By Hannah Flaherty

YNOT – Good marketing can make the difference between a brand that’s on everyone’s lips and just another face in the crowd. The marketing team at Casual.WhiteLabelDating.com offers these tried-and-true tips for increasing your return on investment during 2013.

1. Remember to KISS.
Pucker up! Keep It Simple, Stupid, is the foremost principle of successful marketing. Consumers will make up their minds about your brand in just a few seconds; you don’t have the luxury of wasting time. To achieve conversions, keep campaigns focused on your key message — minus the fluff.

2. Make your campaigns win-win.
Create promotional activity that benefits you and your customers equally. Consumers are looking for value in exchange for their money, so create actionable and genuine promotional campaigns that give them something they want. Small print indicates your promotions aren’t what they seem and will stop customers cold. Worse, they won’t come back. If you consistently deliver what you promise — preferably, more than expected — customers will remain loyal and keep spending, delivering a long-term benefit to your business.

3. Measure the right metrics.
Measurement is key. Regardless your platform, it’s essential that you regularly monitor marketing activity. What’s more, you need to be aware of which metrics are relevant to which campaigns.

In social media terms, 2013 is the year of metric evolution. Measurement no longer is restricted to the number of likes or followers you have. Instead, you need to think about conversions. These can be calculated through your reach, page impressions, click-through rates and share-ability. Success is about quality, not quantity. Get this right, and the rest will take care of itself.

4. Remember that content is key.
If you can create high-quality content, you have at your fingertips the basis of a successful integrated marketing campaign. Whether it’s a blog post, a viral video or an interesting ad, if it’s good, people will engage with it and share it. Not only will this help your credibility and establish your brand, but it also will aid SEO and boost your organic search rankings.

5. Test, test and test some more.
Implement a champion/challenger approach to your marketing activity. Whether it’s customer relationship management, affiliate marketing, social media or a public relations campaign, you need to understand your results in order to improve and optimize campaigns effectively.

When you’ve reached a point of success, thus becoming a champion, it’s time to challenge yourself to drive performance even further. Set a new, even higher target, then innovate, improve and evolve your campaigns to keep increasing your ROI.

6. Optimize for Mobile
In 2012, Casual.WhiteLabelDating.com saw mobile revenue increase at a rate of 440 percent year over year. Mobile traffic now comprises more than 30 percent of all traffic to the platform, proving that mobile is here to stay. We’re seeing a steady increase in tablet penetration, too.

It’s essential that your advertising campaigns are mobile-optimized. You may also need to assess whether your activity requires the creation of separate, individual campaigns to target individual devices.

Hannah Flaherty is the B2B PR and marketing assistant at Global Personals Limited, parent company of WhiteLabelDating.com; Casual.WhiteLabelDating.com is the company’s adult-entertainment division. Launched in 2003, the award-winning dating platform provides the software, membership database, customer care and infrastructure for more than 7,500 dating sites worldwide. Webmasters, affiliates and publishers provide the brand, design and marketing.