Shift to Digital: Part 3 - Driving Growth

What questions need answers?

In the continuation of a series of posts on shifting major portions of a marketing budget around, this post looks at the goal of "Driving Growth" and lists out a series of questions that could form projects.

Since growth focuses on results, the questions in this post tend to focus on monetary issues.  I'll save the consumer/customer questions to a post on building brand and category leadership.

The list:

1. How do sales change with respect to specific marketing activities?
2. How much of the effect of a tactic is offensive (lift/incremental) and how much is defensive (baseline/erosion)?
3. What is the sensitivity in sales to different marketing mix allocations?
4. What is the source of promotional sales? Brand, category, store, net-new?
5. What level of digital air cover is required to replace offline air cover?
6. To what extent to national decisions impact local sales?
7. What is the interaction between tactics?
8. Where is there headroom to actually grow the business?
9. What role does competitive presence play in our sales?
10. How much of a store's growth is controlled by the organization?
11. How can content be repurposed and distributed to impact sales?
12. What friction in the current business model prevents sales?
13. Which current non-digital steps could be (should be??) made digital?
14. How can decisions in-store be facilitated with mobile content and features?
15. What is the role of communal content (reviews, social) in making/speeding the choice process?
16. How should budgets be allocated geographically?
17. How do we forecast or extrapolate from a test to a broad roll out?
18. What digital/retail trends will work for us over 3-5 years?
19. What is the allowable marketing cost of each tactic in each area?
20. Do the puzzle pieces form more than one marketing plan?

All of the above require thinking about the holistic environment in which a store operates rather than looking at it from a channel perspective.   In the end, this is a problem of allocation where not all the information is at the same level or potentially not even capable of being integrated.  Our job is to reduce the risk of moving 50% of a budget away from one tactic to a collection of others by quantifying as many of the variables as possible.