“The first rule of entrepreneurship is that there is no rule,” says Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Zomato. If you substitute ‘entrepreneurship’ with ‘digital marketing’ and repeat the saying, it still stands true for Zomato’s digital marketing strategies.
Every digital marketer today admires how Zomato comes up with new ways to capture their audience. Looking into their digital marketing strategies can help budding marketers find inspiration and ideate killer marketing strategies.
This blog will cover the strategy Zomato used to win their audience’s hearts and become the most-loved and used food delivery, dining, and restaurant discovery service.
What is the History of Zomato?
The history of Zomato can be dated back to 2008 – when Deepindar Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah first started it. It was initially called Foodie Bay and then re-named to what we all know, Zomato in 2010. When the company first launched, its purpose was to be a platform that provided people with information about restaurants, their menu, their prices, reviews and other details.
Zomato reported a 48% YoY growth in its GOV for B2C business, going from Rs 32,308 crore in FY23 to Rs 47,918 crore in FY24. It has over 440K restaurants in its database across 24 counties. One of the many reasons for this aggravated growth is Zomato’s digital marketing strategies. Zomato spends a huge Rs 1326.6 cr alone on advertising and sales. They’ve undoubtedly seen their money (and unparalleled creative efforts) pay off!
Get to know more about Zomato’s Founder – Indian Entrepreneur
Why Should Marketers Study Zomato’s Digital Marketing Strategies:
Zomato’s digital marketing strategies are smart, creative, and relevant. Be it SEO, content marketing, or social media, there’s something to learn from each of their strategies. There are many takeaways from Zomato’s journey of establishing itself as the first food tech unicorn in India. Here are some of the learnings that marketers can implement for their own strategy:
1. Keeping it Simple and Sweet
Zomato uses simple, sweet, and smart strategies to attract its audience and clearly communicate its message. Humour, too, is a highly effective tool for engaging the audience and ensuring that they remember you.
2. Use of Bright Colours
You’ll find something common in all of Zomato’s ads, billboards, and posts – they use bright, popular and attractive colours that get noticed and entice people to read what’s written on them. Doing this also helps them stand apart from the crowd.
3. Establishing a Brand Identity
Zomato portrays a common and consistent identity across all platforms and marketing strategies. This helps in recall and makes them identifiable by people just by the colours and font they use. Creating a brand identity plays a huge role in ensuring that people recognise you and remember your brand despite the rising competition.
4. Value Addition
Every post, story, or piece of content that goes up by ZOmato adds value to the one reading it. Looking closely at their content can make one realise the amount of effort and thought behind each of them.
5. Community Building
Nobody, if not Zomato, can show you how to build a consistent and ever-growing loyal community. Community building is the core of Zomato’s digital marketing strategies. Even if you’re a silent spectator on Instagram, you may be attracted to follow Zomato and comment on each of their posts.
Their new strategy of giving exclusive coupons to their “close friends” list not only rewards those who interact with them religiously but also urges more people to like, comment on, and share their posts. It’s a brilliant way to ask for something without even asking for it.
With this, let’s now discuss the different marketing strategies Zomato employs to retain its #1 position in the food tech industry.
What are Zomato’s digital marketing strategies?
Zomato’s digital marketing strategies depend on continuous innovation and agility. They have created a name for themselves through digital marketing despite being a part of a competitive industry. Here is a breakdown of Zomato’s digital marketing strategies on different platforms:
1. Zomato’s social media marketing strategies
Zomato’s social media marketing revolves around consumers – what they enjoy, what will make them happy, and, obviously, how to get them hungry. Zomato primarily engages on four social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), and YouTube.
Let’s compare how famous they are on each of these platforms and then look at each of them individually.
| Platform | Followers/Subscribers | Engagement rate |
| 1M | 4.30% | |
| 19L | 0.03% | |
| X (Twitter) | 1.5M | 0.19% |
| YouTube | 558K | 63.36% |
Zomato revealed the secret formula behind their successful social media marketing. In an interview. You can follow this mantra and customize it for your own business:
- 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
Zomato’s Instagram marketing strategies is considered a scale of measurement to check how well you’re doing or how you can improve. Many factors make Zomato’s Instagram marketing strategy a success—it all starts with their bio.
If we had to define Zomato’s bios in one word, we’d say they’re quirky. From the previous bio that said, “Meme page…occasionally posting brand posts due to business team pressure, ” to the one now that says, “We got a lot of snacks, but nothing beats the one reading this.” In either case, they sure do leave a smile on your face. Hence, as displayed, their Instagram marketing starts right from the bio.
Moving on to posts, Zomato targets and prioritises engagement. Their engagement posts generally urge their audience to comment on their posts in exchange for free dinners or coupons. Hence, the audience is encouraged to comment on their post and get a chance for a free lavish dinner (and maybe even show off their creativity).
Both of the above-shown posts received over 5000-7000 comments, compared to the regular 700-1000 comments. Hence, a great lesson from Zomato is to just ask your audience to comment; they will!
They’ve compelled their audience to engage with them so much that even if they ask them not to.
..they end up doing it! This particular post had over 44.5k likes! If that’s not a killer way to get engagement, what is?
Another trend widely observed in Zomato’s profile is meme marketing. Zomato leaves no opportunity to inculcate the use of trending memes into their posts and factor in the concept of relatability. As digital marketers, meme marketing and moment marketing are two very helpful strategies that help you push your business to the top.
What is Zomato’s Instagram Engagement Rate?
Zomato’s Instagram marketing engagement rate is 4.30%. It achieved this engagement rate via the various Instagram marketing tactics it employs. Their account is always active, posting contests, giveaways, and regular engagement posts.
