that’s all I have today. Thank you so much.

(23:32):
This is my email if you have any questions. Chris, I don’t know if we have time for questions here.

Chris:
I mean, we could, you’re our last presenter, but yeah, I mean if there are questions in the chat, for sure, put ’em in there. You can email Chelsea directly at cOwens@zelmedia.com. So thank you so much, Chelsea. Such good information. We appreciate you being on And yeah, being our last presenter for the Beauty School Summit Fifth Annual. So thanks so much.