Two economies arriving at completely different speeds
Columbus already has one of the densest concentrations of specialty-retail brand headquarters in the country. Now a generational semiconductor investment is building a second economy next to it, from scratch.
Benchmarks in this market
- Avg. revenue growth, retail brands
- +214%Avg. revenue growth, retail brands
- Pipeline closed, technical B2B
- $8.4MPipeline closed, technical B2B
- Qualified RFQs, industrial suppliers
- +184%Qualified RFQs, industrial suppliers
- Sales cycle length, ABM
- -29%Sales cycle length, ABM
How we work here: Remotely from our San Francisco office, with ET coverage for calls and travel for kickoffs. We don't claim a Columbus office we don't have.
Clients across every market
What's actually different about the Columbus metro
Columbus runs two genuinely distinct economies that happen to share a metro. The first is decades-old and consumer-facing: an unusually dense cluster of specialty-retail and apparel brand headquarters has grown up around the city, giving Columbus a real concentration of brand marketing, merchandising, and DTC talent that most B2B-coded Midwest metros don't have. The second is brand new and industrial: Intel's tens-of-billions-of-dollars semiconductor fab investment just outside the city — often described locally as the anchor of a 'Silicon Heartland' — is pulling in a supplier and construction ecosystem with genuine procurement budgets and multi-year timelines. A retail brand marketing team here and a semiconductor-supply-chain vendor selling into the same metro are not competing for the same talent, the same buyers, or the same marketing playbook, even though they're five miles apart.
Retail-brand marketing talent is genuinely deep here
Decades of specialty-retail headquarters activity means Columbus has real bench strength in brand, merchandising, and DTC marketing — a different profile from most Midwest B2B-industrial metros, and a genuine advantage for consumer brands building a team here rather than relocating to a coast.
The semiconductor supply chain is a new buyer with no local playbook yet
Vendors, contractors, and suppliers moving in around the fab investment are procurement-driven, technical, and largely unfamiliar to agencies used to Columbus's retail-brand side of the market. Specification-led content and account-based approaches — not brand campaigns — are what this buyer actually evaluates.
Two buyer profiles means two playbooks, not one blended one
A retail brand headquartered here wants creative and brand marketing; a fab-adjacent supplier wants technical credibility and long-cycle demand generation. Treating Columbus as one market produces work that's mediocre at both rather than genuinely good at either.
The talent market is tightening around both economies at once
Retail-brand marketers and semiconductor-adjacent technical talent are both drawing on the same regional labor pool at the same time, which is starting to affect hiring costs and timelines for both — a dynamic still underpriced by companies planning as if only one of these economies exists.
What usually moves first in Columbus.
Based on what tends to be the binding constraint for companies in this market. Your audit may point somewhere else — we go where the numbers say.
Industry playbooks relevant in Columbus
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
We'd worked with three agencies who all wanted to spend more on ads. Digital Squad was the first to open our P&L and tell us our hero product was losing money. That conversation was uncomfortable and it changed the business.
The repositioning work paid for itself in the first two closed deals. We stopped being the cheap option and started being the obvious one. Our reps say discovery calls feel completely different now.
We spent four months optimizing audiences when the answer was 'make more ads.' Digital Squad didn't just tell us that — they built the machine that produces them. We haven't touched an audience setting in months.
Columbus questions, answered straight.
Yes, genuinely — the depth of brand, merchandising, and DTC talent that's accumulated here over decades means you can build a real in-house marketing capability locally rather than defaulting to a coastal hire or a generalist agency with no specific retail-brand context. We treat that local talent density as an asset to work alongside, not a reason you don't need outside help.
Other markets we work in
Let's look at your numbers.
A free 30-minute teardown of your funnel, ads, and site — run against what actually works in the Columbus metro. You keep the findings either way.