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The killer marketing strategies of Zomato can make you order a meal even after you just had one. How often does it happen when you are just thinking of ordering a meal online and Zomato gives you a notification like “Chhole bhature khaye kya?” Well, after a notification like this, I am sure no one can stop their craving.
The CEO of Zomato, Deepinder Goyal, says, “The first rule of entrepreneurship is that there is no rule.” In marketing, there are no rules, but the only rule is to acquire customers. Let’s explore the insane marketing strategies that Zomato uses to become one of the most exotic food-delivery applications.
Where did the journey of Zomato begin?
Deepindar Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah founded Zomato in 2008, which is when the company’s history began. It was formerly known as “Foodie Bay” before being renamed to the well-known Zomato in 2010. Its main goal was to connect the restaurant with people. Their idea was to let people choose their food from the various menus and place orders. while they deliver the food to your door.
In the first half of 2020, Zomato’s revenue increased by 225%. Zomato managed to sum up 119,900 eateries from 23 countries. Zomato’s rise was aided by the digital marketing they employed. Zomato knows the new age is hanging out on the internet, and that is where they can target their potential customers. They spent Rs. 1326.6 crore on marketing and sales, along with their creative marketing skills, to skyrocket their brand in no time.
Why should marketers study Zomato’s digital marketing strategies?
The internet marketing techniques used by Zomato are clever, original, and compelling. Zomato always has something unique up its sleeve, whether it’s SEO, social media, or content marketing. All the areas of marketing are perfect, and hence we can take inspiration from them as well. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Zomato’s journey to becoming the first food tech unicorn in India. The following are some lessons that marketers might apply to their own strategies:
1. Keeping it Simple and Sweet
Zomato uses straightforward, enticing, and clever techniques to draw customers and effectively convey its message. Humor is another powerful technique speakers can use to draw in their audience and stick in their memory.
2. Use of Bright Colors
Zomato’s advertisements, billboards, and postings have one thing in common: they all use eye-catching, attention-grabbing colours that draw attention and encourage viewers to read what is written there. Additionally, it makes them stand out from the crowd.
3. Establishing a Brand Identity
Zomato presents a shared and constant brand across all platforms and marketing techniques. This aids in memory and makes them recognisable by people based just on the colours and typeface they employ. In order to ensure that your brand is remembered and recognised despite the growing competition, developing a brand identity is crucial.
4. Value Addition
The reader gains something from every article, story, or other material Zomato publishes. By carefully examining their content, one can see the amount of thought and effort that went into each of them.
5. Community Building
No one, if not Zomato, can teach you how to develop a steady and devoted community that keeps expanding. The digital marketing methods used by Zomato are centered on community building. You might be drawn to follow Zomato and leave comments on all its posts, even if you rarely interact with other users on Instagram.
Their new tactic of rewarding “close friends” with unique vouchers encourages more users to like, comment on, and share their content by rewarding individuals who often engage with them. It’s a genius tactic to get what you want without asking for it.
What Are Zomato’s Digital Marketing Strategies?
Even in such a competitive space, Zomato managed to make itself one of the biggest brands in India. This is never possible without a laser-targeted digital marketing strategy. Let’s dive in and find different marketing strategies for every platform.
Zomato’s social media marketing strategy
Zomato’s main motive is to give their customers a delight factor. But how do they achieve it in their content? They create content that makes their followers happy, engaged, and think about food. They apply their social media marketing strategies to the following platforms:
- YouTube
Let’s break down the strategies for each of their platforms and find out how they impress their followers.
In one of the interviews, the vice president of Zomato said they’d got a few mantras around which they create their content and follow them by heart.
Zomato’s four customer-winning mantras are as follows:
- Be there for your customers.
- Always be relevant to your domain.
- Placing content at the forefront
- Don’t try to copy others. Create unique and one-of-a-kind content.
Zomato’s Instagram Marketing Strategy
The fact that the Zomato team is always improving what they are doing today is one of the best things about their marketing. They do not sell you in a direct way, but rather make you smile, let you check their page, and convince you thereafter. Hence, they experiment with everything, from their bio to their content—from posts to videos and whatnot.
Let’s find out how this food giant plans and executes its Instagram marketing.
Zomato Instagram Page
“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” That is what you can see when you land on their Instagram page. They put you in an unusual situation in which you must go to their page to learn more about them.
The marketing starts with the bio. Although it’s a food delivery company, they never say it in their bio. Instead, they always experiment with some quirky lines.
When you read their bio, you never go into serious mode but probably smile after reading it.
