Duolingo generated 369.7 million dollars revenue in 2022 simply from subscriptions to the company’s premium service. The stat speaks volumes about that brand’s impact.
As one of the most popular language-learning apps, Duolingo’s marketing strategy is a solid case study for all upcoming and established businesses. The company. Whether you want to increase your user base or give your customers a personalized experience, the brand’s marketing strategies are an inspiration.
Through this article, we’ll dig deeper into what makes Duolingo’s digital marketing strategies unique and how its quirky brand voice leads to a rise in user base and product-led growth. Let’s begin.
Duolingo’s Marketing Strategy in Building a Recognizable Identity
Building a brand identity is a challenging feat. However, if you simplify your core business values, it becomes a bit easier. For example, Duolingo’s core value is to make learning free and fun sorted, leaving ample room to devise marketing strategies surrounding this core value. Let’s look at several key strategies and elements Duolingo used to define its brand identity.
Playful and vibrant design elements
Duolingo is identified by its vibrant design elements in the app. From the colors used in the app to the characters and components, the design elements give off a playful vibe, making the users more excited to use the app. Their design aligns with their core value of making language learning accessible and fun.
Weekly Roundup emails
Not all customers might be aware of the new features of the app. Hence, they sent weekly roundup emails summarizing features so that the users could make the most of the app.
Quirky brand voice
On analyzing Duolingo’s notifications, pop ups, and the overall tone used in the app, you’ll notice a sense of playfulness in its brand voice, again emphasizing its value in making learning fun. Its unique brand voice helps make it stand out from its competitors.
The brand promotes inclusivity and accessibility
As an educational app, Duolingo gracefully breaks language barriers and makes education accessible to a global audience. This creates a brand identity that promotes inclusivity and accessibility in language learning. Along with offering free language courses, the app has a simple interface and adaptive learning algorithms catering to users of all genders and ages.
While you can take help of these pointers to devise your own marketing strategy, it’s wise to go for education marketing agencies. They will help you devise an accurate strategy and define the brand voice that reflects your business’ core value.
Now that we know about Duolingo’s marketing strategy ideas, let’s get to how they used gamification in their marketing strategy.
Gamification & Duolingo: How They Used It?
As stated earlier, the brand aims to make learning fun, and incorporating gamification elements into its platform is the best way to do so. Features such as rewards, tracking progress for each course, tests, scores, etc., make learning an interactive and enjoyable experience. Also, if you study any Duolingo marketing campaign, they’ll try to make it more fun.
All in all, value. Duolingo’s brand identity combines playful design elements, gamified approach, and an emphasis on social presence. This makes it recognizable and liked by millions of users.
A few key benefits of incorporating gamification into the platform are:
- It allows users to compete with others and share achievements, fostering a sense of community.
- It adapts to the user’s proficiency level, giving a personalized experience.
- It enables users to learn in chunks, making learning easy to fit into their daily routines.
- It helps users to set clear goals and milestones.
- Elements like leaderboards, tests, scores, points, etc., boost motivation levels.
- It makes learning fun.
As per a study report in 2021, 80% of users enjoyed Duolingo due to its gamification! The stat should push you to consider incorporating gamification into your platform.
We’ve listed a few examples of the social media strategy of Duolingo below. From Duolingo Tiktok marketing strategy to Instagram to YouTube, the brand has a solid social presence.
Duolingo’s collaboration with Crunchyroll
The brand’s collaboration with Crunchyroll came as a surprise to all anime fans. They offered a one-month free trial of Super Duolingo to registered Crunchyroll users. The brand not only celebrated the sixth anniversary of its English-to-Japanese course but also provided Crunchyroll users with a subscription to Super Duolingo for free.
Crunchyroll’s Instagram page has over two million followers. You will increase user engagement rate and reach when you collaborate with brands with many such followers.
Duolingo’s successful TikTok marketing strategy
If we look at Duolingo’s strategy on TikTok, the brand started by posting longer videos- up to 40 seconds, and gradually posting no longer than 10-second videos. The brand stands out because they have understood the audience on the platform and have continuously given them what they want. All the posts usually have at least six hashtags, with #Duolingo being the most common one to spread brand awareness.
Duolingo’s learning course series and tests on YouTube
Duolingo makes the most of YouTube by posting informative videos related to learning, tips, tricks and success stories. It has also launched language learning course series on the platform gaining more traction along with formats of tests and ways to score more in the tests.
So if your business falls under the education category, post learning courses videos on YouTube for users to learn for free.
Time to create a successful marketing strategy
The brand’s overall approach has always been keeping the tone of the app and marketing strategies light and fun. Moreover, their team always looks for new opportunities to polish the app and its marketing strategies which makes them ahead of their competitors at all times.
Use its campaigns and posts as an inspiration to devise your successful marketing strategies. Remember to experiment and analyze the marketing strategies.
Good luck, and make marketing fun!
