Grab makes reliable transport and mobile payment a reality in Southeast Asia
Learn how Google helped Grab in achieving its goals
case study
Global Marketing Strategy
Approach
- To develop a strategic partnership with Google, centered around an annual Joint Business Plan
- To develop key customer and market insights
- To use App Campaigns to drive downloads
Goals
- To grow awareness and understanding of Grab’s transportation and mobile payment offering
- To increase app downloads
Results
- 15% increase in conversion rates with App Campaign
- 90% less time spent setting up App Campaign compared to other campaigns
- By February 2018, app had been downloaded 86 million+ times Over 3.5 million daily rides
Founded in 2012, Grab is now Southeast Asia’s leading on-demand transportation and mobile payment platform, making convenient, safe and reliable transportation a reality for over 620 million people. The company has also created a proprietary mobile payment platform, GrabPay. It aims to help fix the payment infrastructure in Southeast Asia (SEA) and bring cashless payment to the market.
Currently operating in eight countries, Grab has faced challenges, especially with digital infrastructure. For instance, many potential customers and drivers lack access to formal banking infrastructure and technology necessary to use their product. The case study explains how the company handled these challenges with help from Google.
Peggy Zhu, Head of Performance Marketing at Grab, attributes a large amount of the company’s marketing success to Google’s App Campaign platform. After just 6 months of using App Campaign, Grab saw a noticeable uplift in app downloads, as well as spending 90% less set-up time compared to compared to other campaigns they had set up previously.
Google also worked with Grab to develop key customer and market insights, and to engage in workshops to assist their marketing and brand teams to identify areas for improvement. Google provided vital tools to help develop Grab’s product offering, such as Google Maps and Android Pay. Peggy Zhu believes that “having access to a suite of continuously developing products and services has been the main benefit of partnering with Google”.
This has allowed Grab to harness the latest technology to create a better product, and provide a better service, both in major cities, and smaller towns where people often don’t have easy access to technology.
Google’s innovations have also enabled Grab to optimize their internal processes. Peggy points to auto-optimization in Smart Display as an example, and says that this has saved their team valuable time that would have otherwise been spent manually optimizing their campaigns.
By February 2018, the company’s app had been downloaded over 86 million times, and enabled over 3.5 million daily rides.
Grab is now focused on developing their transportation and cashless payments platforms to keep their app as up-to-date as possible. They plan to work with small business owners to create a new value chain with GrabPay. When small merchants succeed they will help to drive financial inclusion for their communities on a local scale.
Their long-term goal is to help fully integrate SEA with the digital economy.
Products used by Grab:
- Analytics
- Android Pay
- App Campaigns
- Display
- Maps
- Search
- YouTube
“From app campaigns and Analytics to Maps and YouTube, Google’s suite of products have helped Grab to grow as a business in all aspects” Peggy Zhu, Head of Performance Marketing at Grab
