For those who love reading case studies about marketing failures, we have something really interesting and worth reading for you guys. We all are aware of the impact TikTok is making in the digital marketing space but Dubsmash was one of the early adopters of short-video content. Here’s a little overview of Dubsmash’s journey and the lessons we can learn from it…
The record-breaking growth
Dubsmash was launched in November 2014 and within 9 months of its launch in Aug 2015, it crossed over 75 million downloads. Do you know any other platform that rose so quickly? Not only audience, but Dubsmash also received monetary support quickly as funding came in 2016. Well there are tons of articles on Internet explaining the growth of Dubsmash but what makes us curious is when everything was going in favor, then how did it fail? What went wrong? Below points will explain you that:
No social network inside app
Online users love to communicate via personal messages. Dubsmash team didn’t focus on this and never integrated the option of messaging other users.
Very less marketing budget
No platform can lead this competitive market without having the right Marketing strategy and budget. The company didn’t focus much on user acquisition. On the other hand, similar platforms like TikTok and Vigo videos spend a large portion of their budget on acquiring new audience worldwide.
Not focusing much on employee expansion
To stay at the top, it is required to make quick changes and expand in the right way both in terms of business and human power. Dubsmash only had 15-20 employees and they never used the 15 million dollar funding for expanding their business by making some offline offices across different locations.
No fan meetups
The whole point of Internet and social media is that these help people in making authority and focusing on community building. For this, companies use so many strategies such as verify option, fan badges among many more. They could have given some points option to the most active content creators or some special badges. Fan meetups like YouTube fanfest could have done wonders for them.
Also Read: 5 Reasons Why Nokia Failed In The Mobile Phone Market
Not understanding user behavior
No business plan is perfect but those who succeed do one thing common; they keep an eye on what their audience is linking and make changes according to them. But Dubsmash failed in this too. They didn’t realise the power of appreciating content creators. Vigo, TikTok follow a proper process to regard creators, they even pay money to them.
We hope this case study will help you understand the online market. We tried to cover most of the things that led to the failure of Dubsmash. If you have some other points we can add, do let us know in the comments section.
