Power Digital Marketing reposted this
CSO at Power, Founder of fusepoint. Marketing ROI, incrementality, and strategy for hundreds of brands.
All non-Amazon online sales accounted for $243b in 25Q2. Which is only... ... about 13% of all the retail sales according to the Census. This means that if more than 50% of your revenue comes from ecommerce, you are fighting in an EXTREMELY crowded and EXTREMELY small pool. • There are over 2.7m Shopify stores • There are hundreds of thousands of non-Shopify stores • There are big brands that also operate online (Nike, Louis, etc) • WALMART IS IN THAT 13%! I can't express clearly enough how teeny tiny of a market this is. "But Ben 243b is a lot!" Not for, conservatively, millions of brands. Even a low estimate on the number of "operating" businesses puts that at between $50-100k revenue per month per store. And we know that it's really a longtail where there are millions of tiny drips and a few big players (Walmart, Target, Etsy, etc). One of my favorite adages in marketing: • Product beats distribution • Distribution beats marketing • Marketing beats competition If you have an exemplary product with one-of-a-kind value, people will go out of their way to buy you. But let's be honest, there are only so many iPhones per generation. So for the rest of us who aren't selling anything revolutionary, you need to: • Make it EASY TO BUY • Make it EASY TO REMEMBER That means that your biggest stick comes back to distribution. "Ben, online is the ultimate ease of distribution! It can ship anywhere!" In this case, the ease of distribution is that it's not outside of the consumer's "normal" sales flow. People already shop in stores. People browse on Amazon. Why are they even bothering going to your website? They're not. If you're a CPG brand, imagine trying to sell cheesecakes online versus in-store. It's ridiculous. And while that's an extreme example, that's how a lot of you sound. What if you can't get sold in Walmart, Whole Foods, or Target? • Go where the money is • Sell on Amazon • Sell on TikTok • Sell on RMN Get to the point where you have some data that you can bring to a merchant and make a pitch. Go and clear 100k units on Target's RMN and they'll start paying attention. All of these growth hacky little tweaks you're making to your website, to your pricing, to your Meta ads structure. It's all just to share a teeny tiny shred of the scraps of the crumbs left on the ground underneath retail's table. • If you can't win on the shelf, you probably have PMF issues • If you don't have the margin to sell wholesale, you're inefficient • If you don't know what I'm talking about, you shouldn't be in biz Stop trying to solve a fundamental problem of your business with more "clever" ways to deliver ads. Instead, focus your attention on getting in front of customers when and where they're trying to buy. Stop fighting for scraps. #cpg #dtc