Yahoo Hong Kong launches foodie campaign to lure food lovers

Hong Kong people are known crazy about food and this might explain why more than 100 million Yahoo's regional search keywords are all food-related.The search engine has launched the “Yahoo Search for Foodie” campaign to attract the massive market of local food-lovers into a series of online and offline initiatives, which can in turn drive traffics on the web.“Content marketing has been our key strategy for years, but our tactic was rather passive.” Tania Lau, senior director of marketing & communications of Yahoo! Hong Kong, explained, “Instead of letting click rates to tell us what to do, we will take the initiatives this time and utilise all the search data we have, drawing food related topics that are up to Hong Konger’s interest.”New services also include Yahoo’s new online F&B magazine Yahoo Food, what it describes as "one-site-for-all" portal that offers latest food reviews, cooking tips, restaurant recommendations, special offers and related dining information contributed by chefs and bloggers. Popular restaurant search engine OpenRice is one of the content partner.“There is no online platform that would centralised all food-related topic online - either is it a food recipe site, or it’s solely providing restaurant recommendations. We would like to offer one.” Lau said.Yahoo also collaborates with top-searched celebrity-owned restaurants, in which restaurants will take up the challenge of devising brand-new creative dishes with the Yahoo top-searched ingredients of the year, some very tricky ones include okra, avocado and monk fruit.“This is a kind of way to engage netizens offline,” Lau told Marketing. “The campaign is yet to go monetised but we would launch exclusive Yahoo deals in mid-august on the creative dishes from the restaurants.”