Most areas of life play pretty much by the same rules.
Learning a new language helps you memorize things better with any other skill you’re developing. Working out gives you energy during any other activity throughout the day too. Travel boosts social life and spiritual growth. Having a pet helps you understand love better and show compassion to people in your life. And how you manage your time is also how you manage your money.
It’s all connected. The same goes for online dating and business. Believe it or not, you can actually improve your business skills if you give online dating a try. The more you experiment with it and the better you get, the more you’ll see progress with your business and will build an entrepreneurial mindset. Let’s see why.
1. You start understanding people better.
Business is about people more than anything else. Every email you send, every post on social media or various chats, every piece of content you produce and share, every call you make, everyone you hand your business card to – all these little forms of interaction can make a big difference when done consistently.
Dating apps can help you feel more comfortable with this. Most online business owners are always on their laptop or phone, or meeting someone for work-related activities. Even in their free time, when they are doing less important stuff, they keep the engagement going. Be it by thanking a customer personally, answering to a team member, opening email, pitching a client, finding media coverage, doing research, etc.
Online dating is something you do effortlessly after a few times. It helps you get from digital interaction to face-to-face. And that makes you more confident, as studies suggest. The more you do this, the more you grow and become a people person.
2. Boosting marketing skills.
In the business world, you’re always trying to grab attention, build an audience, promote and sell.
You’re literally selling yourself as a name and brand, your products or services, or even your vision or idea (when trying to build traffic, get readers, or create a team of like-minded people). Online dating helps you feel more comfortable with all that.
You’re basically doing the same things when finding people to date using your phone. Through trial and error, you see what works and what doesn’t. Over time, you know exactly how to grab attention with that first question, when you start a conversation online and what interesting answers to give to the standard questions when getting to know somebody.
Turns out, for instance, that women get a higher response rate when they initiate the conversation.
3. You’re gaining valuable knowledge about the market.
Online dating is just one of the many markets out there, and it has a specific type of audience. What’s more, it’s a trending topic and a field that’s seeing growth. Even the usage of those between 55 and 64 has doubled.
By being a user, you get to know the people inside, you test different apps and sites, and understand what’s going on and how the whole thing works.
Digital business always includes those social platforms where people spend the most time. Dating sites are one such stop too. You see the interface of the site or app, you can analyze your experience as a user, and whether or not it’s personalized and simple enough.
Then you get to see how others are using the same platforms. Everyone does it differently, but at the same time there are similarities. These tendencies form the target audience of the creators of the dating app most of the times.
What engages people there can be studied carefully and turned into a set of steps that you can use for any other project you’re working on.
Audience segmentation is something you can notice on dating sites too. If you use a few, or one but quite often, you’ll see there are a few types of people, and there’s a certain way to talk to each that gives best results. That’s what makes email marketing and paid advertising effective too.
4. Getting feedback.
Last but not least, another cool way to use online dating to boost your business skills is to look at it as a chance for feedback.
As you know, in e-commerce, or any other business model really, it won’t matter if you have the most quality product in the world, if people don’t need it, or if you don’t know how to describe it so that it resonates with them.
Well, you can use your online dating experience to casually ask the right questions at the right time in order to understand what your audience wants. Then you’ll be able to give it to them and thus see an increase in profits. Online, you can be as playful as you want. For example, if you master how to make a girl laugh over text, it will surely be easier for you to make your business partners feel more comfortable around you as well.
The way you get better at this is by knowing why some dates worked, and why others were meant to fail from the very beginning. You can then ask the person a strategic question to find out whether you did something wrong. Usually, it’s just that you two weren’t the right fit, but still, it’s worth following up to see what they think about this and how you can optimize your approach for the next person you e-meet.
Over to you now. How would you improve your online dating and use it for business?