Business

Online ordering works for food on Instagram. Find out how!

As per the global digital report, close to half of the seven billion people in the world are active social media users and the fastest expansion of user-base is happening on Instagram. With over a billion people sharing their lives on Instagram every month, we are excited to discover the real potential of the platform.

In this blog post, we have covered 6 logical reasons why the online food ordering phenomenon will successfully gravitate towards social media. The reasoning has been categorized as follows:

1. Popularity
2. Bespoke experience
3. Instant gratification
4. Ad-clutter on aggregator apps
5. Relevance
6. Trust

In May 2018, Instagram brought in some extremely useful action buttons to turn discovery into action. Instagram creators had announced, “With the Instagram action buttons available, people can now make reservations, buy tickets, send an order, or book through famous third-party partners without having to leave Instagram.” After this people could do more with Instagram than just liking a food pic and moving on. 

With that in mind, we set out to probe the scope of ordering food on Instagram itself. Does it have the potential to reduce dependency on food aggregators for both customers and restauranteurs? We narrow down our research to 6 points:

1. Popularity: With 200 million Instagram users accessing at least 1 business account per day and 135 million of them clicking on shoppable ads, the scope of selling on Instagram is huge and poised to grow further. 

As per Rival IQ’sIndustry-wise report, food and beverage posts draw a higher than average engagement rate on the platform. So how many restaurants are actively selling on Instagram? The answer is hardly any. 

Apart from mentioning the website link in the Instagram bio and stories, using shoppable ads to create food orders is not being done at the moment. 

People are drooling over the 366 million #food pictures on Instagram, surely that’s an encouraging figure for restauranteurs to start selling on the platform.

2. Bespoke Experience: Customers would prefer interacting with the brand they use in a more personal way rather than a standardized experience of all brands on one aggregator. Instagram is the perfect platform for this engagement. 

By tracking social mentions and collecting feedback on the platform, restaurateurs will know exactly what their customer is expecting from them. This information is valuable for tailoring brand experiences for customers.

3. Instant Gratification: Now we are yet to meet a person who does not love instant gratification. As per data sourced by Invespcro, 84% of all shoppers make an impulsive purchase. How about feeding the impulse with delightful food? You can’t go wrong with that.

4. Ad-clutter on aggregator apps: Remember the time you wanted to order breakfast and you could only finalize your choice by lunch? We’ve all been there. With the exorbitant number of choices that one gets flooded with on food aggregators, life would be simpler if you could see something that you like and order it without overwhelming suggestions.

Sweeten the deal by adding some discounts, the convenience of tracking the food, and making the payment online. You would not open a food aggregator app again. 

Oh wait, we already do all that! Check out Radyes, We make food pics edible.

Image Source: https://www.rivaliq.com/blog/2019-social-media-benchmark-report/#title-food-beverage

1. Relevance: Instead of liking a picture of a dish across the world, wouldn’t you prefer discovering something awesome to eat around you? Hyper-local ads on Instagram can be a gamechanger for restaurants since they will only reach people who can place an order. 

This will surely generate traction amongst hungry Instagrammers located around your restaurant during lunchtime.

2. Trust: The Instagram feed is a great way to know the story and motivation of a restaurant. This knowledge builds trust and interest in the food a restaurant dishes out. Instagrammers are more likely to order what they can trust in, rather than switch platforms to find something else altogether on a food aggregator’s app.

The ‘click it before you eat it’ phenomenon is here to stay, schedule a demo with Radyes to monetize this massive opportunity. 

Platform users are spending an average of 53 minutes on the app every day. So tell me again why can’t they order food while they are at it?

Social Media has transitioned from people collecting likes and comments to people selling on them. How many times have you opened your Facebook or Instagram feed and seen an ad for something?  Businesses are leapfrogging web and aggregator platforms onto the ‘social commerce’ revolution to capitalize on this shift. What started as a pure engagement-driven medium for brands is now growing into an indispensable sales channel with the potential to outgrow the profits and sales volumes of traditional sales platforms.

Social Commerce combines the best of social media engagement with the sales-oriented features of eCommerce platforms. Apps like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., become sources of orders instead of being limited to customer engagement. 

We at Radyes, the fastest growing social commerce platform in the Middle East,  are swiftly expanding into different industries and geographies to provide merchants with an end-to-end plug-and-play solution that they can use to sell on all online platforms. All this with complete brand and data ownership! Third-party integrations with over 120 payments, delivery and, tracking platforms ensure that users gets the full eCommerce experience without exiting their social media app. 