Zomato’s Facebook Marketing Strategies
Zomato’s Facebook marketing strategies align with Instagram’s but still have some differentiating components. Humour and relatability tingle around Zomato’s Facebook posts, which helps them connect with their Facebook audience.
From funny and cute posts…
…to heart-warming ones, Zomato covers it all.
However, one thing that is hard to miss is the comment section on Zomato’s Facebook account. Most comments are filled with complaints regarding Zomato’s service, to which Zomato makes it a point to reply.
There are MANY comments on each post with people complaining about their service. On the other hand, Zomato’s Instagram comments are mostly people supporting Zomato and enjoying their content. Hence, understanding the difference in audiences on each of these platforms is an important factor to consider.
What is Zomato’s Facebook engagement rate?
Zomato’s Facebook engagement rate is 0.03%, which is considerably lower compared to their Instagram engagement rate, which is 4.30%.
Zomato’s Twitter Marketing Strategies:
Zomato’s Twitter account keeps communication at the forefront and uses a tone that is engaging, and unconventional and makes them stand out in more ways than one. It is quite apparent that their major focus is to interact with their million followers.
What is Zomato’s Twitter engagement rate?
Zomato’s Twitter engagement rate is a good 0.19%. They receive an average of 2,928 likes and 309 retweets on their posts.
Zomato’s YouTube Marketing Strategies
Zomato’s Youtube marketing strategy includes posting fun videos featuring popular influencers and/or celebrities. Just 25 episodes in, Zomato has also launched “Humans of Zomato” on their YouTube channel.
What is Zomato’s YouTube engagement rate?
Zomato’s YouTube engagement rate is 63.36%. This is the platform on that they received the highest engagement. It is apparent that people are enjoying watching Zomato’s YouTube content.
One thing to notice here is that there are no cross-promotions between any of these social media channels. Except for Twitter and Instagram, the content on each platform functions individually.
2. Zomato’s SEO Strategy
Zomato’s SEO strategy is fruitful to the maximum and gets about 99.44% traffic from organic sources. Receiving the maximum amount of traffic organically requires a strong SEO strategy, one that Zomato adopts rather graciously. Zomato is ranked #2,621 globally, #275 in the nation, and #1 in the food and drink category.
Keywords
Zomato gets its organic traffic and dominates a position in the search results by targeting over 900K keywords. Most of the keywords include names of restaurants, dishes, and more search terms like “restaurants near me,” and “order food online.”
The top 3 most used keywords by Zomato are “bars near me,” “fast food near me,” and “bakery near me.” Source: SEMrush
Zomato uses its directory with information about all the restaurants and foods people eat the most to then target these keywords and boost their organic traffic.
Restaurant Pages on Zomato’s Website
Zomato’s website has over 54 million pages since it allows restaurants to develop and manage their data.
Furthermore, the large number of pages aids in the website’s SEO. Many website pages are vital in achieving high search engine rankings.
URL Linking and Internal Linking
Zomato includes keywords in their URLs, boosting their visibility and increasing search engine visibility. Through the use of internal linking, Zomato constantly increases its domain authority. They have backlinks from over 12,274,172 domains; the majority of them are from high authority domains like .gov and .edu. Overall, this strengthens their SEO strategies.
Zomato’s Most-Loved Digital Marketing Strategies
While most of Zomato’s digital marketing strategies have been well received and have been a success, some are etched in our memory. These campaigns can inspire marketers and are a testament to what kind of campaigns do well in the food and drink industry.
1. Zomatoloot (Zomato’s Youtube Ads Suck)
Does this ring a bell? Zomato faced a backlash to their YouTube video in 2020 and used the occasion to commemorate one of the most significant marketing moments in history.
They introduced a contest called #zomatoloot, in which they invited users to design a Zomato ad, with the winning ad receiving INR 25 lakhs. This content drew a large number of entries and proved to be a tremendous hit for Zomato! In this approach, Zomato was able to avoid a crisis and use user-generated content to increase engagement!
2. Zomato Premier League
Far away from the betting world, the ZPL is a fun way to vouch for your favourite team and win discounts if they win. This campaign, in many ways, got more traffic to Zomato and urged people to order from them rather than their competitors. They “gamified” the brand and got more and more people talking about them.
3. Zomato Gold Membership
Zomato Gold is a premium loyalty club for Zomato members, who can sign up for it with a monthly subscription and receive enticing discounts and complimentary food.
This strategy proved to be incredibly profitable for Zomato’s clients. Zomato Gold has accounted for 12% of the brand’s earnings while causing various issues among restaurant partners and creating a lot of negative feelings. As of 2024, Zomato Gold was accessible in 1000 cities across 24 countries.
4. Upcoming Zomato Instant Campaign
Zomato has now introduced the “Zomato Instant” concept, where it promises to deliver food in under 10 minutes. Initially, this raised concern for the safety of delivery men who may fall prey to road accidents to deliver quickly. However, Mr.Deepinder Goyal, Zomato’s CEO, posted an explanation of how the system would work.
Only time will tell how this will work out for Zomato. What do you think of this strategy? Let us know in the comments below!
Conclusion
This was the journey of Zomato (till September 2024) and the strategies through which they rose to the top. Zomato’s omnipresence on most platforms has been one of their strongest points. Everywhere you go, there will be Zomato!
If you, too, want to craft such digital marketing strategies for your brand, we have some good news for you!
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Learnings from Other Brands
Nike’s marketing strategy is centred on collaborating with athletes and sports personalities, similar to Spotify’s approach to collaborating with artists.
Additionally, Firstcry marketing emphasizes more on influencer marketing initiatives, collaborating with popular mommy bloggers and influencers to showcase products and reach a wider audience.
Similarly, Reliance Jio’s marketing strategy leverages data-driven insights and personalized recommendations, showcasing how technology and user data can drive brand loyalty and market leadership.
Thanks for Reading!!
