Zomato Case Study-DM

1. SAHIL KHANNA 013-III-331 CASE STUDY

2. INTRODUCTION Zomato initially named as Foodiebay was started in 2008 by Mr. Deepinder Goyal . It is a restaurant searching platform providing in-depth details with autonomous reviews and ratings. Foodiebay , the initial name was changed to Zomato in November 2010 to increase their reach among people . To differentiate themselves from their competitors, Zomato concentrated on adding approx. 18,000 new places to eat from. Along with they also decorated many special features, such as pointed to particular dishes or opening times ”. To be the largest resource in food supply market, Zomato bought urbanspoon , a leading restaurant service providing portal for $52 million to enter US, Canada and Australia to leverage local insights and experience and to expand their business in overseas seeing the future goal and objective.

3. Vision & Success Factor Vision “To expand to more 50 countries” Milestones: Number of listed restaurants: in 2008 it was 4000 restaurants which increase to 94000 in 2013 and currently 384,100 in Q1 of 2015. Monthly visitors of Zomato increases to 35 million in 2014 which was 11 million in 2013 and 0.015 million in 2008. Yearly revenue of Zomato in 2008 was 0.06 crores which increased to 11.3 crores in 2013. Spread in 21 countries worldwide. Success Factor: First mover advantage Strong content platform Efficient employees Good rating mechanism and social platform Funding from experienced source

4. Social media Strategy Zomato uses different platforms to engage their customers with them, Such as F acebook & Twitter

5. Success Story The key factor for Zomato success is its marketing strategy and in-depth knowledge of their competitors. Zomato aims to be a place where the foodies hangout. The company has spread in 20 countries with its headquarter in New Delhi, India providing service to over 35 million values customers per month. The list of registered restaurants on the website has increased to 384,100 till March 2015 . Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are the 3 main platforms which made the base for the success of Zomato with a deep presence among their customers. Other than that, Zomato has extensively invested a lot over SMO’s, SEO’s and has worked a lot to improve its UI and make it more user interactive. Side by side with a goal to branch globally, they also invest much on TV ads to bombinate Zomato . Pankaj Chaddah , the co-founder of Zomato agreed, “ads on the mobile app have changed the revenue game for them”. More than 50% of their total traffic comes from their mobile apps. “Using location-based services to target ads around a consumer’s physical location helps make this decision easier” said Chaddah Sanjeev Bikchandani , co-founder of Info Edge and Zomato’s largest shareholder said, “the firm will focus on segments such as online food ordering, restaurant booking, subscription-based services and billing inside of restaurants”.

6. Approach towards social media Social media has been a conversation medium for us with existing and potential customers. We have tried our best to consistently stick to the following simple principles : Always be there for your customer:  Our users encourage us, criticize us, suggest ways for us to improve our products, ask for our help to find the best places to eat around them and we’ve always made it a point to listen and react to what they have to say as quickly as possible. This stikes a chord with them. We have been able to this consistently by our keeping social media in-house . Stick to your domain:  Our focus has always been around food & nightlife and we extend that to social media as well. Our posts are related to food & nightlife, our product launches, and updates on Zomato. We do not advertise our clients through twitter . Content is king:  We do not believe in spamming the timeline, which is why you will see that we limit our updates to when necessary . Be yourself, Be original:   We enjoy having fun conversations with our users on social media and it always feels like we are talking to our friends and this has worked best for us .

7. K eep track of your competitors and their social media activities “It is always important to know what other brands in the same space are doing since there is a strong overlap in target audience. However, that does not mean that we have to replicate what’s working for them or avoid what’s not working for them blindly. Each brand is unique and so should be its social media strategy .”

8. How is Zomato’s Facebook strategy different from strategy for Twitter ? Because  Twitter  allows for real-time conversation, it is used on a daily basis to respond to queries from people asking for recommendations. We also periodically run contests on Twitter, Foodie Friday being one that has taken off and seen a great response. The Yummy Yatra happened recently and was covered live almost entirely on Twitter. Twitter is less about updates, more about conversation/engagement. Facebook is a little static in comparison, and is more a platform for updates from Zomato . For example, our new TV commercial, posts fresh off our official blog, or photo albums from events conducted by zomato .

9. Given that zomato have such a wide range of users and followers on our social platforms, it’s impossible to stick to keeping any one group happy. So we keep experimenting with what we do, and almost always get a great response out of it. For example, a fun picture we created and posted to Facebook about 6 months back – India according to a Delhi foodie – became a hit, was shared by thousands and is being circulated on social media even today. Content Is KING Contests like # FoodieFriday have also seen a great response and we’ve had a few people telling us how they take time off work to participate on a Friday afternoon. We believe in keeping things simple and always bring in a fun element, which instantly grabs a user’s attention and keeps people engaged

10. Tools use to manage Twitter community Zomato use a couple of third party tools to manage our Twitter account. Below are our views on the same: Tweetdeck (now owned by Twitter) has been a very effective tool to manage interactions with the community and keep a track of what’s happening in the domain we are in. It has a neat layout which arranges different things you want to track (could be a hashtag, mentions, specific accounts etc.) and that enables you to organize feeds better and respond quickly . Zomato are experimenting with Sproutsocial as well. From what we have experienced it has been great tool when you have a team working on the same social media account. You can email queries on Twitter directly from the interface to the person you want it answered from, can assign follow-up tasks easily and also monitor the performance on social media through several metrics that Sproutsocial tracks.

11. G oal behind starting a blog and bringing traffic to it We started our blog with the aim of sharing what we’ve learnt over time as a start-up and we put forth our thoughts on the most pressing issues start-ups face ranging from product development, hiring, training & firing, sales, marketing etc. We promote our blog posts via social media and also showcase the latest post on our homepage which drives traffic to the blog. It has been great to see the response we’ve received so far for almost every post. Some of our posts have also been covered by popular blogs in the Indian startup/tech space . Apart from google analytics data and Facebook open graph insights, we also track user behaviour internally to see if our campaigns are effective. Tracking user actions on the website also helps us constantly improve our product to better cater to the audience. Monitoring the activities of visitors coming to your website/blog

12. Effectiveness of facebook Ads and Twitter Promotions We’ve used Facebook ads very selectively in the past – for example during our New Year’s Eve campaign last December, where we advertised across platforms. We saw great returns on it, but at the end of the day, we strongly believe social networks are a means of communication for us, and not an advertising platform. Social media as a channel for marketing Social media has played a very important role in building a growing community of foodies and brand advocates for Zomato . This community engages with us constantly and helps us improve our products to make the search for the perfect place to eat simpler for everyone.

13. Calculating the ROI of social media activities Social media is about the relationships we build and foster for the long term. Communicating with fans and followers makes a brand personable and human, and one can’t really put a price on that . How are other divisions of Zomato (HR, Admin, Sales, Technical etc ) integrated with social media team ? Inhouse social media team works very closely with the heads of the various departments to answer any specific questions, might be asked on social platforms.

14. Thank You