🛒💨 If grocery and food delivery apps want to grow, they need to figure out how to build an advertising platform...and fast. 😨

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In general, the problem with the grocery/food delivery model is the economics just don't add up:

📉 It doesn't scale (More orders = more drivers = more expenses), and

📉 There's a limit on how much you can charge (Charge too much, and customers will just go pick it up themselves 🤷).

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On the other hand, advertising scales. 📈

If you build the platform correctly, each additional ad brings revenue without adding a significant cost or time investment. 💰

...but that's a big 'if'. 😳

👉 If you don't build it correctly, it becomes a nightmare for your internal teams, advertising customers, and users.

😖 Your users get bombarded with irrelevant ads they don't actually care about.

🥵 Your internal teams have to spend time making and managing creatives and sparring over which messages and interests get priority (internal marketing messages vs brand advertising vs promotions, etc.), and

😤 Your advertising partners are constantly breathing down your neck, asking where the results are and why they aren't as high as expected.

(...and, if advertisers don't feel that they're getting their money's worth (or if they run a counterfactual and get the same performance WITHOUT running ads on your platform), then they're out the door too. 🚪🏃💨)

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So, how do you create a successful retail advertising platform?

3 steps. 👇

1. Focus on your value.

You're closer to the customer and have much more relevant and useful first-party customer data than any singular brand. Therefore, you *should* have a much finer level of granularity on your specific users and market and be able to target much better than a singular brand could on its own. 🎯...If you can't, you need to start here first.

👉 Access to the right customer at the right time. This is literally the value you bring.

2. Create a 'low-touch' system.

You can't 'double-handle' freight and expect to be profitable.

You need to create a way for brands to directly add their promotional materials to your "hopper" (with a minimal review process) and then intelligently interleave those ads and messages in with your other business needs (general marketing messages, promotions, etc.), keeping your end-user preferences as the cornerstone. (A churned user is useful to no one. 🤦)

3. Be transparent with your metrics and reporting.

This somewhat goes hand-in-hand with the point above, but it's often better to give the end user access to a view of their real-time metrics instead of withholding and reporting generic results until the end.This makes the entire process feel more collaborative and it reduces the load of generating multiple reports on your team.

Sound like a pain to build?

It is.

Lucky for you, we're already building it.