Organic Marketing Is Duolingo’s Lingua Franca

By Allison Schiff

Brand and performance marketers don’t always speak the same language. But for language-learning app Duolingo, they are complementary.

Although roughly 80% of Duolingo’s users were acquired through word of mouth, targeted paid acquisition helps spur organic user growth, said Emmanuel Orssaud, the company’s VP of marketing.

“We’ve spent a lot of time building a product that people actually want to recommend to their friends,” Orssaud said. “Marketing is a layer on top of that to accelerate the flywheel.”

A good example of the so-called flywheel in action is Duolingo’s partnership with Max (formerly HBO Max) last year to promote the “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon.” Duolingo launched an updated version of its course on High Valyrian, the fictional language spoken in the show, to include new words and phrases.

According to Duolingo, more than 40% of people who sign up to play around with a “conlang” (aka an invented language) like High Valyrian end up sticking around to take another real language course on the app.

But hopping on pop culture moments – especially on TikTok, where Duolingo’s mascot, Duo, has established itself as a bit of a meme machine – can also be good for reengaging existing users. Duo recently tore up the red (sorry, pink) carpet at the Barbie movie premiere dressed in pink and wearing a blonde wig.

“TikTok has a massive impact on retention for us,” Orssaud said. “We know that people see these TikToks and it reminds them to open the app and do a lesson.”

Orssaud, whose native language is French, parlé avec AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: What’s your strategy for balancing paid and owned media?

EMMANUEL ORSSAUD: Our best campaigns are less about selling and more about showing people why learning a language will make their life better and more fun.

There was the High Valyrian course, for example. We also gave away free bagels at delis around the US to people who ordered in Yiddish when we launched our Yiddish course a few years ago. And we gave a free month of premium access to people whose name is Emily because we saw a spike in demand for learning French after the first season of “Emily in Paris.”

These were some of our best-performing campaigns from a cost perspective and a brand-building perspective. We invest the majority of our effort into building content, including for social, as a way to build our brand, especially on TikTok.

Why TikTok?

We have a relatively small marketing team, just around 40 people, so I don’t want to waste time trying every new shiny platform because there are so many of them. But Tik Tok is where we see the most reach with our videos. People comment and engage, and that drives a lot of virality for us.

In general, we focus on where audiences are. That’s why we’re also starting to build a strategy for YouTube Shorts. Short-form video is big for us.

How do you measure all this stuff?

When it comes to brand-building and channels that aren’t one-to-one from an acquisition standpoint, we do something that is super simple: We have a survey as part of the registration process that we use to ask people how they heard about us and why they downloaded. That is our primary source of information for understanding where new users are coming from.

But self-reported information isn’t as accurate as observing behavior, right?

A survey is never going to be 100% accurate, but it gives us a good signal to understand how channels are performing for us overall, so we know where to spend our time and effort to drive growth.

Trying to be extremely precise with this kind of measurement is not the best investment of our time. I’d rather have a general better sense of what to prioritize rather than measuring ads on a one-to-one basis.

If we post a TikTok that gets 3 million views and then we see a clear spike in our new user growth, that’s enough correlation. Then we know this piece of content likely helped with acquisition because we can see it.

I know a large proportion of people download the app for fun, like to learn High Valyrian, and then stay to learn a real language. But have you seen people actually become fluent in conlangs?

Some people do finish them because you can do those courses relatively quickly. The fictional language courses are shorter compared with Spanish or French, which can go on for years.

And some take it very seriously. There was [an article about] a bride who wanted to do her wedding completely in High Valyrian, and she was sending people links to Duolingo.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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