AIMEE Always Has Value

With the recent Brittany Spears freedom ruling we figured why not share a few points on how to boost your social media performance and engagement since our girl Brittany spent so much time seeking AIMEE.

YES WE KNOW it’s not the same Amy but just let us have this! 

Thank you. 

THIS AIMEE is arguably better anyway because leveraging it can help make your content creation process easier and more effective, allowing you to focus your time doing the things you WANT to do with your salon career. Let’s get into it.

Here at The Salon Hub we have a saying “AIMEE always has value.” This means that if our posts can include one to three elements of AIMEE, chances are the post is of higher-quality. So what is AIMEE?

AIMEE is an mnemonic device that helps frame how you can add value to your posts for your audience. It stands for:

Aspirational - Facilitates a feeling of social prestige and desired attainability.

Inspirational - Content that influences the viewer to think, act, or decide in a specific way.

Motivational - Creates desire or willingness for a follower to take action.

Educational - Teaches the consumer something they didn’t know.

Entertaining - Stimulates amusement and/or enjoyment in the viewer. 

 Each element of this mnemonic device is a value proposition that you can use to help build value into all of your social media activity. Now before you let your mind wander — no, you don’t need to include ALL of them every time you throw something up on Insta or Facebook. In fact, you shouldn’t. 

Again, we recommend including one to three of them at a time for the best results. These are meant to be a reference tool to use as you build posts, and when combined with a good categorical posting calendar, can make creating posts a much easier process. 

After you’ve decided what topic you want to cover, or what category you want your post to fit in, you need to determine what value that post has for your audience. To do this, it's important to ask yourself, “What are my followers getting out of this?” or, “How does this post affect my audience?” AIMEE is the framework you can use to make sure you answer those questions more easily.

 To really hammer this concept home, let’s dive into some examples of each:

Aspirational

 These types of posts show your audience something they want, but may not have. Aspiration works off of ambition, meaning it plays into what people want for themselves in the future. For many stylists this can mean taking lifestyle photos of a client with 26” extensions out at an expensive cocktail lounge or hotel lobby. This shows off how your services can lead to an aspirational lifestyle your typical client may want to achieve.

Inspirational

 Inspirational posts drive empowerment for your audience to make a decision, think about an option they didn’t realize they had, or do something in a different way. Inspiration is less about showing your followers something they desire but can’t have, and more about trying to cause an internal change that drives them to want something they can. These posts tend to be results-style posts, showing off your work and inspiring your audience to want something similar.

Motivational

 Motivational posts are all about motivating your following to take a specific action. Motivational posts are the key to driving followers to click, book, call, email, etc. This is where “the rubber meets the road” when it comes to digital marketing. You can show your following the life they could have (aspirational), show them that it's attainable (inspirational), but at the end of the day, you need to get them to take action in order to make it happen (motivational). These can be posts about how important the maintenance of their hair, nails, skin, etc. is, and the negative effects of not doing those things. They can highlight you doing your work, show how other people are making appointments and looking great, and give them a sense of how NOW is the time to take that action.

Educational

One of the most straightforward value propositions is educational posts for your audience. In theory, you want to teach your audience things they did not know but need to know in order to attain the life (or look) they aspire to have. Educational posts are also a great way to spotlight your expertise, get new clients comfortable with your body of knowledge before they give you a try, and provide the most direct value to your audience. Humans are a curious species, we want to know more about everything, and if you can scratch that itch for them, you’ll build an audience, and trust quickly.

Entertaining

This value proposition is the hardest one to chase because everyone’s flavor of entertainment is different. However, there are some common themes you can capitalize on. Entertaining posts are ones that relate to the audience on a personal level. Whether it’s making someone laugh, showing an interesting visual that inspires a reaction, or simply good story telling that grabs peoples attention, focusing on the entertaining value proposition essentially ensures that people will remember you and will hopefully come back for more content.

 How’d we do? Are there any examples to leverage AIMEE that we missed? Are there other topics that you’d like us to write about? Let us know in the comments!