Combining Business & Digital Marketing Concepts with Dating in the Digital Age.

I’m writing this because I have too many friends that do not have a potential life partner yet, so called girlfriend / boyfriend. I understand how it feels, I was single for about 3 years previously. 🙂

Let me tell you something, in the digital age, you are competing with a lot of other people. If you like someone, you have got to put in the effort. If you are waiting for that someone to come to your life, you have got to put in more effort, because it means you don’t even have a “goal” or that someone to make fall in love. It is like a fresh graduate that has no vision yet about who he/she wants to be.

Brace yourselves single ladies and dudes. Dating concept in the digital age, simplified.

Another reason I’m writing this is because I found out a cool thing: business and digital marketing concepts are actually applicable to relationship creation.

PS: I have a very unique background and thought process, so some of you may find this blog post weird and uncomfortable with, but some of you will love it! As of now, I have been working at my own startup (Uniklik) and a digital marketing agency for 6 months. Prior to this I worked in wheat flour factory (R&D, Sales), convention center (Kitchen), consumer goods factory (R&D, Sales, Marketing),  my another startups (Tidi App, Redwood Capital -> long story).

Prior to this, I was researching about human behavior and psychology of dating, etc. It was just fascinating to understand the complex things when a guy/girl trying to get a partner.

“Why do we need to learn about this? My mom and dad met naturally, everything should be only natural.”

Yes, but you are not your mom or dad. The rules have changed. In the digital age, getting a girlfriend or boyfriend has been digitized. You can fall in love, but without the best strategy and effort, you will never get her/him.

Here are a few things that have changed:

1. Digitization of dating: If you asked your parents how they dated, they will say something like this: “Your dad fetch me with his car, he saved enough money to buy a car to impress me, car was so expensive at that time”. Or it will be something like “Your dad waited me in front of the office door every evening until I said yes.” You do know that the current reality is different. A guy meets a girl in the classroom, then they talked a little bit. Then they will be chatting all the way until the next date. Isn’t this familiar? Another scenario, a girl is introduced to a guy by a friend. They start chatting, and there the story goes. In digital age, for most people, the connection is built online. It means, while chatting with you, that same girl or guy would have been chatting with others too.
2. Everyone has a wide array of options: More than people in the past ever imagined. In the past, our dads and moms only could know like the people around their house, office, school. A woman today can choose from thousands of men. A man today can choose from perhaps hundreds of women, men are not in a very good position. The next point will explain why.
3. For dating purpose, the internet is created for women: The internet amplifies the power of women attraction a lot. Women can naturally post a lot of photos of themselves and people love it! If men start posting too many photos of themselves, people will feel disgusted. The internet is where women photos are shown to men. It makes women in a stronger position. Good news for women, bad news for men? *Some men that are at celebrity level or sons of billionaires / billionaires themselves can post selfies and women will still like it. Women are not materialistic, women just love greater men.
4. Concentration of attention to some fortunate people: This is the real advantage for people that are exceptionally attractive, talented, rich, or famous. Less attention is given to people that are not exceptionally better in something. This can be an ugly truth, or maybe a beautiful truth. Depends on how good you are in benefiting from it.

If you have not believed me after reading until here, let me ask you this: “Who do you think have a better chance to get a better man, a woman with 100,000 followers on Instagram/Facebook or 100 followers?”

**Even if they both are attractive and above average. The woman with 100,000 followers will have multiple higher chances to get a better man compared to the one with 100 followers.

There are 2 hypothesis worth thinking about:

1. Simply supply and demand. More followers create perceived value, it puts the popular women in a higher social level. For example, stock price rises in value when people keep purchasing it.
2. Natural selection. More followers create competition, and competition will produce the best winners. In this case, the men with better wealth, attractiveness, personality, etc.

Attractiveness is valuable, it indicates good genes. We are biologically and naturally more attracted to people that can help us improve our genes. Why beauty is an advert to good genes.

