In our recent blog, we mentioned how the on-demand convenience (ODC) industry has shown massive growth throughout the pandemic. Indeed, the overall market for online food ordering and delivery platforms is worth over £2.4 billion and is expected to grow by 47.4% in 2021. However, the market is crowded, with multiple entrants such as Weezy, Fancy, Gorillas, Getir, Dija, Zapp and Jiffy (to name a few). Their expansion is being driven by almost £10 billion worth of investment since 2020, with these businesses spending large budgets on digital and out-of-home (OOH) advertising. With that in mind, we look at how other forms of advertising such as a paid social strategy can add value to the growth of these brands.
Challenges
Unfortunately, despite the significant investment in OOH brand awareness remains to be relatively low for many of these brands compared to more established players such as Deliveroo – and customer retention is even lower. So how can these brands cut through the competition to increase (and retain) their market share? As mentioned in our previous post – paid social media can have a massive impact, with average daily usage at 2 hours and 25 minutes – a large amount of time for people to see and remember your ads.
There are a host of paid social platforms to choose from, but all brands should be considering reach when brand awareness is front of mind. Facebook and Instagram are therefore the most likely candidates, with a user penetration of 48.5 million Facebook users in the UK.
Opportunities
Generate brand lift
For any brand trying to increase awareness, a campaign optimized towards ad recall, reach or video views is vital. You need to be able to show your brand and unique selling points off as often as possible, as the more frequently you are given eyeballs the more likely people are to remember you. However, impressions aren’t enough to definitively say that you have increased brand awareness – brand lift studies are needed for accurate measurement. These studies measure the ‘lift’ in your ad recall by polling people who have and have not seen your ads, looking at the difference between the groups. If the test group (the one that sees your ads) have a higher recall of your brand or USP, then you can say that paid social strategy has improved your brand awareness.
Note: For awareness to occur, you must have the correct set-up from an audience and creative perspective, ensuring that they are following the best practices.
App Install Vanity
Even if you can get people to remember your brand, they must download your app to use your service. Many companies struggle at this stage as an app install can often be considered a ‘vanity metric’ i.e., it looks good but doesn’t mean anything. Even if a user downloads your app, that doesn’t mean that they are going to open it and take your desired actions. In the case of ODC’s – Orders.
Paid social marketers, therefore, need to make sure that they are optimizing towards their meaningful metrics. On top of this, ODCs should ensure that they are running effective retention campaigns to reengage lapsed users – preventing competitors from acquiring them in the process.
Moving Forward
From awareness to retention, paid social should be a key part of ODCs’ marketing mix, and to make sure they are getting the most out of their campaigns they should be following all best practices. Here at The PHA Group, we deliver campaigns with this best practice in mind, with the social team specialized in all aspects of creative delivery and app effectiveness.
If you’d be interested in discussing how we could help your brand, get in touch with us today.
