Grofers – A Digital Marketing Strategy by Aishwarya Jain

Before the clutter of online grocery store websites that exist today came about, there was Grofers. Being the pioneer in the industry of online grocery shopping, it has become synonymous with the act of buying groceries through a tap on your smartphone or a click on your laptop. But how did Grofers come to be? And how can it become even bigger and swallow up its competition? Well, we have one of our IIDE‘s student, Aishwarya Jain, to answer those questions for you. Lets check out their Grofers Digital Marketing Strategy!

About Grofers

Started in Gurugram in December 2013, it’s barely been a few years since the conception of Grofers. Its co-founders, Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa, got the idea for the business when they realised how horribly inconvenient it is to shop for groceries nowadays—to actually look for a parking spot, to look around for items from a shopping list, to stand in line in order to pay for said items, to lug them back to the car, and drive back after that—it just seemed like too much wasted energy, time, and effort, especially in the age of Amazon and Flipkart. If practically anything else could be delivered to your doorstep, then why not the most basic of items— groceries?

Through public funding, the two began operations in a shared working space and have now grown to the point where they are operational in 17 cities. They are an online grocery store that warehouses goods and lists them on their user-friendly website. Their customers place their orders online and Grofers ships and delivers the products to their house directly. What’s unique about Grofers is that they allow customers to place minimum price orders as well as do some big budget grocery shopping. It’s just like visiting your corner store—except online!

Competition

Grofer’s main competitors are BigBasket and Zopnow. Both BigBasket and Zopnow were founded in 2011, but Grofers was more recent, being founded in 2013. Both of Grofer’s competitors are hyperlocal online markets whereas BigBasket keeps an inventory as well. BigBasket has a presence 26 cities, whereas Grofers delivers to 25 cities, and Zopnow is restricted to only 9 cities.

On Facebook, BigBasket has the maximum amount of likes, whereas Grofers has 128k likes and Zopnow has 30k likes. BigBasket also has the best engagement rate, of 7%. On Instagram, again, BigBasket beats out its competitors by boasting of 1k followers more than Grofers. Zopnow has only 250 followers . BigBasket also has the highest engagement rate on this platform. When talking about Twitter, however, Grofers beats BigBasket by attracting 25k followers. Zopnow has 3k followers.

BigBasket runs social media campaigns like #OfficeSnacking, #TriviaTuesday and #BBFilmyHoli. Zopnow has campaigns like #ZopHealth, #WeeklyDIY and #ZopChefs.

On the basis of the above data, it is clear that at the moment, BigBasket has the upper hand in the digital sphere. However, Grofers isn’t close behind.

Target Audience

Grofer’s target audience is mainly between the ages of 18 and 35. They target the working class living in metropolitan areas that they aren’t originally from, college students looking for discounts, and homemakers with young children or infants.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation refers to the usage of particular keywords in order to ensure the maximum amount of traffic on a brand’s website. These keywords are those that have the highest search rates on Google from their target customers. If a website is able to optimise itself based on the search engine’s keywords, then it is certain that they will be able to reach the maximum amount of relevant people.

Some of the most popular keywords for Grofer’s are grofers online grocery, local grocery delivery, grofers grocery online, grocery website, online grocery and vegatble shopping and online grocery shopping grofers. This means that whenever someone searches for these terms online, Grofers’ results are the first that pop up.

Often, brands bid on certain search terms to ensure that when users search these particular terms on the internet, the particular brand’s page pops up as one of the first results. This may be useful for Grofers in reference to other words that it could really capitalise on if they were able to be one of the top results.

Some of the suggested bid words for Grofers are best online grocery store, online provision store, online vegetable store, fruits and vegetables online market, organic food delivery, online supermarket in Mumbai and supermarket near me. This ensures that when someone searches for the said terms online, they are bound to encounter Grofer’s website as one of the first results. This makes the website more accessible to people looking for groceries online, which is ultimately the group of people Grofers wants most to reach out to. Developing an SEO Strategy has surely benefited Grofers Digital Marketing Strategy!

Social Media Marketing

One of the key factors towards the success of any business these days, especially those in the e-commerce industry, is of course social media. And after 5 years in the industry, Grofers has certainly learned this.

Since Facebook is Grofer’s main social media platform, it is where they have their highest engagement rate. They could post about having no time for grocery shopping by putting up GIFs of clocks, videos of online shopping versus traditional grocery shopping, ask their followers to share pictures of their interpretations of fruit salads, and even ask them to make their own dish using certain ingredients like coconut, bread, and cream.

At the same time, on their Instagram page, Grofers could post about #GrofersSeMangao, a campaign in which they encourage people to order from Grofers rather than actually buy the product. For example, a creative that says, Mom: Can you grind this wheat please? Me: Mom, please mujhe mehnat mat karwao, Grofers she mangao. This would greatly boost Grofers Digital Marketing Strategy!

Blog Ideas

Another way to engage your customers and ensure that they stay on your brand’s website for a longer duration of time is to provide them with interesting blogs to browse through.

An example of articles that Grofers could post on their blog could be This will be the month of corn, Cheese won’t make you fat—learn the Italian way, Corn in a burger! We’ll tell you how—the American way, 3 Step recipe—Indian recipe. Such articles are extremely entertaining and captivate the reader’s attention, and, at the same time, subtly encourage the reader to subscribe to Grofers. In this case, the readers might want to purchase a certain product from Grofers, like corn, only because Grofers is advertising so many diverse ways to prepare it!

Email Marketing

An email marketing system that strategically targets Grofer’s prime customers is the need of the hour. Our student has come up with a strategy he feels would be of benefit. She has devised an email marketing system that includes:

Welcome

Win tickets to Sachin 200. Buy Grofers this weekend.

Promotional mail

Sneha, did you get your offer yet?

Discount mail

100% cashback on your first order!

Upsell mail

This is so cool, isn’t it?

Contact mail

We called you, you didn’t visit!

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing refers to collaborating with social media influencers to promote your brand. As influencers have a large following on social media, they are an excellent method of reaching your target audience and maximising your brand’s reach.

Grofers could conduct influencer campaigns in which it approaches influencers to blog about Grofer’s products, and post about it on social media. Since Grofer’s target audience is in metropolitan areas, this works exceptionally well. For example, FilterCopy, with a large YouTube fan following, Being Momma to talk about parenting, Beer Biceps to talk about the organic food category and Sanjeev Kapoor to generally talk about food recipes.

Online Reputation Management

A few online platforms that could be of use to Grofer’s online reputation management (ORM) could be Instructables, Quora, Blurt It, Answerbag.com and Yahoo Answers. These platforms help the customers share their reviews of Grofer’s services and therefore spread the word!

Platforms like Quora and Yahoo Answers often includes questions like ‘Would you buy your fruits and vegetables online?’ and other similar queries. It has to be made sure that Grofer’s is included in answers to all of these questions on said platforms! This increases the likelihood that, when someone searches something relevant, the Quora question with Grofer’s as the answer would be the top answer!

Complaints on Blurt It and Answerbag could also be tended to more often in order to avoid giving off an innattentive and causal attitude.