Women looking for men with better wealth is not because they are materialistic. They just need to feel safe with a man that can provide the sense of security, it is usually provided with sufficient wealth.

This is where the conversion funnel plays a role. A role that no one can deny, because it is real. Let me explain a little bit about what it is.

A conversion funnel in digital marketing consists of:

1. Acquisition: when users clicks and arrives to the website.
2. Activation: the user signs up / subscribes.
3. Retention: the user returns to the website again and again.
4. Referral: the user shares to other people about the website.
5. Revenue: the user does a revenue generating action such as purchasing something, or giving certain valuable contact information.

I won’t dive into too much of technical stuffs. Let’s talk about the strategy. We will use the concept of a conversion funnel with adaption to real life situations in the digital age.

Women Strategy Book

Let’s talk about women first, because as I said, women have more domination here with the internet’s leverage. I will explain first about how men think. Men are simple human beings. We love pretty women with attractive body. But we usually fall in love for the personality. A certain percentage of men look for intelligence, and almost none of us look for money from women. We are programmed to be the supplier of money in a family since a long time ago, it is in our genes.

Some men will say they don’t care about face and body at all, but there are only possibilities: 1. They are lying. 2. They will love it in the future, they don’t realize it yet. So for women who are going to date men that say they don’t care about face and body at all, think again. They are whether liars or idiots. Honest men are better men. They admit they love beauty and body, but they have better control on their actions.

I won’t talk about how a woman can attract a man here. I think most women know how. The urgency here is how to increase the chances of women to find that someone they have been waiting for. Remember that women have to get married earlier than men, it means by the age of 25, the timer of marriage has been started, your parents will be asking you about your future husband.

Disclaimer: None of what I have written is intended to offend any humans. This is just a blog post to share my thoughts. I may be right or wrong.

*The percentages above are just illustration to explain better. The whole idea of the conversion funnel is so that people know how to optimize each step’s percentage.

Let’s explain in a funnel terms:

1. Value & Achievement: In this phase, the man of your dream is not even in the conversion funnel to be your potential boyfriend yet. This is the part where you need to be able to invest in yourself in terms of your appearances and your talents. The reality is, the most important things men look for are beauty and brain. Once you have enormous value in this part, you will be able to generate a huge stream of people in your conversion funnel.
2. People Knowing You: The more people know you, the better. However, make sure they know you for the good things. Such as how pretty you are, how smart you are, etc. People might know you from Facebook, Classroom, Instagram, etc. They might follow you and see the photos you post every other day.
3. The First Move: When they start to be attractive, men will make the first move to find a way to chat you whether through LINE, Facebook, etc. We all know how it works.
4. The Friend: When you both start chatting time to time and become “friends”. Ideally, a woman should be able to have more people in this zone, it will give a woman more options. Remember that women have more urgency to find the perfect person. A lot of people start to consider becoming a couple here. That is too early, having that consideration makes you make bad decisions.
5. The Meet / Date: You both decide to meet up and see if you are suitable to each other. This is the right time to start considering whether you both are going to be a couple. Meeting up is the best way to understand each other further, chatting online won’t be enough.
6. Boyfriend and Girlfriend: You can only choose one, choose carefully.

Let’s imagine how the funnel works, for example you are doing well with your value and achievement. Average people will have maybe 100 people who actually know them and their names in school/office? 1% of them actually make the first move, which is 1 out of 100. You both become friends. And then? Your options are limited. That is how it works in the past for average people. Pretty people in the past might have 10% of them who made the first move, but it is still just 10.

What if you have 1000 total followers in all social media? 1% of them make the first move, which is 10. Then out of 10, maybe around 5 will continue chatting with you. But, are you sure that Mr. Right is one of the 5? What if your destiny could be better?

