7 Ways to Promote Your Dating Site on a Tight Budget
Dating websites may be easy to create and maintain with the turnkey dating solutions. However, attracting clients is the real problem for the majority of the online dating business owners. In our case, we have to understand the audience, learn about features they like, and how to make them appreciate our dating service more than others.
Promoting a website is a difficult task that heavily complicates your business efforts. Attracting customers is not a simple mathematical equation. An effective marketing strategy that will bring in customers is built upon a fundament of careful planning and creative decisions… And budget.
Money is the driving force in many startups. The vast majority of modern young businesses struggle financially in the beginning of their journeys. We all know what it’s like working with a tight budget that severely limits our opportunities and often makes it impossible to use sound solutions that require spending a dime or two. This is why many companies prefer to start their marketing campaigns in-house and use various techniques to make their dating services more visible. How can you do it?
1. Be Smart and Creative.
Online dating is an extremely oversaturated industry with tough competition and fatter wallet usually wins convincingly when it comes to fighting for customers. However, you can be smarter than huge corporations and concentrate on strategies that may be less efficient in the short run but provide advantages in the long run. One of the most obvious “non-obvious” solutions is to get in touch with news reporters and bloggers.
Your dating website can be truly interesting to news services. Develop interesting new features and search for interesting stories that your current clients may share in order to get into the news feeds all over the world. There are many big sites that focus solely on promoting their websites through stories about their loyal customers. Think outside of the box to experience results.
2. Do Not Ignore Time-Tested Techniques.
Search Engine Optimisation is a great way to ensure that your website is easy-to-find in the ocean of information which is the internet. Search algorithms do not acknowledge your site for good looks and cool features, you need to fill it with relevant content. This means you need to optimise your content so that it corresponds with what your potential audience is searching.
For dating apps, you need to focus on another important factor – ASO. This abbreviation stands for App Store Optimisation. With over 6 million applications available for downloading in all stores, choosing the one you need is quite hard. Help out your future clients – make yourself easier to find.
3. Do Not Overchase.
Yes, the saturation of the market is incredible. The competition is truly remarkable when compared to many other domains. However, the market itself is very responsive and huge financially meaning that even the smallest portion of its overall audience will yield you significant financial results.
In many cases, growing slowly and steadily without overfocusing on marketing is a much better idea. Focus on evolving your website, talk to your users to get feedback, and make changes that will elevate your service to the level where inviting new users is a piece of cake.
4. Go Viral and Be Social.
It is hard to underestimate the impact of social media. Modern marketing effectively co-exists with social media and seemingly cannot survive without Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Have a dedicated team member who will be active in these networks and regularly attract new users to your dating website.
Manufacturing your own content is also a great idea. Film viral videos, order drawings that will make other users smile, and share cool quotes relevant to your business – you will notice results very soon.
5. Cooperate with Others.
The saturation of the market means that all your competitors are struggling just as much as you do. This is why competitors turn into your most precious allies. Link exchange is considered to be a very effective way of ensuring the growth of your dating website. Make contacts with other business owners and exchange links.
Another good idea is using huge forums to promote your website. Obviously, you must have a contributing member on your team in order to make this work. Have a dedicated employee or be active on various forums yourself in order to push your website through the crowd of competitors. Use sites like Reddit with diverse international communities to promote your business subtly.
6. Be Versatile and Diversify Your Efforts!
Relying on one marketing technique is a sure way to a very slow suffocating death of your dating website. You need to stay focused but work in several directions at once. A combination of methods will most certainly be more effective than any single method. Do not rely on only SEO or only Social Media Marketing. Try to be versatile and mix these methods together.
Having several employees working as a team while covering several marketing directions is a good idea. They don’t have to be dedicated specialists. Some things like reposting and sharing news in social media do not require much time.
7. Plan Your Budget.
Careful planning is a cornerstone of any successful marketing campaign. Despite all the wonders of free advertisement and exposure on social media, avoiding expenditures is absolutely impossible. You will still have to hire several dedicated specialists and work with freelancing agents. You will have to purchase some traffic and make deals with forums.
However, you can be crafty and plan all your expenditures beforehand thus making your marketing campaigns much more controllable. Try to be as attentive as possible when planning your marketing campaigns.
Main Takeaways.
Promoting your dating website is a hard task that requires both dedication and enthusiasm. Even the most enthusiastic team will less likely succeed than a mediocre team that actually finances marketing department. This means that you need to combine paid services with your own efforts in order to spend your marketing budget as effective as mathematically possible.
The photo in this post is by Luca Bravo at Unsplash.