What is Food Delivery App Marketing Software?

Food delivery is transforming how restaurants operate, reshaping both the dining experience and driving growth though new business models and increased customer acquisition.

In 2024, the global online food delivery market will reach approximately $1.20 trillion in total revenue generated, with expectations to grow at an annual rate of 9.04%, potentially reaching $1.85 trillion by 2029.

The overwhelming majority of this global growth has come from 3rd party delivery apps like UberEats, DoorDash, Deliveroo, Talabat, Grab, and the hundreds more that connect diners with restaurants around the world.

This indicates the immense potential of food delivery apps to drive sustained revenue growth for restaurants into the future.

The one key trend shaping restaurant marketing

Along with this growth in 3rd party food delivery, a key trend in restaurant marketing over the past five years has been restaurant operators changing how they allocate advertising and marketing spend.

Budgets once focused primarily on social media ads and branding are now increasingly allocated to food delivery platform ad networks and offer campaigns, which offer more direct targeting of high-intent consumers.

Evidence of this trend comes from Talabat, a leading food delivery platform in the Middle East, which has quietly built an advertising business valued at nearly $200 million in just a few years. That's $200 million that might otherwise have gone to Instagram, Google ads and influencer marketing.

At it's core, food delivery app marketing software helps restaurants capitalize on this macro trend that is continuing to play out in the industry. If you're a food delivery operator and not focused on running and optimizing marketing spend of delivery platforms you are likely already behind the competition.
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Food delivery app marketing software helps restaurants, cloud kitchens and virtual brands capitalize on current trends in food delivery marketing by increasing visibility, optimizing in-app CPC campaigns and running better performing offer and discounting campaigns.

What is food delivery app marketing software?

Food delivery app marketing software is a new category of restaurant marketing software that helps restaurants run better paid and organic marketing on third party delivery apps.

This type of software or platform has several core functions that are highly beneficial to anyone running ads on delivery apps.

• Launching, editing and managing ad campaigns across multiple delivery apps.
• Tracking performance metrics like ROI, Conversion rate and contribution margin in a single dashboard.
• Automating marketing tasks, such as scheduling promotions or analyzing customer data.
• Access to advanced optimization strategies like hourly bidding and location targeting.
• Tracking relevant metrics that delivery apps use in their organic ranking algorithms.
• Ability to test and analyze different discounting strategies on multiple delivery apps in a single platform.

Why It's Essential: Today, the food delivery industry is highly competitive, requiring targeted, efficient, and data-driven marketing efforts in order to be successful. Delivery app marketing software helps restaurants meet these challenges.

Benefits of delivery app marketing software

Unlike the majority restaurant software that typically helps mostly with operational efficiency, delivery app marketing software helps drive both efficiency and incremental revenue.

Increased Efficiency

Running effective marketing campaigns can be time-consuming, especially when managing multiple platforms. Restaurants are increasingly switching back and forth between the ad platforms of four or five delivery apps - slowing down execution.

Delivery app marketing software streamlines this process by aggregating the marketing channels into one place. It sounds simple, but if you've worked across multiple platforms before you'll already have sense of how much time can be saved on repetitive tasks such as campaign scheduling, budget adjustments, and performance monitoring when everything is one place.

For example, Revly’s Delivery Ad Manager simplifies ad creation and management, allowing you to quickly and consistently deploy campaigns across all platforms.

This is especially beneficial for delivery businesses with limited resources and/or multiple locations - enabling them to maximize their marketing budget without wasting precious time.

Increased Campaign Performance

Delivery app marketing software improves campaign effectiveness by providing advanced tools for targeting and optimization. This type of software presents marketing and performance data in a much more actionable way, allowing brand managers to reach the most relevant audiences and drive the most revenue.

For example, Revly easily allows you to compare the impact on overall profitability of different types of discount campaign. This precision leads to higher click-through rates, better engagement, and improved ROI, making every marketing dollar work harder.

Data-Driven Decisions

In the highly competitive food delivery market, intuition is not enough to drive success . Data-driven decision-making is essential to understand what works, what doesn’t, and how to pivot strategies effectively.