Zomato’s engagement strategy for posts
When the era of the internet started, the meme culture took off, and people started tagging their friends and family members. Pages started creating more relatable posts to connect with more people in a single post.
This is the strategy that Zomato picked up and started using to create posts that can bring them tonnes of engagement on a single post. They ask people to tag their friends in exchange for a free meal, and people do it more for fun.
Instagram has an average engagement rate of 2.55 percent, and its following is 763,870. With such an engagement rate, they get around 36677 likes.
Can you imagine that with a single post, they can reach so many people?
Zomato’s Facebook Marketing Strategies
Although the engagement rate of Facebook is comparatively lower than that of Instagram, Zomato still applies the same strategies that they apply on Instagram. People connect with Zomato’s posts on Facebook as well as posts that are emotional, relatable, and funny.
However, one of the best things about Zomato is that they immediately take action when they see people unhappy and complaining about their brand. They bring them to the inbox to solve their complaints. So their social media works as a meme and brand page and solves people’s problems. This gesture brings out a good image in people, and therefore people trust this brand as well.
Zomato’s Twitter Marketing Strategies
Like other social media platforms, Zomato does the same on Twitter. Their motive is to create tweets that spark open conversation. They’ve got 1.6 million followers, and they tweet to bring people’s comments to their tweets. With tweets like these, their average engagement is 0.28 percent, which is insane for Twitter. They get an average of 318 likes and 390 retweets on every post.
Zomato’s YouTube Marketing Strategy
Zomato usually posts funny videos on YouTube. It collaborates with famous influencers and actors to increase its reach. Currently, Zomato has 401,000 followers, and its average engagement rate is 2.55 percent. If we calculate their average engagement on every video, they get 19,367 likes and 480 comments.
Zomato SEO strategy
Almost all the traffic that comes to Zomato is organic. Which means they barely need any advertising to get orders. This is what happens when you are the big bull of SEO. Zomato has implemented SEO in a fantastic manner, and now Zomato ranks at the top of the food and beverage industry.
They target easy-to-think-of keywords, and people always search for those terms when they need to order online or find a restaurant. They use restaurant and food names as keywords to rank. Also, they target keywords like “restaurants near me” and “order food online.” Zomato is ranking for more than 900,000 keywords worldwide, which is insanely crazy.
Can you imagine how many pages, Zomato would have to sum up these many keywords?
They have more than 54 million pages and are still growing.
The restaurant owners themselves manage these pages. The better they manage the pages, the better order they get, and ultimately Zomato wins in every condition.
Other Interesting Zomato Marketing Strategies
Some of their marketing strategies are occasional, and these are some of the creative ways through which they earn a lot of traffic on their apps. From these tactics, we can learn how they gamify things and present multiple offers in a few events to increase brand promotion.
Zomato Gold Membership
In order to attract their audience to the top loyalty club, Zomato offers a gold membership. Making regular online meal orders into repeat clients for a longer period of time is an incredible strategy for Zomato. This offer is one of their masterstrokes. People choose the gold membership plan since they are offered attractive discounts and free food with the subscription. Consequently, both Zomato and its customers benefit, making this a win-win situation.
For Zomato’s customers, this tactic was tremendously profitable. Zomato Gold has generated a lot of mixed feelings among restaurant partners, but the strategy has contributed 12% of the brand’s earnings. Zomato Gold was available in 41 cities across nine countries as of July 2021.
Zomato Premier League
Zomato is constantly experimenting, and one of its strategies was to make the app more engaging. By doing this, they significantly increased their traffic, and as a result, those who didn’t already have the app downloaded it to take advantage of the discounts. The ZPL is a fun way to cheer for your preferred team and receive discounts if they win, apart from the world of betting. In many aspects, this campaign increased traffic to Zomato and encouraged customers to order from them rather than from their rivals. They “gamified” the company’s image and increased brand awareness.
Zomatoloot
Zomato openly launched a contest for its followers in 2020, for which they had to produce an advertisement. If Zomato chooses the ad, the user will receive Rs 25 in rewards. Zomato used this method to generate a tonne of user-generated content in addition to drastically increasing its engagement rate.
Conclusion
We are sure you must have enjoyed our research on how interestingly Zomato does its marketing. We have not only covered the metrics of the company’s pages but also discussed their marketing techniques and strategies. There are so many aspects of marketing that make any company huge with so many fans.
To make this happen, every single bit has to be in the correct place. We, the team at RDS, help brands put those bits and pieces of marketing in place. Let us know how we can help you, and we’ll be at your service.
If you like our work, let us know, as it helps us get going. For more fantastic research on blooming companies and their marketing insights, check our website. Until the next one, happy learning!
