Skill in capital allocation (how a leadership group decides to invest their money) is a foundational success driver for a business. For brands and retailers, investment in digital offers the highest returns.
Investments in digital not only have a strong immediate ROI (payback periods in months not years), but they also have great long term ROI. This is due to the fact that the investments build a stronger direct relationship with our customers, as well as allow us to continuously improve our product offering and overall value proposition.
If you own a digital or ecommerce budget, make the case for your cost budgets (internal and external) to be variable. If you're growing at 300%, make sure you have the mechanisms in place to invest with that growth throughout the year. If you're interviewing for a new role within digital, ask them how they think about capital allocation.
With all of that said, many brands are still working with fixed annual budgets. Mapping your backlog against a prioritization matrix is a useful exercise to go through if you find yourself with limited resources. Below is the model we use at Domaine:
