Zomato Marketing Strategy: A Comprehensive Case Study

Some brands have grown exponentially since their inception. Zomato is one of them. How did they manage it? What did they do to increase their customer base? What did they do to keep their consumers coming back? We think Zomato’s Marketing Strategy played a significant part in all this, especially its digital marketing strategy. This article analyses a few digital marketing strategies used by the company to give you an insight into what they have been doing.

About Zomato

When Zomato launched, it aimed to be the best restaurant search and discovery platform. It had the names of various restaurants, their menu, their prices, reviews, and other details. It provided in-depth information on over 1.4 million restaurants across 23 countries.

Over the years, it has converted itself into an online food delivery platform. People can now order food from the restaurants near them using their app or website. Zomato has delivery executives who pick up the order from the eatery and deliver it to the address provided by the customer.

Now that we are discussing Zomato, let’s take a look at their marketing strategy too.

What’s new with Zomato?

Here’s what was buzzing around Zomato recently:

• Zomato acquired Blinkit, a quick commerce app in 2022 with a vision to enter the quick commerce space dominated by Swiggy Instamart & Zepto.  
• The food delivery giant also relaunched its “Gold Loyalty Programme” at the start of 2023.
• Zomato has started testing an additional Platform Fee of INR 2 on Zomato Gold members.
• Crocs and Zomato collaborated to celebrate the Monsoon Season in style. More about this campaign is discussed below.

Let’s now understand the target audience of Zomato better with the help of a buyer persona.

Buyer Persona of Zomato

A buyer persona generally refers to the detailed information of an ideal customer of a company. When it comes to Zomato, people from India use it the most. This buyer persona will help you understand the attributes of regular a Zomato user.

Buyer’s Persona

Name:

Abhimanyu

Place:

Allahabad

Age:

22 years

Profession:

College Student

Motivation

• Affordable dining experiences
• Time-saving meal options
• Discovering trendy local restaurants
• Getting discounts for budget-friendly choices

Interest & Hobbies

• Exploring diverse cuisines
• Attending food festivals
• Consuming cooking content
• Posting food experiences on social media

Pain Points

• Inconsistent information on social
  media channels.
• Limited college budget
• Scarcity of cooking time
• Unreliable restaurant reviews
• Unreliable restaurant reviews

Social Media Presence

• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Facebook

From the table above we can conclude that an ideal Zomato User uses the app for quick food delivery solutions or he/she is a foodie. In both cases, Zomato needs to evaluate the attributes further to understand future challenges.

Want to know about the current challenges of Zomato? Read a detailed SWOT Analysis of the brand before moving on with marketing strategies.

Zomato Marketing Strategies

1. Search Engine Optimisation

Zomato has put a lot of effort into SEO.

As per Ubersuggest data, it ranks in India for 2,494,988 keywords as of August 2023. Its organic traffic is 30,484,205 sessions per month. The stats are low compared to their SEO performance in February 2023. However, it is 2.5 times better than their closest competitor, Swiggy’s SEO Performance.

It is very difficult to get to know the Search Engine Optimisation techniques used by Zomato because they have blocked all the SEO tools from scanning their sites. However, we have tried to find out some of their techniques and list them here.

Here are some of their SEO Strategies: 

Keywords in URL

Zomato takes the top keywords in their niche and creates webpage URLs of them. This tells the search engine that their pages are relevant to the search query of the user. This is a very good strategy to ensure that your website ranks.

Backlinks

Zomato gets backlinks from 12,486,689 unique domains. It also gets 233 backlinks from high-authority domains like .gov and .edu domains. All this increases the Domain Authority of Zomato’s domain and helps it rank higher.

Keywords on the web pages

Keywords that include food names, restaurant names, and phrases like “order food online in Mumbai” tell the search engines that these pages have the content related to these search queries.

2. Social Media Marketing

Zomato is active on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. As of August 2023, it has 859k followers on Instagram, 1.9 million followers on Facebook and 1.5 million followers on Twitter.

Let’s analyze how their posts are:

Trendy

Zomato engages with the audience by posting on trendy topics. The brand understands the audience’s nature. Hence, it promotes content that makes users share it, comment on it and view it again and again. It utilizes trendy topics and posts simple images in order to interact with viewers online.

One of the most noteworthy events in the field of sports is the Olympics. During the 2016 Olympics, Zomato posted something like this.

Another trendy topic of the time was the game “Pokemon Go!” Zomato capitalized on that as well.

Zomato gave a twist to the topic of the Panama Papers.

Posting on trendy topics built connectivity with the audience. Probably, users don’t wish to think much when they are on social media. As a matter of fact, users are there on social media to enjoy and see funny content. And, when such content appears on their news feed, expect your content to be shared. For sure!

Current Affairs

Many in the United States and people across the world know about the border issue between the United States and Mexico. Newly elected President Donald Trump had promised that he would ensure that Mexico would build the wall between the two nations and pay for it.

Zomato had some different plans in mind. Current topics were related to food. “Taco lovers” would have surely reacted to this post in large numbers. Such posts leave an impression on the social media audience.

Comparisons

Zomato has been a master of utilizing this form of engagement. There are tons of examples to showcase how comparisons have been carried out by Zomato.

