Digital Marketing is Just Like Your Monthly Rent
Why Paying for an Online Store Isn't the Same as Renting Physical Retail Space
At Monolith, we often onboard traditional business owners that are used to physical retail and physical goods. The moment they open up their online store, they're often disappointed that the sales aren't as good as their physical store.
The issue here is that most business owners think that paying a subscription to Shopify or paying a commission to a marketplace (such as Amazon or Lazada) is equivalent to paying rent for a physical space in a mall.
That can't be more false.
Ask yourself: what are you really buying when you rent a space in the mall?
The answer: what you're really buying is foot traffic, and you're not just renting an area to display your goods.
When you think of the reasons why people visit a mall -- it's normally for social reasons or personal entertainment (i.e. catching up with friends over coffee, kids going to the arcade, bonding over lunch or dinner, read a book or study at a coffee shop, or just enjoy a shared experience with a loved one).
Shopping is just a secondary activity -- stores need to interrupt the normal footpath by presenting a retail experience that resonates with the person passing by (e.g. the Lululemon retail experience would be vastly different compared to something like the North Face).
Now, when you set up an online store, you're not guaranteed traffic from the start. Unlike a mall, there is no existing foot traffic guaranteed for your domain. The domain is just literally a place for you to display goods. To bridge this gap, this is where digital marketing comes in.
Digital marketing is no different than the mall experience -- you'd want to catch people where they tend to socialize or where they'd want to entertain themselves. This could mean social platforms (e.g. Instagram, TikTok, Twitch) or information platforms (e.g. news sites), then your opportunity as a brand is to insert a relevant message in this natural digital foot path of the user.
Digital marketing can go deeper (i.e. how to target the right users, how to sure you're sending the right message), but when you think of revenue generation in the lens of "ways to get traffic" and "ways to get the sale", one can better understand the nuances and differences between offline vs online sales.
Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Consulting (a growth marketing agency) and Mai (a writing software for marketers & business owners). He is an honoree of Forbes 30 under 30 and Tatler Asia’s Generation T.