Talking about iFood is talking about big numbers. Market leader in food, beverages and other consumer items delivery in Latin America, the Brazilian company now has a great presence throughout Latin America, being instantly recognized by the various populations.
However, maintaining and expanding this success depends on much more than excellent service. In the digital era, it is essential to have a relationship with the market, including partners, based on useful content, reliability and storytelling.
In order for you to better understand this relationship, we invited Leandro Resende, Senior Content Analyst at iFood, to tell you about the partnership between iFood and Rock Content that saw the company grow its audience. Check it out!
The search for connections with partners
Few companies in Brazil can boast of such an impressive growth pattern as iFood. Founded in 2011 in the format of a printed menu guide, it took less than a decade to become one of the most important brands for the food sector in Brazil.
This process, which culminated in iFood operating in more than 1,200 cities of the country and with more than 300,000 partner restaurants, was carried out based on innovation and the delivery of an advantageous service for companies, while being practical for customers.
However, as Leandro tells us, this growth took place in a moment of transition: in the 2010s, the commercial relationships of digital services gained new opportunities to strengthen their positions.
Like consumers, business owners also demand a closer connection with these platforms, their knowledge and participation in partnerships. In addition, they expect quick, clear answers to questions regarding platform use.
“Basically, we only worked with CRM, we still didn’t have, for example, social networks aimed at restaurants and other business partners”, Leandro comments. “iFood was not found by its official sources. If someone Googled how to do something within the iFood platform, another channel would be answering that”.
That is, even with market leadership, iFood found a deficiency in three pillars of modern branding:
- constant and structured communication;
- brand trust;
- narrative control.
“We noticed that there were many other channels and influencers talking about iFood, explaining how it works, how to sell; but iFood did not own the communication of any of these channels.”
Even more so during the pandemic, when delivery became a true opportunity for consolidation in the sector, many influencers started to produce independent content on how to sell more, and how to take advantage of the platform.
At that moment, the management team felt the need to structure its communication channels for entrepreneurs in the sector. That’s when they decided to create the iFood blog for Partners, and their channels on YouTube and Instagram, where they show in a clearer and more engaging way about the experience of restaurants and other business partners.
A partnership with Rock Content
According to Leandro, the choice of partnering with Rock Content was straightforward. “A market survey was carried out to understand costs, commercial proposals, benefits of each of the suppliers, and Rock Content ended up being chosen”.
Leandro also points out the credibility of the future partnership within the marketing team, since Rock Content is the company that consolidated Content Marketing in Brazil and is now a global reference.
With the beginning of this relationship, the entire online audience strategy for business partners was built from scratch: the creation of the blog became a pillar for rebuilding communication, in addition to social networks.
The highlight of this process for Leandro was the speed with which the plan was created and executed. From the first mapping step to the beginning of content production and distribution for entrepreneurs, it took only two months.
See an example of action taken with the iFood blog for Partners as a center for information and engagement with the platform:
“We launched some promotions throughout 2022, such as the Pizza Day promotion. The best evaluated pizzerias on Pizza Day received an iFood recognition award. The blog was the channel we used to publicize, present the promotion, pass on the rules, directions and where we would announce the winners afterwards.”
Leandro continues talking about the versatility and efficiency of this type of communication: “There are so many features and possibilities within the blog that the internal team started to buy the idea and understand the opportunities. We managed to serve different internal customers with this channel in a very practical way”.
The leader also highlighted the use of Stage, Rock Content’s platform for hosting and managing blogs made entirely in WordPress, as crucial for the management and performance of the blog as a whole. “Even when we have a bigger peak, a campaign, CRM communication triggered — actions that bring more traffic — Stage is stable.”
And the results? Well, they surprised even the iFood team itself, both in Google rankings as well as audience volume.
Audience results with online content
In addition to Rock Content’s planning and production structure, the results relate closely to the iFood team’s perception of the demand for this type of content online.
It was the perfect union between the managers’ market vision and the production expertise that delivers relevant, useful and impactful material to partners in their results.
And what were they? “We had set some conservative, aggressive, and very aggressive traffic targets, and we’ve already hit more than 200% of the very aggressive goals. It is a channel that consolidated very quickly and we have achieved new records month by month in the metrics that we monitor”.
In October 2022, the iFood blog for Partners beat the record of 600,000 accesses. In November, the number jumped to 900,000 monthly accesses.“With only ten months since the channel’s birth, we can celebrate traffic reach of almost 1 million accesses in a single month”, comments Leandro.
And this success expands to other contents that orbit the company’s blog. The conversion rate for newsletters and rich materials such as e-books has increased considerably in recent months.
This means that not only is traffic increasing, but the audience engagement with content from iFood is bigger. Partner businesses not only enter to obtain timely information, but deepen their relationship with the brand by seeking ways to improve their performance and use the platform more successfully.
And this is Rock Content’s biggest differential: going beyond production, creating a complete planning relationship that embraces the public and creates an ideal environment for communication and trust building online.
As Leandro concludes, “the secret is to have Rock not as a content producer, but as a strategic partner to achieve the business objectives; and I think this is very evident in the results we got”.
And you, do you want to have the same power of attraction and audience in your company? Do as iFood has, and have Rock Content as a partner. Visit our website and discover our solutions!