Here you go:

Girls tend to check the name of the dish and decide what to eat, while guys usually look at the price of each dish before selecting it.

Yet another splendid image that showcases how people eat.

Yet, the best one is here,

There are two ways people eat Pizza.

They are –

You can relate to such images just by looking at them. You will like, share, comment, and recommend to others. That’s what Zomato wants, engagement with you, interaction with you, a real-life user.

Connectivity with the audience

‘How I ate your butter’.

Sounds wrong, right? Does it remind you of something else?

It has to. This ad was made by keeping in mind the American sitcom ‘How I Met Your Mother?’

Isn’t it similar to Game of Thrones?

How can Indians forget this? Demonetization!

Users can relate to many things. Right from lifestyle or incidents in the life of actors-actresses to social media content; users love such content to which they can relate.

Recently, Blinkit and Zomato collaborated on an advertising campaign featuring slogans on billboards. Blinkit’s billboard read “Doodh mangoge, doodh denge” (Ask for milk, we will deliver it), while Zomato’s billboard read “Kheer mangoge, kheer denge” (Ask for kheer, we will deliver it). These billboards have gained a lot of attention online.

Wait. There is more to it.

Fun

You won’t miss out on this.

It is related to your food habits. Zomato uses info-graphics in a way which audience can relate to. 96% of the youngsters would relate to this image with ease.

Sarcasm

Ultimately, how can we miss out on sarcasm? Isn’t Facebook fully loaded with such content?

Check out how Zomato posts sarcastic content

And beyond that

While we are sure; you wouldn’t like to miss these ones.

At all!

Zomato uses the factor of making people relate to their content to increase engagement and appeal to their audiences. This strategy has worked well for them on social media platforms. You can also ace the social media game like Zomato by implementing these steps.

3. Push Notifications

Another strategy that Zomato has mastered is Push Notifications. Once a user downloads the Zomato App, Zomato keeps nudging them via quirky push notifications to order something.

The reason why their push notifications stand out from the rest is because they use related and Gen-Z language in their copy. Here are a few examples: 

4. Paid Advertising

Zomato runs Search Ad Campaign using Google Adwords. It targets keywords related to food, ordering online, names of restaurants, and much more. It targets users whose intent is to get some food delivered to them.

It also runs Google Display ads to target users on third-party websites and apps.

Along with this, it runs promotions on Facebook and Instagram to target users on these platforms.

Marketing and Advertising Campaign Examples

Here are some of the unique and successful advertising campaigns of Zomato:

1. The story of Raksha and Bandhan 

For the 2023 Raksha Bandhan campaign, Zomato shared a very unique ad campaign highlighting that siblings can’t do with and can’t do without each other.

2. Zomato vs Zomato Campaign 

Zomato used the entire confusion about the pronunciation of Zomato’s word as an idea and created an entire campaign with cricket legends who once argued on the pitch – Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth.

3. Humans of Zomato featuring Delivery Agents 

Another gemstone of a series by Zomato is ‘Humans of Zomato’ where delivery agents are interviewed in a fun way by Zomato Anchors. This really created an emotional connect with the audience, showing that Zomato is compassionate towards the delivery agents.

4. Breaking Breads with Founders & CEOs of Food Brands 

Inspired by a globally renowned series – Breaking Bad, Breaking Breads is a series on Youtube where Zomato conducts podcasts with the founders of Food Brands like Farzi Cafe, Biryani by Kilo, etc. 

Failed Campaigns of Zomato 

Zomato more than often grabs attention with its unique marketing. But, there have been a few times when the campaign failed to connect with the audiences and gained backlash. 

Here are a few examples of failed campaigns of Zomato:

1. The Kachra Ad 

Zomato wanted to sarcastically draw parallels between a legendary character from the movie Lagaan-Kachra and World Environment Day.

This met with a lot of backlash from the viewers who felt the ad made a mockery of untouchables, specifically Dalits. 

Here’s the apology that Zomato released after taking the video down:

2. Har Customer Hai Superstar  

Starring Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan, the main goal of this ad campaign was to ensure that customers don’t talk to delivery agents in a condescending manner. Zomato wanted to highlight the unexpected conditions that delivery agents have to work in. 

However, this ad, just after its release, received backlash all over the internet. Some of the viewers commented that Zomato should first improve the basic remuneration of these delivery agents before preaching to the audience. 

3. Billboard Copy in Delhi 

Another instance when Zomato’s tongue-in-cheek moment turned into a nightmare for them is this copy. 

Top Competitors of Zomato 

Here’s the list of top competitors of Zomato:

• Swiggy 
• Uber Eats 
• Doordash
• Deliveroo
• Grubhub
• Postmates 
• MagicPin 

While other competitors might be very small compared to Zomato, Swiggy can be considered a direct competitor.

Conclusion

As we wrap up our analysis of Zomato’s impressive digital marketing strategy, it’s clear that staying up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques is key to success in the digital marketing world.

Whether you’re a marketing professional or just starting out, be sure to check out our free digital marketing masterclass to gain a solid foundation in the essentials of digital marketing.

Who knows, you might just develop the next big marketing strategy like Zomato’s! Don’t forget to share your thoughts and comments on Zomato’s strategy in the comments below.