As one of the UK's leading young entrepreneurs Ross is always keen to share interesting aspects of his daily life as well as his passion for successful business. This is where Ross publishes his latest blog posts. You read it here first.
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Blog
September 2008
eHarmony Progress in the UK
Posted by admin on Friday, 5 September 2008 12:59 PMI’ve just come back from another Miami trip - am still amazed by the amount eHarmony and other dating sites spend on TV advertising over there.
It was Labour Day weekend, kinda like a bank holiday and eHarmony was advertising “free communication weekend” where you could communicate for free with their members - we do the same thing at WhiteLabelDating.com and it’s a good way to hook basic members into communicating so they then upgrade after the free communication period.
eHarmony seems to be carrying out a soft launch in the UK - I haven’t seen much offline marketing about it, but they are spending on Google PPC. This is probably to help seed their UK database ahead of a larger public launch after Christmas and throughout January (traditionally the time when lonely singles with new years resolution want to find someone).
It’ll be interesting to see whether their UK marketing is sensitive to our very different culture or they try to sledgehammer their US-style adverts on UK television.
Match.com have done a good job using humour to make their site appeal to UK audiences - somehow, I’ve got a feeling that eHarmony will take a US-approach and may be in for an unpleasant shock.
Anything that raises the profile of online dating in the UK is a good thing - and as 80% of users will search using Google rather than entering the domain name directly, eHarmony competitors can just snap up most of the traffic generated by the TV advertising.
For those of you that don’t know eHarmony, here’s a nice satire of their US advertising approach:
