For many B2C retailers, the problem is not effort. It is fragmentation.
They have a storefront, customers, a website, marketing ideas, and growth ambition, but no clear system connecting those pieces to revenue, customer reach, lower costs, and better decisions.
This case study shows how one Toronto retailer used CDAP funding to reduce the cost of digital strategy, selected MJ Digital as its advisor, and built a practical roadmap for local and national growth.
This case study focuses on a Toronto-based B2C retailer with strong local roots, but a growth model that still depended too heavily on walk-in traffic. The business had a website, but its digital sales and marketing channels were not yet working as a reliable growth engine. Through CDAP, the retailer established a multi-year digital roadmap and practical playbook to expand locally and across Canada, while identifying opportunities to reduce costs through technology, automation, and data. With MJ Digital, the business built a clear roadmap for revenue growth, stronger Google visibility, smarter technology decisions, and a measurement plan to connect digital investment to business performance.
Executive Takeaway
For many B2C retailers, a digital-enabled business, digital marketing and eCommerce are confusing and often viewed as exclusively a technology purchase. It starts with clarity.
This retailer used CDAP to find the right help and fund the strategy and roadmap. They selected MJ Digital to turn that funding opportunity into a practical roadmap for their business growth engine.
The lesson for other retailers is simple: if your business depends too much on walk-in traffic, your website is not producing enough value (in-store or online sales), competitors are easier to find online, or you are unsure where to invest next, the issue is not one tactic. It is the system.
Retailers need a connected plan across technologies, customer channels, people and data.
Current State / Situation
The client was a Toronto-based B2C retailer with two physical locations and seven years of operating history. The business had built a loyal local customer base, but growth was still heavily tied to downtown foot traffic.
That model became harder to sustain after COVID. Sales pressure increased, supply chain costs rose, wages and rent created margin pressure, and the business had limited reach beyond its immediate local market.
The retailer had a website, but the website was not yet connected to a broader digital growth system. The owners needed a clear plan to improve visibility, reach more customers, evaluate the right technology, reduce operating drag, and make better decisions with data
Problems
1. Growth was too dependent on walk-in traffic
The business had strong local roots, but too much revenue still depended on customers physically coming into the store. That limited growth potential and made the business more exposed to local traffic patterns, rising costs, and market disruption.
2. Digital visibility was not strong enough
Customers were searching online, but the retailer was not consistently showing up where demand was already happening.
Weak Google visibility, both in share-of-voice and page rankings meant competitors were winning attention before customers reached the store.
3. The website was not operating as a growth engine
The storefront presence existed in Google Business Listings, along with its brand website, but it was not designed around customer shopping journey to drive browsing interest and conversion. For the owner, this made it hard to know what was working and what needed to change.
4. Technology decisions were unclear
The retailer needed to understand which ‘measuring sticks’ (KPIs) were available, the tools, platforms, and capabilities could support their goals for revenue growth, customer reach, marketing performance and cost reduction.
Without a plan and roadmap, technology investment could easily become expensive guesswork.
5. The business needed a practical plan, not random tactics
The owners did not need more disconnected recommendations. They needed to keep it simple and know what to fix first, what to invest in next, which KPIs mattered, and how to move from digital activity to measurable business performance.
Opportunities
At the time, ISED (Innovation, Science, and Economic Development) CDAP grant program gave eligible Canadian SMEs a way to fund digital strategy before making larger technology investments.
For this Toronto retailer, the CDAP program reduced the cost of hiring consultants and created the opportunity to make smarter digital decisions before committing capital investments.
But the real opportunity was not the grant itself. The real opportunity was to use the funding to build a plan and roadmap how the business could expand and grow its revenue, acquire more customers with in-store traffic and online through eCommerce, expand locally and across the provinces all while lower operating costs and making stronger data-backed decisions.
MJ Digital led the retailer through CDAP to move from fragmented digital effort to a connected growth system across their inventory, POS, eCommerce and customer digital channels as Google and Social. It also considered eCommerce readiness and related technologies for automation and data usage.
The Current State
The company’s digital ecosystem had grown with the business, but the operating model behind it had not kept up.
It had 26 websites across regions, languages, business units, industries, and equipment categories. Different markets used different MarTechs and platforms, 7 agencies, 3 analytics tools, no standarized reporting models, content workflows, or customer journeys.
Brand voice was inconsistent. Messaging and positioning were inconsistent. Systems and MarTechs were not connected. Data wrangling was manual. Content was hard to govern and buit a plethora of SOV debt. SEO was not yet a shared enterprise discipline. Reporting took days, sometimes weeks, of manual data wrangling and PowerPoint production. The outputs often focused on vanity metrics instead of lead generation, funnel movement, pipeline influence, or marketing return.
The Opportunity
As part of a broader enterprise transformation strategy, the opportunity was to turn a fragmented website ecosystem into a global digital experience foundation and demonstrate it as an enterprise asset for customer and revenue growth, at a lower cost-to-serve, and scalable for growth.
This was not just about consolidating websites. It was about creating an internal digital accelerator: a shared operating model, MarTech foundation, performance language, and customer data path that could help the business scale digital capabilities across regions.
For leadership, the opportunity was tied to value realization for a sales and product-driven organization that had a 80 year legacy of operating the same way.
The business could reduce operating cost by removing duplicated websites, platforms, tools, reporting processes, and agency effort. It could improve the return on MarTech investments by standardizing the enterprise foundation around Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and tag management. It could also unify brand, content, SEO, analytics, GDPR and CASL consent, marketing automation, CRM integration, and customer data under one global framework.