The Scope of Social Commerce:

The potential here is massive, and what we have seen so far seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. 

• 30% of online shoppers are already inclined to purchase products from a social media network like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat. 
• There are  1.82 billion daily users on Facebook alone and over a billion active monthly users on Instagram. 70% of these Instagram users rely on the platform for product discovery.
• Following the trend, Tik Tok has added a feature to link your eCommerce platforms to facilitate online orders. 
• The research from Global Web Index in their social media trends 2020 report shows that younger audience is particularly keen to discover products on social media.

Image source: https://www.davechaffey.com/digital-marketing-glossary/path-to-purchase/

Nike recently pre-released Air Jordan lll shoes on Snapchat with same-day delivery. Snapchat geo-fenced the area to restrict it to the delivery zone, and within 23 minutes, the entire stock was sold-out. 

Marketers willing to wait out this shift lose out on the initial momentum and precious time to build a robust social selling channel. While social commerce may not replace eCommerce portals, it will undoubtedly become the necessary extension for all eCommerce platforms to add to their offering.

Key Drivers:

While direct, commission-free orders through social media are gaining traction swiftly, it’s long term sustainability is pivoted on three main factors:

1. Profitability: With the middle man out of the picture, a brand receives 100% of its revenue. The per-order commissions that merchants save can be reinvested to expand the reach of online campaigns and multiply the ROAS.

2. The Power of Data/Data Ownership:

With data flowing directly into the brand’s pixel/tag/analytics dashboard, the merchant has complete real-time visibility of the business. This data is vital to bring down a brand’s customer acquisition costs (CAC) overtime through retargeting campaigns and audience optimization. A brand’s performance and long term sustainability rest on this.

3. Expanding Userbase: While the social media user base increased by 10.5% last year, Facebook retains the biggest share of this pie. On average, users are spending 2 hours, 22 minutes of their day online. 

Image Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-users-pass-4-billion/

From the users perspective, the key aspects that make this trend sustainable are:

1. Built-in Social Proof: As many as 40% of online shoppers say that they made a purchase after seeing the product being used by an influencer on social media. The psychological impact of seeing others advocate, like, share, or use a product on these platforms cultivates trust. Brands also repurpose user content via tags, stories, and DMs to benefit multiple KPIs.
2.  Direct Interaction: In the age of bots and marketplaces, social commerce reverses the trend with personalized brand experiences. The customer has the satisfaction of interacting with the brand directly, making the shopping experience more authentic, with a higher recall value.
3. Noiseless Conduct: In the absence of competing suggestions and showcase of similar products of different brands, the experience of purchasing on social media is less distracting and can lower the abandoned cart rates your brand is facing on other platforms.
4. Visual Commerce: This element enriches the customer’s brand experience with enticing product images, video, and user-generated content and adds shoppable layers to it. Pinterest and Instagram are platforms that are optimized primarily for visual commerce. Tools like Pinterest lens, Visual Search, and Shop Button on the platforms are some examples.

Image Source: ‘Instagram vs. Facebook Report: Key Trends You Need to Know’ by Social Bakers, 2020

The Customer Experience Analogy:

eCommerce: Think of traditional eCommerce shopping experiences like walking into a supermarket, where similar products of multiple brands are stacked on horizontal shelves fighting for eyeballs. Unless there is a strong brand preference, the experience is discount-led, and brand recall is limited as the customer’s attention is split between different brands offering a similar product and other stacked products. 

Social Commerce: Social Commerce is more like visiting a store in a mall; you may not have walked into the mall with the intent to buy from the particular brand, but once you enter the store, the entire experience centers exclusively around the brand. To add to the experience, Radyes provides its merchants with just the required customer support you would expect in a store regarding your order. 

Audience Targeting:

Social Commerce platforms, like Radyes, facilitate the entire customer acquisition cycle from affinity-based targeting, engagement to retargeting on the Social Media platform itself. With platform-specific pixels and tags tracking the customer’s online journey, retargeting interested customers and creating their lookalike audiences increases conversion chances.

eCommerce Platforms:

Social Commerce:

While Social Commerce is still in its early stages of adoption, it is cutting unnecessary layers and noise of an online transaction. This is the perfect time for brands to explore and experiment to figure out their winning social commerce marketing mix which they can further scale-up to reach their target KPIs.

How Did Online Ordering Become The Giant Industry That It Is?

