5 min read
Love them or hate them, dating apps are a staple in the modern dating scene.
Research from Statista found that there were over 366 million users of online dating services in 2022. This number is expected to rise to 440 million by 2027, indicating that the market is getting even hotter.
As developers launch new dating apps to help people on their age-old quest to find love, who or what is there to help developers find high-value users?
If that’s the question on your mind, you have clicked into the right blog post.
Unique Challenges for Dating App Developers
Dating apps occupy a special place in the app market. They are not exactly social media apps, though they connect people; they are not exactly gaming apps, though their interfaces may feature game-like features.
In a niche of their own, dating apps and their developers face unique challenges to attract users with a high lifetime value and create a successful ecosystem for finding love.
Acquisition: The Need for Critical Mass
One of the key reasons dating apps are so popular is they provide a convenient way to meet a lot of new people. Users can connect with other singles from the comfort of their homes and get to know them before going out to meet up.
However, if there aren’t that many people to connect and chat with on the dating app, then users may find it more effective to go out and meet people the old-fashioned way.
What this illustrates is that a dating app is only as good as the quantity and quality of people users can meet on it. Much like social media apps, dating apps need users — lots of them — to be successful because it isn’t nearly as fun when you are swiping on the same 5 people over and over.
In marketing, this is called reaching critical mass, the point for dating apps where the product becomes useful with a self-sustained ecosystem of users. Once you reach this point, user activity and engagement become more regular and organic.
Engagement: The Limitations of the Developers
Unlike gaming apps, there is only so much dating app developers can do to make the app engaging for its users.
Yes, developers can optimize the user experience and user interface (UX/UI) design, and even gamify aspects of the app. But when it comes down to it, how engaging a dating app is depends largely on how engaging the users are to each other.
This variable is one that is essentially out of the developers’ control, and the only way to actually manage it is at the acquisition stage — by acquiring high-quality users who download the app with the intention of seriously using it.
We will come back to the discussion of high-quality users in a bit because very often these are also your high-value users.
Retention: The Inevitable Sign-Off
All good things must come to an end. When a dating app user eventually finds love, they tend to leave the app. This is perhaps what sets dating apps apart from all other apps the most: its built-in expiration date.
A successful dating app is only successful if users can use it to find love, and unfortunately for the app developers, when users find love, they no longer need the app and will likely uninstall them.
For the ecosystem to survive, the cycle of acquiring and engaging new users must continue, which brings us to the next section of our post.
Marketing Insights for Dating App Developers
Now that we’ve established just how important user acquisition is for dating apps, we’re sharing key insights that dating app developers and advertisers should keep in mind when they come up with their marketing strategy.
- Highlight a Unique Selling Point:
Tinder popularized the swipes; Bumble gets women to make the first move. To stand out in an increasingly competitive market, a dating app needs to have a unique selling point (USP) that sets it apart.
Not only will the USP make it more memorable and more easily recognizable as a brand, but in terms of user acquisition, a USP can also help the brand attract high-quality users with strong intentions to use the dating app.
The high-quality users are the ones who are likely to pay for premium features so they can make a great match faster, making them your high-value users.
- Rely on Successes Stories:
When it comes to advertising a dating app, word of mouth is everything. Everyone has that friend of a friend who met someone on a dating app and is now happily married. Developers need to use these success stories to convince users their apps work and get them to sign up.
We have found in working with dating app developers that videos work very well for their user acquisition campaigns. Videos that feature testimonials from past and present users and demonstrate the app’s proof of value will get more buy-in from prospective users.
- Engage in App Store Optimization
This last tip is more technical but absolutely necessary. At the end of the day, dating apps are competing with both other dating apps and other apps in general to stand out in an app store. To do so, marketers can engage in app store optimization (ASO).
This process is intended to raise an app’s visibility to those browsing the app store, and when done right, it can dramatically increase the download numbers.
ASO is SEO (search engine optimization) for apps. Developers can optimize their app store visibility by choosing better titles, keywords and descriptions, to name a few things to do.
How MarTech Can Help
The most direct way that marketing technology (martech) can help with high-value user acquisition is to identify these users and generate the keywords that will appeal to them.
Appier has two solutions that can aid marketers with this process: AIBID and AIXPERT.
AIBID is an AI-powered user acquisition solution that uses deep learning to find the best users for your dating app. With deep learning, AIBID processes over 1 million attributes about these high-value users and leverages multi-task learning technology to find the users that will download and use the app seriously.
AIXPERT is an AI-powered campaign automation cloud that can generate a list of relevant keywords your campaigns should bid for to appear in front of the high-value users. Since integrating ChatGPT into AIXPERT, it can generate even more interests and preferences that are directly associated with the users who would be interested in your dating app.
These are two direct ways in which martech can help acquire high-value users. If you’re interested in learning how martech can engage and retain your users, reach out to us now!
