How To Create A Winning Sales Pitch For Instacart

Instacart, the world’s largest online grocery service, is in the market for a new agency.

To snag a client like Instacart, or frankly any big-name client you’re after, you’ll need a perfect pitch deck that sets you apart from other agencies. The competition is likely fierce, so it’s essential that you have a competitive advantage.

That’s why we’re showing you how to use to Similarweb insights to:

• Understand your prospect’s market
• Benchmark against direct competitors
• Craft a plan of action

Dive into our in-depth case study of Instacart and find out how to master the art of creating a data-driven sales pitch with Similarweb tools.

Instacart is on the market

Instacart delivers groceries across the United States and Canada, using couriers to bring the grocery store to your door. With demand for essential goods high and fewer people shopping in-store, food delivery sites and online shopping rates have surged, causing a 47.54% spike in visits for the online grocery industry, year-over-year.

As the world craves a return to normalcy, interest in online grocery shopping and delivery has started to wane. Positioned in between big name retailers and popular delivery services, Instacart’s market is extremely competitive.

The Economist reports that “Walmart, America’s biggest grocer, may have regained the upper hand in delivery. Amazon Fresh is a force to be reckoned with. Rival upstarts, such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, are expanding from meals to everyday goods.”

Instacart has pivoted several times this summer to remain competitive in a rapidly-changing market. The San Francisco-based company, which plans to go public with a massive $39 billion valuation as of March 2021, is hunting for a new creative agency, bringing in big-name executives from companies like Facebook and Uber.

Crafting a winning pitch

When creating a killer pitch, remember to keep your focus specific. Explain what your agency can do and, crucially, what you can do for your client. Make your messaging unique to the business you’re talking to. This is done by taking an in depth look at their performance and finding areas that your services could improve.

It’s essential  to understand the market of the company you want to win. This starts by analyzing their standing within the industry as a whole. By looking into the numbers and understanding your prospect’s performance in relation to their competitors and the wider industry, you can identify strategic opportunities to help them compete in their market.

Thinking of pitching your agency? Download our full guide to get more insider tips on using Similarweb Agency Intelligence to help you craft the perfect pitch and bag the client.

Understanding Instacart’s industry

First let’s break down Instacart’s website performance. Here, we get a macro view of how instacart.com performed over the last two years.

We can see that it currently holds the #2 ranking for the Groceries category in the United States. We also get perspective into the split between mobile and desktop users and the total number of visits.

To understand instacart.com’s performance better, we need to zoom out and look at the online groceries industry as a whole. This will give us insight into how the company’s numbers measure up.

Here we can see the top performing websites and get an idea for the industry standards. We can also see the explosive growth this industry has experienced, with a 47.54% increase in visits year over-year (YoY).

Looking at the traffic and engagement metrics for the Groceries industry YoY, we can see a dramatic spike in traffic at the start of the pandemic.

While this growth in visits was mostly sustained, the industry has experienced a gradual decline since peaking in March 2021. But, overall, the surge in traffic remains significantly higher than pre-pandemic numbers.

Now let’s review traffic trends for the industry’s top players. This will reveal the big names in the market, and how they are performing over time.

Instacart.com holds the second highest traffic share within its competitive set behind kroger.com. When looking at the numbers month-over-month (MoM), we notice that instacart.com’s traffic share is gradually declining – with the brand holding 12.35% of traffic in August 2020, vs. 9.81% of traffic in July 2021.

Benchmarking against direct competitors of Instacart

The first step in benchmarking is identifying your top competitors. Remember, competitors aren’t always found in the same industry, and not all sites in one industry are true competitors. Similarweb offers multiple competitive discovery engines to help define your competitive set.

The Competitive Landscape metrics reveal websites that contain similar content and target the same prospective client, including an affinity score to indicate how similar they are.

On the other hand, the Audience Interests page shows you other websites that are likely to be visited by your prospective audience.

You should also look at your prospect’s Search Competitors to see who they are competing with for paid and organic traffic.

Once you’ve identified your direct competitors, you can compare their traffic, engagement, and marketing performance in relation to your prospective client’s.

Let’s check out traffic and engagement metrics over time to see what trends we can identify. Looking at the number of monthly visits from February 2020 to August 2021, we can see that all brands in the competitive set experienced significant month-over-month growth in the spring of 2020, at the outset of the pandemic.

With 53.5 million visitors in April 2020, instacart.com beat out competitors to top the charts. But competing brands like kroger.com and doordash.com managed to sustain their growth into the following year.

Traffic to doordash.com surpassed the peak seen in the first outbreak of COVID-19, with an impressive 28.1% increase YoY.

So how did brands like kroger.com and doordash.com manage to maintain their numbers while instacart.com tailed off? Let’s dig into the data and find out.

Instacart’s plan of action

First, let’s take a look at where Instacart’s competitors are driving their traffic from. Similarweb’s Search Overview tool enables you to review your prospect’s search performance against its competitive set.

We can see that instacart.com tops its competitive set in desktop search, receiving 28.5% of total search visits from this channel. But the website has the lowest share of branded traffic, indicating an opportunity to help the company grow brand awareness.

The mobile web numbers reinforce these findings, with Instacart having the third-highest share of total search traffic and the lowest share of branded traffic by a significant margin. So while Instacart might have a strong SEO plan, there’s plenty of room for improvement when it comes to branded search performance.

And that’s where Similarweb’s keyword analysis tools come in. Let’s uncover some non-branded keyword opportunities for mobile search that instacart.com could bid on to win even more traffic away from the competition.

Doordash.com earns most of the traffic share for terms like food near me, delivery near me, and restaurants near me. Instacart could bid on these popular terms and win traffic.

Next, let’s see how our competitive set is performing in affiliate marketing. Looking at incoming traffic from referrals shows which affiliates are working with your prospect and its competitors. By understanding which referral sources are currently sending traffic to the competition and not to your prospect you can discover new opportunities for affiliate partnership.

With 8.8% of total referral visits, instacart.com has the second smallest share of referral traffic among its competitive set.

Kroger.com and doordash.com are dominating in this space, with 33.7% and 41.6% of referral traffic, respectively. This means that Instacart has an opportunity to invest in affiliate marketing to boost referral traffic. Instacart can look at which affiliate partners have been successful for their competitors and use these to drive more traffic to its own site.

Now let’s see which ad networks Instacart’s competitors are working with. While instacart.com is receiving traffic from several of the top ad networks, we can also see which networks competitors are working with to drive traffic.

For example, instacart.com has the lowest share of Google Display Network, which drives nearly 30% of the total traffic share. We can also see that doordash.com receives the majority of its traffic from Amazon Ad System and kroger.com dominates traffic from CJ Affiliate. Instacart can use these insights to work with the ad networks that are performing well for the competition and boost traffic to their site.

Perfect your pitch with the best marketing tools

Knowledge is power. When a brand is in search of a new agency, they’re looking for a data-driven approach to edge out the competition.

Similarweb provides the competitive intelligence needed to assess a prospect’s market, benchmark their performance against competitors, and craft an informed marketing strategy based on your findings.

Check out Similarweb for agencies to see how our insights can power your next pitch.

by Chloe Dougherty

Email Marketing Specialist

Chloe specializes in email and content marketing. She enjoys podcasts, reading short stories, and baking, and lives in Tel Aviv with her cat.