India’s first unicorn in food-delivery segment, Zomato recently launched a ‘Pure Veg Mode’ service for 100% vegetarian customers.

Sharing this wonderful initiative, Zomato chief executive Deepinder Goyal wrote on microblogging platform X: “Pure Veg Mode will consist of curation of restaurants that serve only pure vegetarian food and will exclude all restaurants which serve any non-veg food item.”

Starting an own venture is both exciting and challenging. For any new venture, irrespective of budget, strategic marketing plays a remarkable role. It needs creativity and proper thinking for an innovative as well as effective marketing strategy to get a good customer base.

Zomato (previously named Foodiebay), a startup founded in Delhi, was originally started as a food review website as Foodiebay.com. It had only the menus from famous restaurants nearby, which eventually turned into a leading food delivery service in India. The founders, Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, from the beginning, focussed on effective marketing strategies to attract customers. Over the years, zomato has mastered it in this quick commerce segment with strategic marketing.

In this article, we will discuss about effective strategies used by Zomato for becoming such a huge brand in India.

SEO marketing strategy of Zomato:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, truly has no alternatives in modern e-commerce or q-commerce. Nearly 54% of its traffic comes from online searches. Zomato targets more than 900K keywords only for their SEO purposes, which consequently gives an upper hand in SEO.

Names of the restaurants, recipes, locations, every keywords boost the SEO of Zomato. Even regularly used phrases such as “restaurants near me,” or “bars to dine in,” serve as useful keywords for them.

With nearly 1.5 million listed restaurants and high authority backlinks from more than 12.4 million domains, SEO strategy is simply outstanding for Zomato.

Social media marketing strategy of Zomato:

Zomato's premium customer base is people aged between 18 to 40. Mostly, they remain active on social media platforms too. Zomato has successfully mastered the meme marketing strategy on social media for a long time. From creating Ads with relevant topics from sports and entertainment, Zomato has successfully achieved attention of millennials.

Push notifications strategy:

Push notification is a unique marketing approach, focussed on sending personalized relevant messages to its users at the appropriate time. Based on data like location, preference, previous orders, push notifications are generated using humor or personalized emojis. This has been a game-changer for Zomato.

Email marketing strategy of Zomato

Although being a old marketing strategy, Zomato has revolutionized it with addition of humour. Zomato uses effective one-liners for the subjects. For example, Zomato sends email referring famous characters of any binge worthy shows or cricketers like Virat Kohli.

Visual advertising strategy of Zomato:

We often get excited looking at the large billboards in the road. Zomato has effectively used that strategy to promote their brand. Zomato has always come up with exciting, buzzworthy, and impressive ideas. These are funny and visually appealing, which counts into increased traffic.

Smart initiatives:

Apart from foos delivery, Zomato came up with some effective initiatives like Zomato Gold to provide more benefits to subscribed customers, HyperPure to provide high-quality, hygienic supplies to restaurants, and Zomato Pro with greater benefits to regular customers.

Nearly 58 million customers placed 647 million orders through Zomato in 2023, as per recently published data.

Zomato’s marketing strategy has successfully kept the traffic coming, thereby increasing sales. The brand, always aiming for agility and innovation, has eventually became the leading food delivery platform in the India.