I think with this short explanation can help you understand what I mean about using the conversion funnel to optimize on who you will be together with. You may find this ridiculous, but I hope less women would join the thousands of wives that fight with their husbands weekly for 50 years. I still believe that the more options one has, the better person he/she can be with.

From the conversion funnel, you can adjust and see which step’s percentage has to be brought down or up. However, I still believe that the key is to improve ourselves at the most early stage, before people know us. I believe that who and what we are will attract similar people. Focus in improving yourself and make sure you optimize the funnel, because without optimizing the funnel, you won’t get the best life you ever dreamed of. Trust me, those women with 1,000,000 followers will have better chance to get better men. Not every man dares to make the first move, it is a natural filter. Not only that, they get to choose from a larger pool of better men that made the first move. I’m not saying that not putting effort means women will meet bad guys. What I’m really saying is that the digital world has allowed some people to get most of the attention. I call it, Attention Inequality.

Men Strategy Book

I will explain a little bit what I understand about women. I apologize to the female readers if some of my hypothesis are wrong, you know you are unpredictable right? lol

So basically women are very complex, totally the opposite of men. Women care about money, but not everyone will explicitly say it. Women also care about appearance, which they will always show publicly. They will say it out loud if they see handsome actors, while men will hide it if they like Jennifer Lawrence from The Hunger Games. But here is the most interesting part, most women choose men not based on appearance! Interesting right? (I’m living in South East Asia, I’m not sure about US or other countries)

Before proceeding, I will repeat again that women loving men with better wealth is not wrong at all. They just need to feel safe, money provides sense of security. It is like how female lions will choose to be with the Alpha lion, the strongest lion in the pack.

In my opinion, this is what women think they care about:

1. Appearance
2. Personality
3. Wealth

What they really care about:

1. Personality
2. Wealth

They don’t actually care about appearance! They can fall in love with someone as long as they feel loved and safe. SAFE is the keyword here. Every man can love, but not every man can make a woman feel safe.

The job of a man is not to optimize a conversion funnel, because a man does not own one. Only women have their conversion funnels.

The job of a man here is to compete and become the winner in the funnel, to be the one for the woman you are pursuing. Let’s look at the funnel below again.

Above is the conversion funnel a woman own, to be able to be the boyfriend, a man needs to compete with a lot of other men, which is fair. So would you stay in “The Friend” zone? You can, if your goal is to be a friend, but if your goal is to be a boyfriend, that’s super lame. Btw, even to be “The Friend”, you need to make the first move, do you have the courage to make the first move?

So, what does it take to compete and win? If we go back to the things a woman truly needs:

1. Be loved
2. Sense of security / Feeling safe

The competitive advantage a man can create is to make a woman feel safe. Again, every man can love, but not every man can make a woman feel safe.

So how does a man do it? Security can be generated with:

1. Wealth: A man needs to have wealth, it can come from parents. But if your parents are not wealthy, you need to work so hard until you have the potential to be wealthy, or be wealthy instead before you approach a woman. Wealth is useful to make sure we can live comfortably and not to worry when problems occur.
2. Faith: A man needs to show faithfulness, to make a woman be sure that he won’t cheat in the future. So ideally, while women should create a huge funnel to let more men approach them. A man should approach only one woman at a time, but focus and work hard to win the competition in the conversion funnel.
3. Confidence: A man needs to be very confident that he can provide all of the above for the woman. This confidence is an insurance of continuous effort for the woman, a determination and a commitment.

 

Conclusion

This is a long post, I hope it will be beneficial for readers.

As conclusion, women should focus in improving themselves in terms of appearance and mind to optimize the quality and quantity of men who try to become the right boyfriend with a conversion funnel.

Men should focus in winning the competition in the conversion funnel by having competitive advantage by making a woman feel safe with wealth, faith, and confidence.

Ideally, male lions fight to prove who is the strongest to be with the best female lion.

If you have further thoughts, reach me at: vincent.huberta@gmail.com / vincent@uniklik.com

Adios!