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 that Zomato’s Marketing Strategy played a major part in all this, especially its digital marketing strategy. This article analyses a few e-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.

Target Audience

Zomato’s target audience includes people between 18 to 35 years of age who have access to smartphones and are comfortable using apps. It targets two kinds of customers: The first group includes people who want to order their food at home and the second group includes people who prefer to dine out. In a lot of cases, these groups overlap. It offers food delivery to those who need it delivered as well as gives incentives to people to dine out through its Zomato Gold program.

Working professionals who need food in their offices, students who need food in their hostels, people who do not have time or space to cook for themselves, and people who occasionally like to eat outside food- all form a part of Zomato’s target audience.

Zomato Marketing Strategies

Search Engine Optimisation

Zomato has a has put in a lot of efforts in SEO.

As per Ubersuggest data, it ranks in India for 13,367,554 keywords as on February 2023. Its organic traffic is 136,916,532 users per month. These stats are really amazing.

How has it managed to do so well?

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.

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 12,708,567 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.

Social Media Marketing

Zomato is active on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. As of July 2019, it has 154k followers on Instagram, 1,899,405 followers, and 1.42 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 wouldn’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.

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.

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.