When your biggest customer is also your competitor
If you sell through retailers and directly to customers at the same time, you have a conflict most marketing advice ignores.
Benchmarks in this market
- Avg. revenue growth
- +214%Avg. revenue growth
- Contribution margin lift
- +68%Contribution margin lift
- Avg. store conversion rate
- 3.6%Avg. store conversion rate
- Repeat purchase rate
- +41%Repeat purchase rate
Illustrative ranges for engagements of this type, not verified Minneapolis-specific client data. Orientation, not a guarantee. Your starting point changes the range.
How we work here: Remotely from our San Francisco office, with CT coverage for calls and travel for kickoffs. We don't claim a Minneapolis office we don't have.
Clients across every market
What's actually different about the Twin Cities
The Twin Cities are home to big retailers and the consumer brands that supply them.
That creates a tension people rarely talk about. A brand's own online store competes with the retail partners who bring in most of its sales. Pricing, exclusives, promotion timing and even bidding on your own brand name in Google become negotiations, not decisions.
Marketing advice written for online-only brands assumes a freedom these companies just don't have.
Retail partners limit your pricing
Undercutting your stores online puts the relationship that brings in most of your revenue at risk. So direct sales here are built on exclusives, bundles and online-only versions, not on lower prices.
Your stockists bid on your brand name
Your own retailers often compete with you in Google ads for your brand name. Whether to bid, step back or negotiate is a business decision as much as a media one.
Retail and online numbers rarely match
What retailers order and what shoppers actually buy are different numbers, on different delays. Marketing credited to your online store often drove a store purchase nobody can trace.
Retail calendars set the seasons
Buying cycles, shelf resets and promotion windows are set by your partners. Your budget has to follow their calendar, not an even split across the year.
What usually moves first in Minneapolis.
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 Minneapolis
Specific playbooks for Minneapolis businesses
- Paid Ads for Food & Beverage Brands
- Paid Ads for B2B Companies
- Paid Ads for Nonprofits
- Paid Ads for E-commerce & DTC
- Email Marketing for E-commerce & DTC
- CRO for E-commerce & DTC
- SEO for Professional Services
- Web Development for Professional Services
- Paid Ads for Professional Services
- Web Development for Industrial & Manufacturing
- Web Development for E-commerce & DTC
- SEO for E-commerce & DTC
- SEO for Industrial & Manufacturing
- CRO for Professional Services
- CRO for Industrial & Manufacturing
- E-commerce for Industrial & Manufacturing
- SEO for Food & Beverage Contract Manufacturers (Co-Packers)
- E-commerce for E-commerce & DTC
- Paid Ads for Industrial & Manufacturing
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
We were three weeks from cutting the channel that was actually feeding us, and we would have had a defensible-looking dashboard justifying it the whole way. What I found hardest was accepting that our reporting had been wrong for two years, not that it needed fixing.
The hardest part was telling the board our old reporting had been optimistic, and that we would now be running fewer tests and winning less often. Watching the conversion rate move for the first time in two years made that conversation retrospectively easy.
We had spent four years measuring the content team on how much they published, and then wondering why none of it ranked. Deleting two hundred and fifty pages was the most uncomfortable thing we have done and the most obviously correct in hindsight.
Minneapolis questions, answered straight.
Make your online store add to the business instead of competing with it: online-only versions, bundles, subscriptions and early access, not lower prices. Some brands also share their online demand data with retailers, which makes the partnership more valuable.
Let's look at your numbers.
A free 30-minute teardown of your funnel, ads, and site, run against what actually works in the Twin Cities. You keep the findings either way.