The pandemic has greatly changed our shopping habits. During this time, food delivery apps quickly became one of the most in-demand types of applications. As a result, their mobile marketing strategies also became crowd-pulling.
It also helps that they’re not only providing a real shopping experience but also quick delivery as well. The convenience of ordering food from the comfort of our house is definitely a great selling point.
But here is the thing to remember, increasing demand also resulted in increased competition. Today there are dozens of grocery apps to choose from. While the market is this lively, reaching the right audience is key to success. Hence, we are witnessing different mobile marketing and user acquisition strategies to capture as many users as possible.
As you might have noticed, many of these apps are engaging in paid mobile marketing, in a rather aggressive manner (and not only on mobile devices).
Mobile Marketing Strategies of Top Delivery Apps
Through our Ad Intelligence tool, let’s check out the mobile marketing strategies of some of the top delivery apps.
When we check out the top advertising apps that organically rank for the keyword ‘Grocery’, Glovo, Rappi, and Getir are some of the apps which are listed at the top.
We can start by checking the visibility map in order to better understand these apps’ presence in the App Store.
Getir is outranking Rappi and Glovo in Europe while Rappi is dominant in LATAM and Glovo is ranking first among the rest.
You can see below that both Getir and Glovo adapt their product pages to the region they are operating in. With delivery apps, it is especially important to reach users in their native language. This way, you will avoid losing potential customers just because of a language barrier.
Organic and paid growth goes hand in hand.
Just as your product page, your mobile ad creatives should be translated to reach as many people as possible. When combined with a localized product page, you can provide a seamless acquisition experience to customers, which will reduce your costs while increasing conversion rates. When Custom Product Pages are live, these capabilities will be even more advanced in the App Store.
Above, you can see Rappi and Getir’s language distribution for mobile ad creatives. Just as in the case of Toon Blast, localized ad creatives also seem to be in the center of the mobile marketing for grocery apps.
Creative Analysis for Grocery Apps
Now let’s take a look at the mobile ad creatives of some of these grocery apps.
Starting with Getir’s advertisements, we see backgrounds dedicated to the countries they are advertising in.
For France, we can see the Eiffel Tower background while for the Netherlands we can see classic Dutch Buildings. This is definitely an effective way to connect with your audience on a more personal level.
Glovo also uses some videos that have a cartoon-like style.
Even though video creatives are cool, they are not the most used creative format. For most grocery apps, we can see a similar distribution of creatives: Images and HTML formats are used most while the rest 20% to 25% are video creatives.
Getir’s Creative Format Distribution
One popular ad creative format seems to be placing an iPhone with the app’s interface in the middle, combined with a catchy headline. In the case of Rappi, we can see that they are experimenting with various background colors. This is a great demonstration of the capabilities that iOS 15 will bring.
If the blue background creative attracts a user and convinces them to click on the ad, with Custom Product Pages you can adjust your screenshots to similar colors in order to provide a more consistent acquisition journey, increasing the likelihood that they will download your app.
DoorDash also seems to be using this creative format.
However, instead of the background color, we can see that they are using different zoom levels on their imagery on the variants of their creatives.
As we always discuss, understanding the competition is the key. Creative trends constantly change in the advertising ecosystem, that is why you should make sure to stay on top of things and keep in touch. You can simply subscribe to your competitors and get notified whenever they release a new mobile ad creative with our Ad Intelligence tool.
Using Apple Search Ads to Hack Growth
Unless a user is searching for a specific competitor, it is crucial to appear at the top of the search results. For a second, imagine that you are hungry, and looking for a grocery app. Most likely you will check out the first 2 or 3 apps and download the one you prefer. However, grocery is a very popular keyword.
With a search score of 41 and more than 8,000 keywords ranking organically in the U.S, climbing the ladder will take serious App Store Optimization efforts.
This is exactly where Apple Search Ads comes in. Even if you don’t rank at the top organically, you can increase your visibility and brand presence through well-structured Search Ads campaigns.
As you can see, JOKR and Weee! are the grocery apps that rank 27th and 32nd organically for the keyword ‘grocery’. However, through Apple Search Ads, they are able to gain a serious chunk of the impressions for the keyword.
Speaking of brand presence, Competitor Campaigns are an excellent way to spread your name in the App Store. Especially if your competitor is not running Apple Search Ads, you can take your share of impressions from their brand name by appearing above their app in the search results.
DoorDash is one of the grocery apps that take advantage of Apple Search Ads. They bid on more than 6,000 keywords in the U.S and have significant visibility in both organic and paid aspects. We can see that they are actively bidding on the keywords of their competitors.
Consider the Chipotle keyword. It is very popular with a search score of 70, and the actual Chipotle app is organically ranking first. But, using Apple Search Ads, DoorDash is able to get nearly 60% of the paid impressions from this keyword.
Final Thoughts
All in all, as it allows you to skip the organic line and empower your brand name through increased visibility, Apple Search Ads seems to be a major mobile user acquisition channel for grocery apps.
In order to build and maintain profitable user acquisition campaigns, it is essential to keep up with market trends and to keep an eye on your competitors. Sign up for free today and enhance your creative advertising strategy by analyzing more than 34 million mobile ad creatives!
