Background

Unless you have been living under a rock, Zomato is one of the most recognizable food delivery brands in India. Founded in 2010, Zomato was started by a couple of IIT alumni in order to combat the issue of long waiting times to order food. Since then, it has risen to the status of a national behemoth and become a well-known brand almost synonymous with ordering food. Anybody who knows about ordering food online knows about Zomato. So what exactly made this success happen? While there were many smart decisions taken during this journey, one factor undoubtedly contributed to a lot of their success: a great digital marketing strategy. Let us explore how various tenets of Zomato’s digital marketing strategy contributed to their meteoric rise.

Targeting and positioning

Before composing any digital marketing strategy, it is important to know two things:

• 1. Who is your target audience?
• 2. How should your brand be positioned?

The marketing strategies of Zomato have largely been successful as a result of its target audience consisting of people in the age group of 18 to 35 years. This target audience was selected because of the common trend of people in that age group being familiar with food delivery apps and preferring cheaper and delivered food as compared to fine dining options.

As for how Zomato has positioned itself, it has strived to give an impression of a perfect conduit providing the perfect ecosystem for restaurants, delivery agents and users to ensure that everyone has a great experience.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Before beginning any paid campaign, it is important to have a website fully optimised for the search engines and the crawlers, but most importantly, the users.

Despite having a mobile application, Zomato has invested a lot of time and effort to build a fully optimised website that allows even first-time users to easily navigate the website and satisfy their food cravings.

With more than 12.5 million backlinks, Zomato has taken its SEO strategy very seriously giving its site an amazing domain authority score of 86. This gargantuan amount of link building has been a result of having an inventory of vast amounts of content (in this case, dishes from restaurants).

At the same time, as all the great brands have done, they have always looked for the next big idea to take their business to the next level. When the COVID -19 lockdown was imposed, Zomato was one of the earliest adopters in terms of expanding its services from only food delivery to including groceries and general delivery services. This resulted in them gaining even more backlinks and boosting their presence several times over.

In addition to this, Zomato's marketing strategy involves using trending keywords on their website with monthly search volumes from 1000 to 100,000 in addition to targeting obscure keywords with monthly search volumes as low as 10. As a combined result of this, Zomato continues to rank at the top of the search results regularly driving more traffic to its website as well as its app.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Just because Zomato has a great website and app which have been optimised for SEO, it doesn’t mean it is satisfied with only organic traffic. Zomato also has a well-run and aggressive Google Ads search campaign.

With quirky and witty headlines Zomato always comes up with clever ad copies based on trending topics or pop culture references which capture users’ attention right away. Not only does Zomato make sure that they have an attractive ad copy, they also ensure that they target the users with the right intent. This is done by using an aggressive bidding strategy on all branded and non-branded keywords which include the names of the restaurants and areas they serve.

By using these simple principles, Zomato has been regularly running Google Search campaigns to encourage an average of 70.5 million users to either download their app or visit their website every month.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO)

This is arguably where Zomato has most of its fun while promoting its brand. As mentioned before, the target audience for Zomato is 18 to 35-year-old users. As a result, serious content pieces and informative posts do not work as well as compared content generally containing puns or double entendres or trending topics/pop culture references.

One such interesting example is the creative below: It doesn’t really have any brilliantly designed graphic elements and the text is not very complicated to understand, but it is very well-written and cleverly combines something related to Zomato with the Indian independence movement.

In addition to regular organic posting, there are also a lot of fun social media paid campaigns run with concepts such as “No Cooking Days” wherein people are encouraged to take a break from cooking and order in their favourite dishes from Zomato.

Other campaigns include special offers for events such as the Indian Premier League, sports matches and festive/special days based campaigns such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, New Year etc.

Push Notifications

Arguably the most relentless marketing campaign Zomato implements on an hourly basis every day of the week is with messages such as

• 1. "Suno? Don't work on an empty stomach!"
• 2. “Grrr... Grr...Grr....Grr.. It's probably your stomach making noises. Order something?”
• 3. A hard day's work..... calls for a fulfilling meal to end the day with!

These types of push notifications every day help users who have already installed the app have an instant brand recall. This way, the thought of food is always linked with Zomato in their minds as a result of these constant reminders.

Conclusion

Food delivery apps are one of the hottest products on the market with the market capitalisation for the online food delivery industry in India rising to 290 crores. Brands like Zomato and its main competitor Swiggy have been able to distinguish themselves from the rest of the chasing pack due to their brilliantly thought-out and meticulously executed digital marketing strategy.

No matter what business you have, in today's competitive market digital marketing is the ultimate tool that can tip the scales your way and allow you to go toe-to-toe against the most established brands. So, what are you waiting for?

Schedule a call with our experts and discover how we as a Digital Marketing Agency can help to grow your business.

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Disclaimer:
The trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Idecution Marketing Studio LLP does not claim any intellectual copyright over or intend to use it for any commercial purposes whatsoever. This blog is only meant to provide information to the digital marketing community.