A number of us head home from work and order our dinners online- from our favorite apps or restaurants. We want to make the most of our time, and we don’t want to spend whatever little personal time we get slaving over a hot stove in the kitchen. People are looking to get the most out of their time and money and that’s where Online Ordering solves at least one problem. Ordering in is now a common part of our lives. People in cities order online up to 4 times a month on average! 

The Market

It’s no surprise that the online ordering market has reached a value of USD 82 Billion in 2018 in terms of gross revenue booked and is expected to double by 2025. Yet, this industry only services about 11% of the world population. It’s a heated battle to the top in this market where players are coming in every day and disappearing just as quickly. The volumes are high and margins are thinner than ever. The sharks are eating up the big and small fish alike. Players like Deliveryhero sold their German arm to Takeaway.com, and bought Talabat, and Zomato in the Middle East. Grubhub, Just Eat, Uber Eats are all examples of how a handful of players are dominating the American and European Markets.

The Problem

Yet, not one of these names belongs to a restaurant. Somehow, in an effort to make the cash registers ring, the restaurants have traded their brands in for more orders. The total investment made in the food delivery industry sat at USD 9.6 billion in 2018 alone. This has helped aggregators outspend their supply base and win the restaurant’s customers. The restaurants, however, lost loyalists, repeat business and a lot of brand value. 

The Sweet Spot

It’s only in the past couple of years that brands have realized that the trade-off may not have worked for them as hoped. Given how margins are diminishing in the F&B industry, restaurants have begun investing heavily in their own delivery fleets, order generation, and management systems. At the same time, customers are looking for the best deals, service, and variety when it comes to who they order from. Here lies the opportunity for restaurants. This customer behavior gives restaurants a fighting chance to win their customers and margins back. If restaurants can be a source of these deals, the service, and variety, there’s no reason why customers won’t order from them directly. 

The Solution

If brands can give their customers the ordering experience of an aggregator app with additional benefits, it will be possible to switch behavior. Considering the fact that online ordering platforms are now charging up to 30% of the order value as commission, the restaurants have no real choice but to offer their own delivery services. With customers spending more time online now than ever before, the solution is clearly digital, or more specifically, social. 

Restaurant owners and managers the world over, are short on time and resources and need a solution that fits into their existing systems. A platform solution that comes pre-integrated with payment, logistics, and marketing services along with order management and fulfillment would literally solve this problem with one click. 

The Options

Now there are a few players that offer Restaurant platforms like these, but every restaurant has unique needs and you must find the right fit for you. Here are some questions you should ask yourself before choosing an online ordering platform for your restaurant:

1. Does this serve your customers well?
A smooth UI/UX, reliable and timely delivery, clear payment methods would usually be the factors you would watch here.

2. Does this solution fit all the moving pieces of your business as it stands?
Do your staff members, riders, managers and other team members feel comfortable using it? Can it be integrated with your current tech? How does it fit with your existing marketing channels?

3. Does it put your brand first?
Are you again paying someone for transactional value where your brand loses? Is this platform truly yours? Owned and built for you? Does it let you put your brand out there for your customers to interact with?

4. How much more time and effort will you have to put in to make it work?
Will it help your operation become more or less efficient? A good support platform would help you find time to do more, not take away your precious time. 

These 4 focus areas are of prime importance if you really wish to save those ever-thinning revenue margins. Not only are consumers opening up to the possibility of ordering directly from restaurants to save on delivery fees and order minimums, but they are also primed for a shift in the online ordering space. So much so that players like Zomato are exploring the expansion of their dine-in loyalty program, “Gold” to delivery to retain users. 

The Win

The battle here is to bring good experience to the end-user, beating the aggregators at their own game, and arming your brand for the blood bath to come in the online ordering space. 

At Radyes, we focus on just one thing- putting restaurants first. And the best way to do that is to help them serve their customers. Our approach to online ordering is very simple. The customer is ordering your food, from your restaurant and as such, your brand comes first. We have combined our deep knowledge of consumer behavior in this space with what restaurants need and created a platform that serves both ends of the value chain. 

Our Platform As A Service approach goes beyond just order generation. The intention is to create an organic, fully owned channel for your brand. This means the customer always sees you, via your social media and websites. We enable order generation, order management, logistics, and payments. All of this comes to you fully customized, fully integrated with the payment gateways, POS tech and logistics providers of your choice in our easy-to-use dashboard- Compass. 

