http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/consumer-behavior-research-purchase-analysis/
I found this post interesting for different many reasons; how Avinash introduce the need of convince potential clients through a very useful tool, the Consumer Barometer (http://www.consumerbarometer.com), how this tool can help a company to know its potential consumers in different countries, how they behave, how they research (online or offline), where do they buy…
But I think if you want to convince your potential clients to invest a big amount of money in digital marketing you also need to provide them other proofs, they must know the importance of having a global digital marketing plan.
Ten years ago, the communications agencies did not even think about to get into the digital world and the consulting firms just provide corporate webs and a little bit of e-commerce. If you compare that with the world today, things had changed a lot.
Corporate webs, e-commerce, email marketing, SEO, social media, adwords, Google analytics, etc. Nowadays the variety of options that Internet offers to the companies to increase the profitability is huge. But that brings out a problem, which one should I choose? Where should I invest the money in order to get a bigger profitability?
Sadly, a lot of companies think that digital marketing is just social media when the most important thing is to have a really well defined corporate web, without this, it is quite difficult to get good results.
For any company that wants to increase its presence on internet, the first need is to make a global study, a very deep analysis, in this way the company will be able to find out what type of corporate web the company needs, how to improve its positioning on search engines (SEO), if the company should be (or not) in the social media (and in which of them), if the company needs to work on its digital brand reputation, how to invest in digital media to get some return, etc. So, before starting to use Internet as a channel, it is very important to have a global digital marketing plan that allows knowing the needs of your company and defining very well the introduction of any single action.
Focusing again in the Consumer Barometer, this tool is extraordinary useful in the first stages of the development of the digital marketing plan. This tool will allow the company to do a very good segmentation of the consumers, by countries, allowing the company to design a different strategy depending of the country.
It is also very interesting how consumers access to Internet. This knowledge will tell us if we should develop (or not) an app for the main platforms (idevices, android, windows 8…). Let get an example, if we are a bank and we are studying if we should launch an app to let our customers make all their bank operations (transactions, check the balance of their accounts, etc), we will probably launch it first in the languages of the countries that have an intensive use of mobile devices to access to Internet. Also if we cannot launch the app worldwide, we could use this tool to choose which countries are the first.
In summary, I found this tool very interesting but I do not think this tool only can convince a potential client to invest a few millions in digital marketing.
Other sources http://www.puromarketing.com