Swiggy
Swiggy is an on-demand meal delivery service that delivers food from local eateries to clients’ doorsteps.
Swiggy was started in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy, and Rahul Jaiminiin in 2014.
Zomato
Zomato is an Indian multinational restaurant aggregator and food delivery company.
Zomato was founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008.
The main difference between the two is that Swiggy is a private company while Zomato is a publicly-traded company.
Market Share
The global online meal delivery market, which is expected to be worth around USD 113 billion by 2020, is one of the few that is growing at a double-digit compounded annual growth rate (CAGR).
The online food delivery market in India alone was estimated to be worth USD 4.66 billion in 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in the country, attracting significant investment.
In the Indian food delivery market, both Zomato and Swiggy are significant players and have been struggling to acquire a majority market share against each other and other smaller competitors.
Since 2019, Zomato has been able to hold a wider lead over Swiggy in terms of revenues until the lockdown in April 2020 due to the coronavirus spread.
It was not until the end of May 2021 that Swiggy’s sales caught up with Zomato’s, and the two competitors became more on par.
In terms of average monthly spending among the two, it was seen that users on Swiggy would spend more per transaction than on Zomato. Pre-lockdown, the average order value for Swiggy would be between INR 220–250 (USD 3–5), while now it has reached an average order value of INR 300–350 (USD 4–5).
As the frequency of dining out has decreased, it appears that the epidemic has aided Zomato and Swiggy in improving their user economics and attracting new customers.
Before the commencement of COVID-19, Zomato had always been in the lead. However, according to recent data, when the first lockdown occurred, Zomato saw a significant decline in users and more than 95% of restaurants shut down their operations.
In January 2020, Zomato purchased UberEats, and there may have been some transfer of customers, but only partially (we suspect some users may have switched to Swiggy). We saw that after the lockdown ended in May 2021, online deliveries increased as eateries reopened, and the number of people dining out decreased.
The chart below explains the % of customers using leading players in the market, Swiggy, tomato, and Uber Eats (which was acquired by Zomato) from 2019 to 2021.
Courtesy- krasia.com.
Who does it better?
Overall Ratings
As of April 2021, Swiggy has an overall rating of 4.3 stars while Zomato has an overall rating of 4.2 stars on the Google Play Store.
Delivery Speeds
According to our survey, Swiggy delivers food faster, the expected delivery time on the app is more accurate, and food is delivered at the given time. Unless due to bad weather, Swiggy will not let you down.
While Zomato does have a few problems with its delivery, like inaccurate delivery times being shown on the app and sometimes there are issues with understanding the location of the delivery guy on the map. Zomato also won’t let you down and will be a little late at worst.
In any case, Swiggy normally wins the delivery department.
Marketing Strategy
Zomato puts an enormous effort into making its content and advertisements SEO-appropriate. It makes sure it has the highest traffic on its website, which is highly productive. Zomato takes keywords and builds its URL out of them.
Zomato makes use of funny, trendy, and current topics to engage its audience because they know its audience well. Zomato’s only objective is to tap into all their possible customers, so they use all the digital marketing tools possible.
Zomato targets the following things online through its Google advertising.
- Target searches like online food, online food order, etc., to acquire new customers.
- Targets branded searches and keywords like Zomato order and Zomato online etc.
- Zomato targets specific popular restaurants like Haldiram’s Noida Sector 63, which is a popular eatery.
Zomato also targets generic food searches like mutton biryani, pizza, etc.
SEO STRATEGY-ZOMATO
Zomato uses an SEO strategy to make its website Google-friendly and consequently rank higher in search engines.
Zomato has listed all the restaurants in India by ranking them. Zomato is like an e-commerce website for restaurants where owners can keep updating their pages and Zomato employees keep updating information regarding the restaurants too. This creates an incredible experience for food lovers.
Zomato has registered 6,500+ restaurants on its website and has 54 million pages on the website too with information like menus, ratings, reviews, etc. The more pages a website has, the more likely it is to rank at the top.
Internal linking- Zomato uses internal linking on its website effectively. Most of Zomato’s organic traffic comes from keywords like restaurants near me or cafes near me. To do this, their SEO team has created an awesome internal linking structure, where if anyone clicks on the restaurants near me button on their website, it automatically detects their location and shows them their restaurants near me page.
Zomato’s strategy is extremely effective as it gets over 24 million website visitors monthly, which is more than Swiggy. Moreover, 83% of this traffic is non-branded, which means it does not search for the word “Zomato.”
Thus, Zomato acquires many new customers and builds brand awareness with its SEO and Google-friendly strategies.
Marketing strategy- Swiggy
Swiggy’s main marketing strategy is to capitalize on people’s hunger and desire. Its social media platforms will have mouth-watering food pictures and will make you wish to order something to eat.
Swiggy’s goal is simple, people want tasty food, and Swiggy will deliver in no time.
Swiggy uses demographic and psychographic segmentation to divide its markets into segments and tailor-make its ads and campaigns for each of the segments. Their main target is the younger generation, mainly teenagers, who find it difficult to find their favorite cuisines and eateries near them.
Another segment that Swiggy heavily targets are college-going individuals and working individuals who either don’t have the time to go to their favorite eatery or simply want the convenience of having food delivered to their doorsteps.
Swiggy targets audiences that are savvy on social media, and online, and also believe it is easier to stay home and order. They are studying? Working and living mostly in well-populated cities.
Swiggy has created the image that it makes life convenient for the customer and also helps the partner’s business remain profitable in their locality.
Social Media Campaigns
What sets Swiggy apart from its competitors is its remarkable social media marketing strategies. In the past, it has come up with brilliant campaigns like #eatyourveggies, #earnyourcheatmeal, and #superswiggy, where they convey the notion of healthy eating humorously by using puns and witty one-liners.
When they are not running campaigns, they use enticing food images on Instagram. Their purpose is to make people crave good food. If people want delicious food, they will look at Swiggy to deliver it to them.
SEO STRATEGY- SWIGGY (courtesy-IIDE)
Swiggy has worked hard on its search engine optimization.
As you can see from the SEO audit report from Woorank, the home page of Swiggy’s website has an appropriate meta title which includes their main keywords like ‘food’, ‘online’, ‘food delivery’, ‘order’, and restaurants near you.
Their backlink score is good too, with a great mix of inbound and outbound links. Also, they have no broken links on their website.
They also redirect their traffic from non-preferred domains to their preferred domain.
They have an up-to-date sitemap, which helps search engines figure out the layout of the site.
Considering all these points, we can see that Swiggy has made a lot of efforts to ensure that its web pages are search engine friendly. When the search engines are hungry (pun intended) for information about the domain, they are sure to get their fill.
In conclusion, Swiggy and Zomato serve the same food, have the same business proposition, and sell the same product. Both of them are also vastly different in their marketing, target audience, strengths, and weaknesses.
Another major difference is that Swiggy is privately owned while Zomato is a publicly-traded company. They have their differences but are both brands that have and will continue to inspire Indians to startup and aim to become “the next unicorn”.
