Will they love you in Des Moines? How to know before you go

When you’re at the helm of a successful food delivery brand with big growth goals, how do you know when a new geographic market is ready for you??

Companies like Jow , a French personalized grocery/meal app, and FELFEL Schweiz-Suisse , a Swiss office lunch brand that leverages smart-fridge tech, recently announced moves to enter the US market. But in spite of boosts from pandemic-era behavior changes, food delivery in all its forms is a bit of a brawl. Since the Web 1.0 days of Kozmo and Webvan, plenty of companies have been burned by insufficient customer density, expensive logistics, and brutal competition.?

For a logistics-based food company, turning the lights on in a new geography isn’t just a matter of drop-shipping. It’s a real investment in distribution infrastructure, product, and marketing—just to deliver the first orders. What if you put all the work into bringing your product to a whole new market only to find out that it’s a flop?

To efficiently and effectively de-risk a big strategic move like this: test, test, test before you make any big commitments. A few small-scale digital ad tests with a sample of prospective consumers in a new location can yield a lot of answers and save you time, bandwidth, money, and maybe egg on your face.?

Here’s how to de-risk a new geographic market for brands with multivariate digital ad campaigns:

Test demand. The most obvious gating question: should we enter this new market in the first place? Time to test baseline demand with digital ads. A small test using digital ads will tell you whether people care about what you have to offer. Through clicks on ads and sign-ups on “notify me” landing pages, you’ll know whether your offer is worthy of an email address. It’s the next best thing to an order when you are pre-launch.

Test positioning. The positioning that works in Copenhagen won’t play in Cleveland. Or maybe it will. This, after all, is the point of testing. Testing multiple strategic positions for your product via ads?gives you feedback on how each position resonates with distinct target audiences based on performance metrics.

Test audiences. In a digital test on a platform like Meta or TikTok, you have the? power to learn about target audience(s) and figure out where to focus your efforts. Using the backend of the digital platform, design a discrete audience to answer questions about who your best customers might be. Want to find out where your product plays best geographically within this new market? Design your audiences based on locations. Looking to nail the age range and other demographics of your targeted consumer? Smart audience design will get you these learnings. Want to know what other brands your best first customers are also loyal to? You guessed it: layer it into discrete audience design.

The benefits of “heat-testing”?

1. It’s fast. The entire testing process described above takes a few weeks.?
2. It’s empirical and behavioral. Rather than relying on surveys, focus groups, and other hypothetical situations where consumers’ stated behavior is held as data, digital in-market testing using real behavioral data (clicks and sign-ups) is predictive of consumers’ behavior in the real world.
3. It happens early in the decision-making process. You can test before the product is even “real” in a new territory. By leading users to a landing page with a “coming soon—sign up to get updated when we launch” landing page, you’re able to get a solid indication of purchase behavior long before investing in getting your product on the ground in that new territory.
4. You’ll finish testing with road-tested ads with the performance metrics that prove them. Plus, you’ll have substantial marketing cost data for building your launch strategy.

#ThisIsWhyWeTest