Meet Edafe; A Digital Marketing Freelancer on iProo
About Edafe
I am a social media influencer, a digital marketer, a blogger as well as a content editor. I also have web design skills mostly with the WordPress CMS, so if you are looking for a freelancer in any of the areas above do not hesitate to contact me and i promise you that you are going to get nothing but the best. Looking forward to working with you all.
Freelance Gig Allotted to Edafe:
Ruth (a client) wants to find out the marketing strategy and digital platforms she could employ to launch a dating platform in Nigeria.
Kindly advise her appropriately.
Edafe’s Resolution:
Hello Ruth, my name is Edafe and i will be helping you out with your inquiry on launching a successful dating platform, i sincerly hope that you find my input helpful. so lets get down to business.
Let me start by saying that a dating platform is essentially a matchmaking site therefore it is expedient that such a site is involved in helping people meet,interact , communicate and eventually build a romantic or casual relationship, so you must realize that the goal of you site is to bring people of diverse cultural background together solely for building a relationship. you must therefore ensure that the strategies needed for its success aligns with this.let us therefore take a look at Five(5) of these marketing strategies that needs to be employed as you go about launching a dating platform.
1.FIND THE RIGHT NICHE:
You would agree with me that there are a handful of dating platforms currently available for people seeking relationships and as such it is not going to be a stroll in the park for you by simply establishing yours( hey do not fret i am not trying to make you dissuade you). so need to find out what you audience needs that they aren’t already getting from the available platforms you must therefore focus on building and marketing your site to meet their needs no matter how quirky this may be,you need to also decide what group of people you are targeting,be it singles or divorced, widows or widowers looking for love again, you might also want to make it location dependent that is people from say Abuja can only see people from their locality or make it a country wide thing where anyone in Nigeria can interact with anyone no matter what part of the country the are visiting your site from. you must also do some research on your competition,the success of their site and feature with a view of modifying them as well as adding your ideas on your own site.
2. DECIDE ON YOUR BUSINESS MODEL:
Deciding what business model to use for your site is another key strategy in building a successful platform. you need to be clear on what model you would operate on wether its an Advertising model (this model gives free access to your audience thus your earnings come from various advertisements you run on your site) , the Subscription model( where your customers/audience have to pay to gain access to your site) or both models. you must keep the size of your site in mind before deciding on the model to run, for a small scaled site you should opt for the subscription based but must ensure that such a site gives its subscribers value for their money because people are always willing to pay however they must get value for it.
3.PERFECT YOUR ALGORITHM:
An Algorithm is a finite set of instruction or logic, written in order, to accomplish a certain predefined task. having know what it is you must therefore figure out what value will be most important to potential audience and how you should rank their preferred matches( which is made know to you by the series of questions such as likes,dislikes,age range they want to meet etc…you ask them on sign up). having determined that you then consult a professional programmer to set it up for you or you do it yourself if you are well versed in programming.
4.LURE YOUR CUSTOMERS:
This is one area which is very key to the success or failure of your dating platform, people are bound to be attracted to a site that has a lot of audiences as that would signify a good platform.so for a start you could throw in a few incentives to new members that sign up this could be a free 7 days trial or discount for the first few 100s that sign up , this would only be applicable on the subscription based model of course. you can also get friends, their friend as well as acquaintances to sign up then as your site audience grows you venture into promotion using either facebook ads or google ads campaigns to build a large audience with more incentives put in place as well.
5.MAINTAIN QUALITY CONTROL:
In so much as its a dating platform,you must be ready to cope and deal with several issues ranging from sexual harassment to abuse and privacy concerns.you must therefore set up a system that flags people for unruly behavior whereby rescinding of membership status is done when the cases are severe.you should thus work with a professional lawyer to draw up membership contracts which members are required to agree to at sign ups,this would therefore exempts you of any wrongdoing resulting from real life incidents that happens to people who meet up from your site.
You must therefore give the aforementioned strategies a thorough look in as you attempt to launch a platform of you own as it essentially defines how successful you would be or how bad your platform ends up i hope you give it a proper go and wish you the best.
DIGITAL PLATFORMS
Now that we seen key strategies needed for a successful establishment of a dating platform,we therefore look at the digital platforms to be employed to help you grow an audience,make a conversion(successful sign up) as well as improve your dating platform to stand out from the numerous ones available. a digital platform for clarity is any electronic tool for communication such as mobile ,desktop, social and email softwares(websites) and social media(twitter,Facebook,linkedin etc) sites. we now look at the major platforms.
1. FACEBOOK TO INSTAGRAM INTEGRATION:
You would agree with me that for every 5 persons you meet on your way at least 4 are actively involved on facebook therefore targeting your audience through facebook be it post or ad campaigns goes a long way to increase your the traffic on your dating platform. once you set up an ad campaign for the page of your dating site all your post will therefore reach more audience which will ultimately lead more conversion. Also the recent integration of instagram to facebook has seen more people join the picture crazy platform you can equally create a page on instagram and employ the use of images from site banners and other images of your site with necessary permissions to create awareness and also use instagram ads to gain more audience for you platform.
2. BLOGS
Setting up a blog also goes a long way to increase audience such a blog could either be customized using popular CMS( content management systems) like WordPress or using an established blog like google’s Blogger, you can then go on and write quality articles about dating, share success stories of people who have found love through your site then adding a link to your site for your readers who are inspired to join in and experience these for themselves ensuring that you gain new audience /members in the process.
3. YOUTUBE
Youtube videos on a daily basis receive millions and billions on views as such you can target your audience by creating videos about dating DOs and DONTs posting them on your site’s youtube channel,similarly you could ask member to make a video of their experience since becoming a member so you could post on the channel, that way your audience increases because they have seen people with first hand experience giving nice review about your site. as your views and subscribers increase you become a youtube partner making you eligible for payment from google based on your views thus presenting you with monetization strategy.one major thing is you must ensure this videos comply with youtube policies.
4 TWITTER
This is one of the leading social platforms around as it helps increase brands( your site) awareness and gives information to your target audience, it is also a powerful outlet for sharing of content from your blogs, websites as well as channels. it is also on this platform that you find social media influencers that you can contract to help create awareness of your site careful and detailed information about them must first be know so you do not fall into the wrong hands.
There are other platforms you can explore such as linkedin , google+, pinterest ,wechat this will help you securing the right audience for your dating site and ensuring that this audience are converted to members as that is the goal. finally you must ensure that your site is mobile friendly because majority of your audience are on the go and as such need something the can assess easily on their phones.
I hope you find this write up helpful and goodluck on your project.