The Business Of Love And Relationships – Growing Or Slowing ?

While the business of love is booming, also growing is the number of dating APPS and people providing personalized services. Is the business of love and relationships growing or slowing ? Its growing, of course, but so is competition.

Many of our readers are, what we like to call, love professionals, including matchmakers, date coaches, sexologists and psychologists. We recently reached out to over 100 of these professionals asking a couple of basic questions (many we communicated with on Twitter and Instagram). Although this was not intended to be a research project of any kind, we learned some very interesting things that we felt would be worth sharing.

The first topic was how business was in general, growing or slowing. Surprisingly about 75% said that they were not getting new clients at the rate they had been in the past.

The next topic was how they were getting new clients. Generally, all used some combination of conferences, social media (mostly Facebook), media, press and referrals

So we asked about social media, conferences, press and referrals

In the dating and relationship personal services business, most of the people we communicated with rely heavily on Facebook but have seen that promoted posts and paid ads come with lots of restrictions when it comes to dating related promotions. It seems Facebook views much of it like escort or sex services.

Many of the matchmakers and date coaches specifically like networking through conferences. These seem to be great places to catch up and share stories but most said it was not a good source for new clients.

For most, press coverage and use of other media (expert blog sites, etc) is a great way to get a surge and get the word out about individual expertise.

Finally, previous client or other professional referrals was clearly the #1 source of new clients according to those we communicated with but is that really the true #1 way to get new clients ?

We then asked about Google searches, it was another surprise

This seemed to draw some confusion as some felt that it wasn’t important, others felt they were ranking well and others didn’t understand why they weren’t coming up to the top of searches like competitors.

Here we drew on some expert help from our publisher, Blue Island Digital (see below), who ran some digital audits (this is used to see how one company stacks up against another in the digital world). They looked at social media, SEO (Google rankings) and websites. What they found surprised even them.

About 75% did not rank well on Google for a variety of reasons, a lot had website deficiencies (which added to the Google search issues) and over half were not using video enough or properly in social media. Our tech guys even sent some of the digital audits out which definitely opened some eyes and looks like their getting some new clients who are excited.

What we found really made sense and is something to think about seriously

When they looked closer at those 25% of love professionals who told us their business was growing faster, almost without exception, all had good digital audits (all had good SEO, websites that scored well and/or properly used video in social media). Coincidence or science ?

So the advice from our experts is become easy to find. Almost 70% of people search with Google and about 70% click on the top 5 organic search results. Organic (Free) SEO top ranking is the absolute best and most cost effective way to get new clients and pull ahead of competitors. When people want something they search for it. If they find your competitor first you lose a potential client.

The next piece of advice from our experts was get noticed more on social media. Use short videos. Put them everywhere, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. Place links to the videos on your blog and get referral backlinks.

(If you’re interested in learning more .. You can contact us and we’ll get you a FREE digital audit from Blue Island

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER: Blue Island Digital provides marketing and consulting services to clients in the dating and relationship industries. They have provided services to over 100 clients worldwide in this industry including specialized marketing classes to some of the largest international dating / matchmaking companies so they know your business and how to generate new clients.