The Biggest Ad Challenges in Food Delivery Today and How to Overcome Them

Food delivery has become a global market with meal delivery, flash grocery delivery and regular grocery delivery at your front door faster than ever. In response to the growing number of grocery shoppers going online, food retailers are seeking ways to connect with their customers on online platforms and promote delivery options. Even for established food delivery platforms, the large diversity of customers, regions and product availability makes it difficult to create locally relevant ads at scale.

With different campaign types that need to be localised and targeted per zipcode area ánd be super relevant per season, day of the week and area, marketers stand before many big challenges.

• Different campaign needs (per city) — Food delivery asks for many types of campaigns, from recruitment to local brand awareness and app download campaigns. For these different campaign needs, you need lots of different creatives that each have their own specific targeting in place. Imagine expanding into a new market where every city has different campaign needs because of the restaurants available, delivery radius and opening times...

• Localisation — With different customer demands and different product availability every minute of the day, food delivery asks for nation-wide campaigns that are extremely localised, down to the postal code. Especially when doing business in multiple markets, all with their own cities and local areas, this is a complex task.

• Campaign relevancy — For supermarkets, product relevance and prices can differ at city level. These different specs all have to be incorporated into the ads and targeted to the right customer. Meal delivery is even more complex because it includes other specs like availability, time of day and the weather, and ads differ on “postal code” or “range” level. 

Implement the following solutions to overcome these challenges

• Campaign concepts — Empower your local teams with a campaign library with ads that are ready to use. Local teams often miss the expertise or budget to create strong campaign concepts in line with the brand identity. Cape’s input validation functionalities ensure that local marketers can only change those elements in the campaign that are essential for the local touch, such as product, destination or the offer they want to promote. The in-tool authorization management allows the global brand team to check the local ads through the intuitive interface, so global ads can be adjusted to the local campaign needs and can go live in no time.

• Feed-based creation and ad ops — Use a feed-based setup with localised feed-data, which can be applied for even faster automated concept creation. Hence, local markets only have to check the assets for final approval before publication. Businesses can also automate tailored campaigns using feeds based on data, such as live demand data, discounts, and the price vs the competition. Ads can automatically change, push, and pause based on this data. This can be done for banner ads, but also video ads!

• Smarter campaigns — Incorporate real-time data into your ads, such as the weather, time of day or changing prices, as this lays the foundation for campaigns that are smarter, more relevant and effective. Add data sets and create alternative variations, different ads sets, or even automatically make changes to your campaign set up. Automatically pause a campaign when a product is locally out-of-stock, or promote the daily food deals per targeted area. Whatever your strategy, sure it leads to better allocated ad spend.

• Spreadsheet-based campaigning — If you have physical stores, specific catchment or service areas or if you simply operate in different countries, then it’s 100% certain that your marketing need is not the same for all locations. You can hyper localise your marketing setup with feeds, from creative production, to campaign management and even targeting. By determining feed commands that detect when a branch, product, or service needs a promotion boost, you can manage nation-or worldwide campaigns with local agility without touching a button. The ads will be specifically targeted to customers based on their proximity to the branch or interest in the product.

• Publication profiles — Fully automate your ad trafficking and campaign set up in any ad platform to power media buying. Cape templetizes your media buying process. Capture your campaign strategies in publication profiles that can be re-used and evaluated over time so you can easily publish to all channels.

What are you waiting for? Make your campaign set-up smarter and more effective!