Delivery app marketing software provides detailed insights into key metrics like customer acquisition cost, conversion rates, and campaign contribution margin and ROI.

Revly’s Intelligence Suite, for example, offers real-time analytics dashboards that allow restaurants to monitor performance and identify trends.

By translating raw data into actionable insights, these tools empower marketers to make informed decisions, allocate budgets more effectively, and continuously improve their strategies.

More trends in restaurant marketing (and how food delivery app marketing software helps you capitalize)

Inside the macro trend of shifting ad budgets to 3rd party delivery platforms, there are further trends that are causing increasing numbers of restaurants and cloud kitchens to onboard into food delivery app marketing software.

Understanding these trends highlights the importance of delivery app marketing software in helping restaurants thrive on delivery platforms.

1. Increased competition on delivery apps

With the rise of new food delivery business models like virtual brands and cloud kitchens hundreds of brands are being launched every month in every large market around the world.

This means the competition for visibility and orders is fiercer than ever, which in turn means CPC advertising costs are rising. Without optimization delivery app marketing is becoming less effective.

Increasing saturation means restaurants need highly efficient, targeted marketing strategies to stand out.

How delivery app marketing software helps: Tools like Revly's Delivery Ad Manager enable restaurants to manage and optimize campaigns across multiple channels, ensuring that they are visible when it matters the most.

2. Focus on hyper-localization

Hyper localization is coming big time for the food delivery market.

Delivery apps are already personalizing the app experience with custom, tailored options; and data is clearly showing that different delivery locations have different sales trends with the same city or neighborhoods.

Restaurants and apps are responding by using hyper-localized ads to target customers with delivery area targeted promotions, or featured dishes and combos that work best in particular locations. For example, a campaign targeting city dwellers can differ significantly from one aimed at suburban audiences.

How delivery app marketing software helps: Delivery app marketing software makes it much easier to target ads and discounts at a location level. This type of targeting improves performance dramatically but has been hard to execute with out a lot of manual work. Delivery app marketing software removes much of the manual work.

3. Rise of AI and Automation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation are revolutionizing the way digital advertising is run. Facebook, Instagram and Google ads are all increasingly being automated with AI - often with much better results. Automation ensures campaigns run seamlessly without constant manual intervention.

How delivery app marketing software helps: In the food delivery app ads world the optimization tools are not as sophisticated yet as the big players, but delivery app marketing software is helping restaurants leverage automation and AI in their delivery app marketing, removing manual errors as well as increasing overall performance.

4. Shift toward performance-based marketing

With new marketing tools and campaign types now available through delivery apps, restaurants are focusing more and more on campaigns that deliver measurable results. The demand for detailed analytics and insights has never been greater, as marketers aim to maximize ROI and minimize waste.

How delivery app marketing software helps: Tools like Revly's dashboards provide real-time analytics on ad performance, customer acquisition costs, and other KPIs. This data-driven approach ensures marketing efforts are focused on strategies that deliver tangible results.

5. Embrace a test and learn approach

Testing is a business growth framework that has very much come to define modern food delivery operations. From menu testing, brand launches and of course marketing - a testing mindset is often the difference between profit and no profit.

How delivery app marketing software helps: To run an efficient testing program in food delivery app marketing you need both quick access to performance data and the ability to update and launch campaigns fast.

Tools like Revly are built exactly for restaurants embracing a test and learn approach, and are geared towards helping restaurants find the best strategies that work uniquely for their brands.

Delivery app marketing software is at the forefront of these trends and is helping operators capitalize on the latest in restaurant and cloud kitchen business optimization.

Choosing the right delivery app marketing software

Choosing the delivery app marketing software depends on a number of key factors:

Ease of use: The system must be easy to use and understandable to members of the team.

Depth of integrations: How well supported are all the delivery apps you operate on? Asses in detail how many of the features are supported.

Availability of advanced analytics and automation: Your system should be extremely customizable in terms of data so you can answer any question when you need to.

Support and training: Can the company provide you with expert advice and guidance on how to get the most out of the software?

With experience in running and optimizing millions of dollars in delivery app ad spend and use by many of the biggest global brands, Revly is fast becoming the go to option when it comes to delivery app marketing software.

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