We’re a young spa, and in fact have only been around a few months now. We’re smack in the middle of Boston on the 2nd floor of a building that isn’t very visible from the street, so letting people know we’re here, via advertising of different types, is crucial to our business. We’ve committed a generous percentage of our sales to advertising, knowing full well the challenges we face.

We understand the power of a strong web presence, and in fact were searching for a way to not just sell gift certificates online (which we had been doing, but we fulfilled the traditional way by processing and hand mailing each one to the recipient) but sell and deliver gift certificates via our website.

SpaBoom came along and solved a problem for us. We now avoid not only the hand processing and mailing of gift certificates, but also another, almost comical scenario that went like this: Someone would wait until the very last second of the day they needed a gift for someone. They would think of us, which is a very good thing, but they would be in a huge hurry to get their gift certificate. Now remember I told you we’re in the middle of Boston? Boston has no parking. Anyone who’s been there knows this, and locals do all kinds of silly things to deal with the problem. In our case, we would prepare a gift certificate for someone to pick up, then ask them to double park, call us on their cell phone when they were out front (risking a ticket or worse!), then one of us would dash down the stairs and out the front door to deliver the gift certificate to them.

You can see the drawback to this, and we lived it. We don’t anymore though, thank goodness. We’re avoiding the ‘double park double dash’, and we’re saving a whole lot of time that was spent manually processing gift certificates. We hardly ever sell our old type of gift certificate anymore, which frees our receptionist up to handle business tasks that help us grow our business, something we spend a lot of time thinking about and managing.

So SpaBoom has solved a problem for us by letting us easily and instantly sell and deliver gift certificates right from our website. The bigger question, then, is how do we get people to visit our website in the first place? Since almost 60% of our clients come to us from the website, we need to pay close attention to attract more and more people every day.

Our approach is to allocate almost half of our monthly advertising budget to Internet tools designed to help us become more visible in the vast realm of cyberspace. We use Google, Yahoo and Citysearch.com, to name a few. We attribute much of our success so far to effective Internet advertising, and the rest to a blend of the more traditional, like print, direct mail, and others. We understand that building awareness as a new spa requires all kinds of advertising and marketing, but the key for us has been to respect the power of the Internet, to create a website that works to generate interest, and, in our case, to sell and deliver instant gift certificates.

It’s not rocket science, and we continually adjust our approach, but anyone out there who isn’t working to make their website work as hard as possible for their business is missing out on an extremely powerful marketing opportunity.