Who wants to develop a bona fide omnichannel experience?
In our post-pandemic world, every brand builder should enthusiastically raise their hand. Or, at the very least, give me a ✋.
Take Target, for example. According to IMD, the retailer had its best quarter ever, Q2 2020, with digital sales scaling an incredible 195% and overall sales up 24.3%.
You don’t have to be a marketing whiz to figure out why. The integration of Target’s physical and digital presence was seamless. Buy it online, grab it curbside. Or click and buy that paper shredder you desperately needed, along with a bag of groceries, and it all shows up at your door later that day.
Here are a few other fun stats from Target: multi-channel consumers spend 4x as much as store-only consumers and 10x more than digital-only consumers.
Similarly, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands who had a heyday during the pandemic are realizing they might need more brick-and-mortar presence to solidify brand awareness, according to Retail Dive.
But here’s the rub: all real estate isn’t held in the same regard. Whereas retailers won’t blink at high prices ($100+/square foot), I see clients balk all the time at spending money on their digital structures.
They think that just because something is virtual, it should cost less. And that’s not only brands; some marketers I know have that perspective as well.
That’s like trying to build a penthouse on a building with no foundation. For ambitious brands with their sights set on scaling and growing, that’s not just a shaky structure.
It’s building a business that’s bound to collapse.
Invest In Your Digital Foundation
Once upon a time, digital was an add-on, a small line item in the overall marketing channel spend. But now we’re more than a quarter-century into online sales and promotion, digital-first can’t be an afterthought.
