The Lox Club Dating App is Benefiting from TikTok Marketing

The Lox Club has turned to TikTok for attracting new users and is seeing record new downloads of its app as a result. 

The dating app launched last year to big fanfare and a profile in The New York Times, but the real test came with keeping users engaged so they didn’t return to Tinder and other popular dating apps. Since launching its new TikTok marketing strategy, the company has seen 13,000 conversions (clicks turned to downloads of the app) in January and February, according to AdWeek. This is also five times the number of conversions in November and December of last year. 

There’s a crop of new dating apps looking for novel ways to attract Gen Z users who want more than a swiping experience, which means thinking outside traditional advertising options, like Facebook ads which don’t necessarily convert browsers to users. Younger daters also gravitate to creative content and TikTok in larger numbers, opting to be entertained, which has driven some engaging new features in the dating app industry. For example, Tinder launched an “Explore” section, which includes Festival Mode to help users meet up with each other at music festivals and an interactive series called “Swipe Night,” among other features.

The Lox Club embraced TikTok for more creative freedom in advertising, according to co-founder and CEO Austin Kevitch. In other words, he didn’t want the content the company created to feel like an ad. (The Lox Club itself is irreverent – its tagline is “a members-only dating app for Jews with ridiculously high standards,” though the app is open to any user.) 

According to AdWeek, one winning TikTok strategy was Kevitch encouraging his own employees to post about their personal experiences with the dating app and at the workplace, spreading the word to their combined thousands of TikTok followers. Two particularly engaging TikToks that Lox Club shared on its own account are employees making fun of Kevitch for being scared of flying, and Kevitch singing on a Zoom call to his “blank-faced employees” as a punishment for being late to meetings. 

The most popular TikTok was a more typical marketing strategy where a user found love on the app, but with a twist – the user was a Lox Club employee. She posted a video of she and her partner with a mash-up of their dates as the relationship grew. It was viewed over 6.5 million times. 

“We found TikTok to be the best because it aligns with our brand pillars,” Kevitch told AdWeek. “It felt kind of corny to run a plain ad like, ‘Hey we’re application only and curated and here’s an ad and we’re begging you to come join.’”