The Product

Our platform’s user interface comes in the form of a link that you can add to your website and social media and users can start ordering directly with you. No middlemen, no intermediaries. Just a direct transaction between you and your customers. With Radyes, the money that you spend to get orders flowing in serves your brand awareness goals as well. As we said, we’re about putting restaurants first.

To know more about how you can get your restaurant on Radyes, schedule a demo with our product experts here. 

Tags: Business

Restaurant

Online Ordering

Social Media

Order Generation

Radyes

Food aggregators

One-eighth of the world’s population is on Instagram and 80% of this audience follows at least one business account. Ecommerce companies are gradually making an advent on the platform with shoppable ads. In fact, a whopping 130 million Instagrammers are already clicking on these ads each day to reveal product tags.

Considering this, what is stopping quick service delivery restaurants from selling food on Instagram?

With 366 million #food pictures on Instagram, the platform remains largely underutilized by the food and beverage industry. To date, only a small number of home chefs have discovered the scale of this platform and recorded big business successes.  Trap Kitchen, A Little Taste of Chyna, Shad’s New Cali are some classic examples of chefs whose journey to the top started from Instagram. While many restaurants mention their website links for order placement, Instagram remains a primary medium for engaging the audience and not converting them.

In this article, you will know 3 ways to sell food on Instagram. 

1. Put up food posts with location and contact details.
2. Put your contact us details in the bio or action button on the profile.
3. Integrate an order generation and management software into your Instagram account

1.   Posts with contact details::  If you wish to start with the simplest method, do what Chef Grubby and Sunni Bleu (@bleukitchen) do. They publish pictures of their food along with their food truck’s location and timings. 

You can see the details of their menu, availability, and email address to place an order in their Instagram highlights. They also interact with interested customers through comments and direct messages for real-time updates. With 93.5 K followers already, The Blue Kitchen has perfectly optimized its Instagram account to churn revenue for them.

2. Link in the bio: Add the link to your website or order management software in the bio. This helps you get direct orders and reserve tables for customers. With 142k followers, Katz’s Delicatessen does this very successfully. The link to their website is mentioned in their bio, it leads you to their ordering platform where you can choose between requesting a local or national delivery. You can even book their catering services on the same platform.

You can use Linkin.bio and Linktr.ee to optimize your Instagram traffic better. This solution works best for your restaurant if you already have an online order management software with integrated payment and last-mile delivery tie-ups. All you need to do now is run targeted ads with clear Call to Action (CTA) so that your audience can start placing orders.

While most restaurants today do mention their ordering link or contact information, the landing pages are not optimized for a smooth user experience. Also, in the process of redirecting your customer to an outside webpage, some leads are lost.

3. Shoppable ads with Radyes: If you think this is too much to handle along with running your restaurant, try Radyes. Radyes gives your restaurant the entire ecosystem to accomplish all of the above. 

It boosts your targeted ads in hyper-local regions with clear CTAs. This helps you to get orders on Instagram itself. While you focus on creating delicious food, Radyes manages payments and deliveries on your behalf. It even allows your customers to track their food as it is being prepared and delivered.

This is a very cost-effective and efficient way to manage order generation and fulfillment for your restaurant. It is best suited for delivery-focused restaurants.

In the age of aggregators when competition and commissions can eat a chunk of your revenue, organic orders from loyal customers are both delightful and rare. Generating your own orders through Instagram also helps you connect with your potential audience directly. It boosts repeat orders and increases brand advocacy, both online and offline. 

So don’t miss out on the ever-growing user base on Instagram and make your Instagram account work for you. Schedule a demo with Radyes to understand the simplest way of enabling social sales with zero tech integration.

Things to Keep in Mind

• Plan the campaign thoroughly before you start.
  • Define your targets, audience, and set a minimum and a maximum number of influencers to engage.
• Work with different categories of influencers. 
• Personalize the experience- handwritten notes, personalized packaging, a call, make the experience special for the people who will endorse your brand.

• Pick a 3-month window to start with
• Set realistic goals
• Define your audience

Myths vs Facts

• Influencer marketing can be tested with less than 20 influencers
• Influencers with a higher number of followers will work best for your brand
• One influencer activation will get me orders
• An influencer will promote a bad product because it’s free.

How to Start:

• Click here set up an experience on Expin.
• Enter your product and brand details
• Specify the kind of influencers you would like to be associated with.
• Download the Expin app
• See the details of influencers who want to collaborate with you. Check their past experiences and ratings, audience metrics, etc.to approve/reject them.
• Ordering code is automatically shared with the influencer and stories are posted by the influencer within 48 hours.