Marketing Advice Needed Please

[Arehman99]

Hello All,

I needed some help on marketing please. I own a take away and our main source of sales is through our food delivery portals (Uber Eats, Just Eat etc) and they push the orders to us and they provide the delivery service as we have no drivers. As a result of this, we have no contact with the customer at all during any stage of the process - the delivery portals forward us the orders with only order info - nothing else.

I want to implement a marketing campaign to increase the number of sales and I will have to direct all sales through my food delivery portals mentioned above because they provide the delivery service.

My question is, how do I measure my return on investment on marketing when I will be driving traffic to the food delivery portals (not my own website)? How can I measure the effectiveness of the different media channels? I think I will be guessing and wasting money due to the setup. If I was directing to my own website (if I had one) then this problem wouldn’t exist as I would be able to monitor and measure everything. And the food delivery portals don’t provide any stats either. They will most likely take credit for the orders coming through.

This is something I have been stuck on for a very long time and needed some help with please. Thank you

 

[BusterBloodvessel]

What type of marketing campaign do you want to implement, and do you necessarily need to do it outside of the food platforms? If you use their marketing tools (sponsored listing, free delivery, discount etc) then they provide you analytics on that.

Do any of them offer to create a discount code? I don't think Uber does but perhaps the others do? That would allow you to advertise on your social media for example with "use discount code xyz" which you could then track.

 

[murraystephen]

Hey there! I understand your concern about measuring ROI for your marketing campaign when directing traffic to food delivery portals.

 

[HFE Signs]

Well the obvious answer is loads of banners everywhere Seriously though, you really need your own website where you can direct traffic and measure your own orders to separate out yours from Urber and Just Eat. There must be systems specifically designed for this that can handle walk in's too.

I remember a take away we used to use years back that was really efficient, you'd ring them to order and they would greet you by your name and ask if its the usual (obviously from caller id)

 

[Paul Carmen]

As @HFE Signs says, I'd suggest you're likely to be wasting your time/money here, unless you have your own site and generate incremental measurable business.

You don't want to direct traffic to Deliveroo/Uber Eats etc, as although they can go to your page, there's nothing to stop customers searching for something else, and as you cant measure the sale/conversions, you don't know what impact your marketing had.

The whole point of those type of sites is that they generate leads for you, as they put a big budget towards marketing and you're paying fees for their platform and its marketing/traffic.

You should be using the fee saving to get business, and hopefully generate incremental sales (potentially at a higher margin) via your own marketing.

You really need to get a transactional website setup and organise some sort of local delivery service yourself. This is relatively easy to do, as you can cap the number of orders you can take to manage demand initially, but obviously you'd need to factor those website and delivery costs into the project, as well as the marketing budget.

 

[fisicx]

And get your own delivery driver.

 

[murraystephen]

Hey there! I understand your concern about measuring ROI for your marketing campaign when directing traffic to food delivery portals.

It can definitely be a tricky situation, but there are still ways to track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

 

[Fagin2021]

It can definitely be a tricky situation, but there are still ways to track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

Then describe some.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

1 - create your own website that allows direct orders
2 - for every thrid part delivery, put a menu or voucher in with a (single use?) discount code if booked direct
3 - when someone used the discount code, you know where they have come from.

Never run your business 100% dependant on a third party.

 

[murraystephen]

Hey there! I understand your concern about measuring ROI for your marketing campaign when directing traffic to food delivery portals.

It can definitely be a tricky situation, but there are still ways to track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Have you considered setting up unique promo codes or special deals through the delivery portals?

 

[makeusvisible]

I suppose the first question I would have;

If you are planning to run your own marketing campaign, why are you concerned about measuring ROI against the third-party delivery platforms? If you are running your own campaigns, then you would be best placed to send those campaigns directly to your own website/ordering system.

If undertaking the above, measuring performance against spend becomes much easier. For example, you can setup goals within Google Analytics to track where the traffic came from, and how much revenue was generated. If driving traffic from META you can also setup tracking within the meta-advertising platform to be able to attribute spend against revenue.

Having run a campaign previously for a food delivery platform....my suggestion would be;

Setup a simple website containing an easy to use checkout. If you use Wordpress there's even a delivery driver plug-in which can automate the whole process.

Once your website is up and running, set up social media channels on FB, and Instagram.

Install facebook pixel on the website

For all your delivery platform orders, insert a flyer that contains a discount code to use on YOUR website.

Setup a Mailchimp integration with your website, and send a promotional email out every Friday to past customers. Also send a review invitation 24 hours after the order.

Setup Facebook ads to run every Friday and Saturday night to people who have visited the website.

Post about your food and promotions on a regular basis, and share those posts into local groups.

Selling good food isn't difficult.....so complement the above with good images, and start building good reviews via a Google My Business profile and you'll fly

 

[IanSuth]

I suppose you could have some special versions of meals people would only know about via an ad. Even just a name change "The Spring special" wouldn't stop people finding you through the delivery app and ordering it without seeing the ads but.....

But better would be a flyer in with every delivered order stating a discount for collection or a free collected x y or z after every 4th delivered meal.

Maybe print it on the box/napkin so the deliveroo rider cant ditch it or have a coupon as part of your box needing snipping out (although beware of those as a uni mate lived above a snappy tomato pizza who did that and he just snipped all the coupons from the boxes in his back garden and brought carrier bags of them to any party he was at so we could all order free pizza - they went bust)