Essential Awareness Stage Tools of the Multicultural Marketing Funnel

The awareness stage is by far the most difficult obstacle in the multicultural marketing funnel. Attracting anyone's attention in the age of technology is difficult. These challenges are compounded by the fact that multicultural consumers are elusive and non-traditional in their media consumption behavior.  

 

 

In order ensure your multicultural strategy is targeted and on message, you need to have a leadership development process. From experience, I find many small businesses don't implore the effective use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. However, there may not be a more important tool for your marketing strategy. Before you go spending a small fortune on a shiny new website, consider investing in a solid CRM. Think of it as the central intelligence agency or operating system for all your marketing.  

 

For the Multicultural Marketing funnel, the CRM is vital. Remember, the goal in the awareness stage should be to hear and understand your best customer. Your CRM will help you do so. Your CRM should allow easy integration of all your marketing activities in one place, allowing you to view the evolution of leads as you nurture them into customers. Building a lead profile via your CRM will allow you to, at a glance, gain a better understanding of what your buyer persona's pain is. Consider a CRM tool that integrates social listening, publishing, and reporting as this is where multicultural prospects tend to be most transparent.CRM software also helps put your best foot forward by helping to segment an audience, perfect messaging for targeting email campaigns as well. The more intuitive your CRM, the more effective you'll be in communicating with multicultural consumers.  

 

Its true you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so make it count. That's why the awareness stage of the multicultural marketing funnel is so vital.  It is in this step where you introduce yourself to potential customers but also the stage of the funnel that tends to be most leaky. One really effective way to make a great first impression and have airtight communication for your business is via marketing automation. Because Multicultural consumers want to be heard and historically have had challenges withing being understood, they expect your attention as a prerequisite of their loyalty.  

 

Read our Ultimate Guide to The Multicultural Marketing Funnel

 

Nurturing any relationship, business or personal, is hard.  Imagine then being in a relationship with hundreds, if not thousands. Impossible. This is why marketing automation can play an important role in your funnel.  Every interaction, every email, every direct message and a phone call can be triggered by your CRM to issue a well crafted and premeditated response that lets the prospective customer know they were heard, their inquiry has been received, what the next action that will be taken and when.  

 

Internally, automation also makes it easier for your teams to determine who's responsible for taking the next action.  Instead of waiting for someone to check the general voicemail, inbox or social media account, an action is triggered sending an alert to the appropriate person within the organization giving them the customer profile to this point in the funnel, what action should be taken and how to take it. Take the guesswork out of multicultural marketing. Automation is essential for businesses that have multi-lingual customers. Often times, there are a select few employees that can service these customers. Don't waste your time or the customer's figuring out who that person is. Identify it on the front end with an internal and external automated communications process.  

 

Predictive analytics is a tool that should be used in every stage of the multicultural marketing funnel but if not implemented in the awareness stage, prove futile. Predictive Analytics help predicts marketers understand, at a glance, the likelihood of consumer actions, namely, will they buy.  At the awareness stage in the multicultural marketing funnel, gathering the right intelligence helps marketers optimize marketing collateral, timing, frequency and offers to best engage the consumer as they move along the buyer's journey. Instead of utilizing a one size fits all approach to your marketing efforts, predictive analytics help the marketer understand when to execute which tactics leading to higher sales and customer retention without increasing costs. Tools like discounts can be tailored to specific buyer personas when they're most likely to exhibit conversion behavior.  

 

Predicting a purchase from the awareness stage is tricky and if done incorrectly can cause a leaky funnel. Data points like a number of website clicks, the frequency of emails open, demographic and hyperlocal geographic data all can play a role in helping to create effective predictions. Savvy and intuitive CRM will help you do this through lead scoring models by calculating pre-purchase behavior of current leads to the pre-purchase behavior of previous leads that converted into sales. Those current leads that exhibit behavior most similar to previous to customers get higher lead scores. Marketers can then tailor activities around those indicative behaviors to let the multicultural lead know they're listening and understand.  This allows even the smallest businesses to safely invest with confidence time and resources into that prospective customer.