Thinking “outside-in” marketing

The Outside-In strategy focusses on delivering all aspects of marketing from a customers’ perspective.

Companies using this approach first seek to immerse themselves in the mind of their clients to fully understand their needs before designing their marketing strategy.

How can this be achieved?

Remind yourself of your market
By taking the time to carry out research, you can identify and act on a range of opportunities and threats to your business.

Through taking the important step in getting to know your market correctly, it is possible to build stronger plans for the coming months with context as well as fresh ideas. It also lessens the risk of being caught out by market changes due to not having information at the ready.

Market research can help with;

• Identifying gaps for business opportunities (e.g. new services or products, or even just rearranging existing business features)
• Anticipating and acting on trends or changes (e.g. technology, or customer habits)
• Evaluating and understanding customers’ needs
• Customer satisfaction – are your customers happy? If not, why?
• Choosing which method of advertising works best for you
• Keeping ahead of the competition

Get to know your customers
One of the biggest errors companies make is trying to attract everyone. By precisely defining your Target Audience to a distinct set of customers, you can get into the shoes of those you are focusing on. This allows you to tailor your marketing strategy to your target customer, which should ultimately increase your marketing and businesses effectiveness.

Get out a crystal ball
You’ve reviewed your market, analysed your client base and now you need to use that data to look forward. How can you pull this information together to keep your company one step ahead?

Keeping up with trends allows you to stay in touch with your target customers wants, their buying habits and all the new technologies which can improve your business for customers.

Schedule some meetings
With the rise of technology, face to face meetings with customers is starting to become a rarity. This is because technologies such as phone calls or video communications allow for easy and often cheaper alternatives to face to face meetings.

However, face to face contact with customers is vital as it helps to trust, understanding and a feeling of a shared goal. This can be hard to replicate through online communication.

From experience, it is generally also more productive as face-to-face meetings can generate greater ideas in the initial stages via brainstorming.

Attend industry events
Finally, on the theme of real-time interaction look ahead at the events, awards and gatherings scheduled for the next year. Ideally, you will also be exhibiting at a few of these well-chosen events.

That different perspective, maybe even attending as an individual rather than your organisation, can allow you to review your position, have different conversations with competitors, partners and clients in a new environment.

Think too of creating your own events and create a unique/memorable spin. Lasting Impressions…