The operating model was just as important as the technology as was the strategy had to demonstrate value across both COO and CMO metrics.
Underpinning the strategy, cost-savings, technology, etc. was a goal to centralize the standards and decentralize the execution with a hub-and-spoke model.
Central teams would own strategy, platforms and tech, lead the CoE, governance, compliance, analytics, best practices, and technical quality.
Regional teams would manage localized content, lead voice-of-customer and customer needs into the strategy, campaign execution while adopting global-driven programs simply requirying localization, language / market and compliance nuances, and business-unit execution within shared guardrails.
That model gave the business more control, agility, speed and flexibiltiy without slowing regional ‘I need it yesterday’ demands.
It also created a stronger foundation for growth, agility and scale. With the right website strategy, the digital ecosystem could support changing marketplace dynamics, lead generation tactics, product discovery and customer self-serve personalized preferences, online equipment insights and appointment booking, customer self-service tools, sales intelligence, ABM (account based marketing), personalization, and future CDP (customer data management) and AI (artificial intelligence) enablement.
The bigger opportunity was to make digital easier to govern, easier to measure, and easier to scale.
Instead of operating as disconnected regional teams and websites, the web ecosystem could become a global business platform: one that helped leadership lower cost, improve customer experience, commercialize data, better understand customers and adjust to their always changing demands and connect digital activity to revenue, service, and growth priorities.
Why the retailer selected MJ Digital
The retailer did not need a generic CDAP plan. It needed a partner who understood how retail growth actually works: customer discovery, local visibility, product demand, website experience, technology choices, operational efficiency, and performance measurement.
MJ Digital brought holistic experience across industry knowledge, strategy, digital adoption planning, SEO, technology evaluation, data, automation, and execution support together in one roadmap. That helped the retailer turn a funding opportunity into a practical business growth plan.
Concept & Solution
MJ Digital developed a customized digital adoption plan with playbooks built around a simple idea: the retailer needed a connected digital growth architecture, not a collection of disconnected digital tasks that they could understand.
Workstream 1: Google visibility and customer reach
MJ Digital audited their business across employees, vendor and customers. They created a SWOT and gap analysis, qualitative and data research to see how customers searched and shopped, where competitors were winning, which customer search terms mattered, and how the retailer could improve operations and customer channel visibility across local and broader Canadian search demand.
Workstream 2: Website and customer experience improvement
The plan identified a retail website solution that would improve supporting customer education, product discovery, trust, transactions, in-store traffic and future sales growth.
Workstream 3: eCommerce readiness and platform evaluation
eCommerce was framed as a strategic solution and future growth path. MJ Digital evaluated technology platform options and requirements that would work with their current POS and options the retailer could understand what would be needed to support online selling, inventory workflows, payments, promotions, automation, and customer experience.
Workstream 4: Technology, automation, and cost reduction
MJ Digital assessed solutions and capabilities that could help the business reduce manual work through automation, improve marketing execution and performance, support current operations, and make use of customer data.
Workstream 5: KPI measurement and execution roadmap
The plan gave the retailer a way to connect digital investment to performance through an online dashboard with meaningful KPIs, a means to setup targets to see how they’re facing month over month, and use this to guide decision making and priorities.
Implementation Game Plan
MJ Digital supported the retailer through a structured execution playbook that included:
- Business strategy and goal alignment
- Business assessment and onboarding
- SWOT analysis
- Gap analysis
- Competitor research and insights
- Market, customer, and persona research
- Search engine market research (Google and SEO) and digital advertising performance insight
- Social media assessment across share-of-voice, content, followers, and performance.
- Keyword / customer search term research that informed a content strategy.
- Website audit across technical, on-page, and off-page factors
- Content audit and content strategy
- eCommerce technology assessment and evaluation of 5 platform options
- MarTech assessment and evaluation of 3 platforms to support marketing automation, social media management and digital advertising
- KPI measurement plan with goals, metrics, targets, and reporting needs
- Prioritization matrix: what to do now, next, and later and identify quick wins with high impact.
- Revenue opportunity forecast
- Investment, cost, resource, and risk considerations
- Execution roadmap and playbook
- Governance and change management summary
- Research and planning artifacts to support execution
The roadmap was designed to help the business make better decisions before spending more. It showed what to prioritize, why each move mattered, and how the retailer could measure whether the strategy was working.
Results & Impact
The retailer left with more than a CDAP PDF. It had a practical growth roadmap they could execute that connected digital strategy to customer and revenue opportunity, technology decisions, operating efficiencies, and performance measurement.
Delivered outcomes
1. A funded digital adoption roadmap
The retailer used CDAP to reduce the cost of digital strategy and establish a multi-year plan for growth.
2. A clearer Google & SEO growth path
The business gained visibility into how search demand, keywords, competitors, and content could support local and national customer growth.
3. A website sales-engine
The roadmap identified how the website could better support customer education, product discovery, trust, sales, and measurement. Simply but it evolved from a brochure website to a new sales channel with unlimited growth for the business
4. An eCommerce readiness plan
MJ Digital evaluated what would be required to support a stronger future online sales channel, including eCommerce platform fit, cost, and technology integrates for inventory, payments, automation, and operational needs.
5. A technology and automation view
The plan identified tools and capabilities that could improve operations, reduce manual effort, and support better business decisions.
6. A KPI measurement plan
The retailer gained a measurement structure to track progress and connect digital investment to business performance.
7. A prioritized execution roadmap
The business could now see what to fix first, what to invest in next, and how to move from planning to execution.
“CDAP helped us connect with the right expertise, reduce the cost of planning and show us the 'how'. But MJ Digital helped us understand where the real growth opportunity was."