Acquisition Framework applied to Dating in the Digital Age

Looking for a TL;DR? Look at the schema below. 👇🏻

If you looked back a 100 years ago, some and even most people did not decide who they would marry. Nowadays, it is widespread to use marketing techniques to get on a date.

If you’ve been on the infamous dating app Tinder, then you have noticed some of the techniques. Testing the different pictures of your profile to maximize the number of “swipe right” is one example. That’s A/b testing right there.

And then you have a basic targeting system that allows you to target an audience fitting a persona. You might not have thought of it this way, but as soon as you used the Tinder sliders for age and distance, that was it!

Tinder uses A/b testing and targeting among other things. I did not need to dig very deep to figure that out.

I’ve never looked at dating from that angle, but I can see how marketing and dating can work together. Businesses are using marketing to lure human into buying products and services.

When you are dating, you are essentially trying to convince someone that you are a good party. Without really thinking about it, you are already using some derivatives of marketing.

The concept of personal branding is also inherently present. Everyone inherited a personal brand from the rise of social media. That brand is at the center of dating. The image you decide to project out there does influence your game.

The impact becomes significantly more important with the multiple social platforms converging towards each other. You connect your Tinder with your Instagram, Instagram is linked with Facebook, and all the sudden someone can make up his mind on what kind of person you may be.

So now, what? We have our personal brand and marketing techniques playing a role in our quest to find the perfect romantic partner.

Shall we do something with this?

— Well, Donald, I guess we can push this a step further, don’t you think?

How about we bring some structure to this and build a romantic partner acquisition framework leveraging marketing tactics and our personal brand.

Romantic Partner Acquisition Framework 🤵🏻

The romantic partner acquisition framework uses different marketing tactics to move prospective romantic partner down the conversion funnel.

There are specific tactics that help you move a person down the stages, and you have the content strategy that essentially guide you on what kind of content you should be sharing at any step.

On top of that, you have your personal brand showcasing to a prospective romantic partner what kind of person you are in your everyday life.

Everyone has a unique value proposition, something you are known for among their friends. The reasons people like to hang out with you.

You should align your content strategy with your personal brand to communicate clearly what are your value proposition and your interests. Someone should look you up on social media and get a good feel of who you are.

Getting your personal brand straight will help you in the execution of this strategy.

Figuring out your perfect romantic partner 👥

Let’s start with the basics. What is the first thing you do when you create a marketing strategy?

That’s right! You define your audience.

Alright, let’s create a persona of the perfect romantic partner. Define a set of characteristics such as age, education, physical attribute, and whatever you could think of.

Don’t be too specific, or you might find it hard to do the acquisition stage. Some channels are limited regarding targeting.

[ACQUISITION] Filling the top of the funnel 🔭

Goal: Get the first conversation.

We call this part the «acquisition». You know who to target and now you need to figure out the channel to acquire them.

So, where are all these guys & gals?

The answer is it depends. You need to find a place where there is a good quantity of your audience. It allows you to select who you want to engage, get rejected a couple of times and try again.

You have multiple acquisition channel options. You can use a dating app, go to social events, ask for referrals, etc.

I’d recommend trying a few different channels to figure out which one has the best conversation rate. Then you’ll know where to focus your attention.

Yes, the best conversion rate!

— Don’t be silly Donald; you won’t find the love of your life on the first try. (Unless you are lucky AF.)

Every channel has their pros and cons. Obviously, dating apps are great for the volume, the targeting, and the information gathering. On the other end, referrals may have a higher conversion rate and they offer equally great, perhaps better information gathering.

— You’ll figure it out, Donald!

As soon as someone accepts to engage you in a conversation, you have converted this person to what we’ll call NEWCOMER. Quickly the next stage is in action!

[AWARENESS] Moving down the funnel ↓

Goal: Get the first date

The initial conversation, the one you did not get rejected, has for aim to get your ass on a date.

Here’s how you gonna do it; you’re gonna drip-campaign this newcomer to turn it into a prospect.

This stage is a short process compared to the subsequent steps, but you gotta get it right.

— Otherwise, no date for you, Donald!

For muggles: A drip campaign is a sequence of messages with one obvious intent. In this case, your goal is to get on a date.

How do you drip-campaign someone? It is like having a script that you adapt to the person you are talking to. You are having a conversation, but you are leading it to a particular direction using your different messages.

You want to have a conversation that ends up with you proposing a product demo; I mean asking for a date.

If the other person accepts, you are good to move to the next step.

[CONSIDERATION] Getting Closer 👫

Goal: Get into active dating

Here is the first challenging part of all this.

You need to build a high yet sustainable level of engagement, and that can be tricky. This is why it is crucial that you gather information from the early stages.

The higher the engagement is, the better are your odds of closing and moving to the next step. Engagement doesn’t appear out of the blue; it builds itself. It requires patience and work.

How do you build engagement?

The most significant mistakes would be to go full-on and force it. You want to start slow and build it up based on the response you get. You are gonna have to test and learn.

You will possibly make some mistakes, but don’t worry too much about it. You are gonna find your pace.

Here is what’s important; to get engagement, you need to maintain a high level of quality in the content you are sharing. You should try to bring value every single time.

This also means you need to learn a lot more about what your prospect likes and engage on these subjects. All that information you’ve been gathering is useful now more than ever. This is how you are going to get valuable conversation and create engagement.

Ultimately you want to successfully build an engagement level that is reasonably high and regular. There are no clear industry benchmarks here; you gotta go with the flow.

Active dating is when you see each other on a regular basis. You text each other to know how is it going and share thoughts. You may be attending some social gatherings as official date.

When you get to that point, you can consider you are actively dating and can move to the next steps.

[CONVERSION] The moment you’ve been waiting for … 💏

Goal: Be in a romantic relationship

Nurture, nurture & nurture!

By now, you should know more about the other person. You should be 80% confident (if not more) that you want to be in a relationship with this person.

You have successfully built a level of engagement that is high enough to infer that you both see the potential of a romantic relationship.

At this stage, you want to provide a lot of value to the other person to make the point that life will be better together. You need to nurture the relationship by any mean possible.

You should share new and exciting stuff about your life. It is also a right moment to start educating the other person about how your brain works.

The brain is a very complicated thing, and you can probably save yourself the trouble of a few quarrels by educating early.

What this stage is really about though, is conversion. You should introduce some strong call-to-action in your conversation every once in a while.

Something like, you give a piece of paper that says ‘’ Will you be my gf ? Yes or No’’ and you wait for the answer.

— Oh wait, no one does that anymore, Donald!

I guess the best call-to-action would be to have an honest conversation about each other’s feelings and figure out if you guys want to visit Bali or Iceland together.

[RETENTION] She is a Keeper ❤️

Goal: Keeping the romantic partner of your dream

To move someone from a romantic partner to a life partner, you need to keep delivering result. You need to make the other feel like you are bringing value and making life better.

You sold yourself a certain way. You unconsciously made some promises about how life will be just by the way you were behaving. We just expect, us human, that the past is vouching for the future.

The way you were early on is how you are expected to be forever. You need to manage that expectation and deliver the value you said you would bring.

There are two fundamental concepts you need to know for the retention:

• Improve continually to deliver more value by a/b testing and analyzing the feedback. You want to try new things and see if it has a positive effect. You don’t want to become boring or even worse lose your value.
• Maintain a high level of engagement with frequent communication and other incentives such as special activities. Obviously, you want to remain in constant contact to know when something is going wrong, but you also want that communication flow because support is a powerful way to offer value.

Simplicity in Execution 👨🏻‍🍳

The success of the framework — or any dating activities really — lays on your capacity to communicate. It is mostly about communicating clearly your value proposition from the beginning, building and maintaining a fairly high level of engagement and delivering on your promises.

We did not bring up the subject of psychology which also play a big role in the actual execution of the strategy. I am not talking about psychopath level shit, but you know basic human psychology.

I think this is only a glimpse of what can be done. There are thousands of ways to refine this framework and adding more tactics. I like to think dating is all about simplicity & execution.

Reduce the number of details and make everything as perfect as it can possibly be!

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