How Dubsmash lost its way in the market and revived itself?

App marketing is the process of increasing your user interaction with an app. I’m sure everybody knows that. But not many people know the story of Dubsmash, a video sharing social media service application where people choose a audio recording from a movie and dub over that piece of video. Before TikTok flourished itself in the market, in around 2014–15, Dubsmash was a hit back then. I personally made some videos on Dubsmash and was happy with its user interface and there were lots of recordings that you can dub to. But eventually, Dubsmash lost its way in the market and there were numerous reasons as to why it happened. But there are some marketing schemes and ideas that Dubsmash used and you can too.

Virality of Dubsmash

Launched in 2014, Dubsmash, a karaoke style video messaging app, got fame and popularity in no time. The thing that captured the eyes of users the most is the vibe that they’re more likely to hit the Trending or Explore page on Dubsmash because unlike TikTok,it is much less crowded with semi-pro creators and influencers.[ The Trending page is dominated by hot new songs and flashy dances, even if they’re shot with a lower production quality that feels accessible.

Dubsmash tries to stoke that sense of opportunity by making Explore about discovering accounts and all the content they’ve made rather than specific videos.It was a creation tool like Hipstamatic, not a network like Instagram. There’s a reason we’re only using one of those today. But the virality lasted for only 2–3 years. Dubsmash was bleeding users faster than it could recruit them.](Source)There was nowhere in the app to post your videos.

Bringing Dubsmash back to it’s position

[So in 2017, Dubsmash‘s three executives burned down the 30-person company and rebuilt something social from the ashes with the rest of the $15.4 million it’d raised from Lowercase Capital, Index Ventures and Raine. They ditched its Berlin headquarters and resettled in Brooklyn, closer to the one demographic still pushing Dubsmashes to the Instagram Explore page: African-American teenagers posting dances and lip-syncs to indie hip-hop songs on the rise. Dubsmash stretched its funding to rehire a whole new team of 15. They spent a year coding a new version of Dubsmash centered around Following and Trending feeds, desperately trying to match the core features of Musically, which by then had been bought by China’s ByteDance.]Source

Dubsmash rebuilt its app and revived its usage

This graph perfectly represents the usage over the years. Until 2016, it was going all good. But in 2017, it went down the hill. Active users went from high to 0 in 2018. After rebuilding the application, it came to back its path in the late 2018 which can be seen in the above image. It was like Dubsmash came back to life. The executives gave Dubsmash a second life by moving the company to US and relaunching its product. It attracted a large number of users and made people feel comfortable in front of the camera thus canceling out the problem of huge visibility on such a big platform.

Great Marketing strategies to learn from Dubsmash

1. Social Media sharing, personalization and celebrity endorsements.
2. Revivement of a product is possible. When your product is good, you know you’ll do good and succeed.
3. Focusing on people’s choice. Content is the most important thing.
4. Campaigning with other brands to target millenial customers.
5. Dubsmash’s tagline “Be anyone you want to be” makes people feel a celebrity in themselves on a different level. People can choose any clip from any movie or song and make it their own.
6. Connecting people through their chat option. You can even send your videos to your friends.
7. Celebrity adoption is a major part of attraction by a large number of audience. Celebrities such as Rihanna took to Dubsmash and directed their fans to dub their songs.

Dubsmash’s co-founder Roland Grenke expressed his idea and philosophy on viral marketing:

“Our focus was never building something with viral success or viral marketing. Our focus was always product-centric. We always focused on building a great product that people loved to use multiple times and then recommend to friends. That is the viral effect.”

Marketing isn’t about doing things at the right time or on a right day. All the area of focus should be product quality. If people will like it, they will use it and share it. As we know, Customer satisfaction is the most important thing.

Marketing stratagies from Dubsmash gives us an important lesson that any marketer can go viral. It’s about how he does it, not when he does it. Don’t worry about it’s virality. The wire of virality is connected with the product. If the wire of product quality is in perfect condition, the current can easily reach the virality. It’s all about your creativity and innovative ideas.