Page 39 - Adnews Magazine May-June 2021

Jeremy Bolt (top) and Ryan Gracie
“Increased demand from our consumers across a whole bunch of products that we had not generally sold en masse or in volume before. Then the second part was that Australia Post really felt the strain.
“The strain of all of these sales going through their delivery net- work with them reaching their capacity they’d never reached before — very, very quickly.
“I think consumers were understanding of the fact the whole of Australia had jumped online and were trying to purchase goods.”
Since then, Catch has changed its marketing.
“Previously we’ve been spending 95% of our marketing budget on performance channels, which have a lower funnel activity, mostly across Google affiliates, retargeting, programmatic, etc,” says Gracie.
“What we’ve done from August 2020 onwards is we’ve really spun that mix around to be 70% performance and 30% spent on our brand campaign.”
With Catch’s brand campaign, unprompted brand awareness has increased by just over 50%.
“A significant increase, and what we’ve seen is we’re driving far more people from that top of funnel through our free channels, com- ing to the site either directly or through organic search,” he says.
“We’ve got a higher repeat customer number. So as we’re building up that loyalty as people are becoming more aware of Catch, they just come back to us more often.
“I think we’ve been able to capitalise on the opportunity of that increase in online spending, to have a formation around people who are coming through online, just natively now.”
Did somebody say Menulog?
Menulog took a big bet and, at first glance, a counter cyclical move at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic by launching a massive recruitment drive. The delivery business is built on technology but still needs people
to sign up restaurants and to make sure they can be serviced. Growing fast before the pandemic, Menulog took off on a steeper climb when everyone was ordered to stay at home to help stop the
spread of COVID-19. The business became a lifeline for many.
“We were actually doing quite well going into the pandemic, delivering a full quarter of double-digit growth,” says Simon Cheng,
Menulog’s marketing director.
Then the world changed. Restaurants weren’t allowed to open.
Overnight, Menulog became an essential service.
“And so we had to madly recruit about 2000 crew within the
first few weeks of the pandemic just to keep up with demand because the only way restaurants could trade was through delivery services,” says Cheng.
Growing the restaurant range is one of the biggest drivers for stickiness for customers using the Menulog app. “We want to be able to provide the full ecosystem of restaurants and dining options, then there’s no reason for people to go anywhere else,” says Cheng.
Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway.com, the parent company for Menulog, singled out the Australian operation when releasing its results for the year to December 2020 for its soaring sales and expanded market share. Menulog was Just Eat Takeaway.com’s fast- est growing market, with 104% order growth in 2020.
“Our investment in the sales force and in signing up restaurants to get on our platform, and growing that range, was one of the linchpins of our success last year,” says Cheng.
“Obviously, we had a lot of that at the start of the pandemic in March, April and May.”
Cheng has been at Menulog since April 2019. Before that he was with retailer Healthy Life, Carnival Australia, Qantas and agencies including McCann Erickson and Ogilvy.
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