B2B Marketing: Find Your Focus with an Outside → In Approach

Are you overlooking crucial factors that could make or break your B2B marketing strategy? If your world is changing fast, so is your customers’ world. Concentrating on seeing things from their point of view could bring greater focus to your strategy.

It’s easy to get caught up in your company’s internal agenda—the products you offer, the services you provide, and the ideas your team has brewing. Short-term pressures, overconfidence, and silo mentalities can leave us blinkered to what’s happening outside the walls of our organisations.

But companies entrenched in an "Inside→Out" mindset, driven predominantly by internal perspectives, often struggle to adapt to changing conditions. And at the moment, the world is changing too rapidly to take your eye off the ball. Markets are continuously disrupted, the competitive landscape shifts, and buyer behaviours evolve. Ignoring or being unaware of these external pressures can significantly undermine your marketing efforts.

Smart marketers understand that the secret to maintaining competitiveness and relevance lies in balancing internal needs with external realities. 

This article explores the "Outside→In" approach and why it is not just beneficial but critical in today’s market. We’ll explore how embracing it will help your business become more adaptive, responsive, and ultimately, more aligned with the real needs of your customers.

What is an Outside→In Strategy?

An "Outside→In" perspective is a strategic approach that prioritises the external factors influencing a business–such as customer needs, market trends, and the competitive landscape–as the primary drivers of decision-making and innovation.

In an Outside→In approach, companies seek to understand and adapt to the evolving needs and preferences of their audience. They do this by gathering and analysing data from various external sources, such as customer feedback and reviews, market research and trend reports, and competitor analysis and benchmarking.

By synthesising insights from these sources and investing time to see the bigger picture, companies can anticipate changes in the market, identify untapped opportunities, and head off potential threats to their business.

This enables them to make more informed decisions about how to allocate their resources, develop their products and services, and engage with their customers. They can also be more proactive in anticipating and responding to changes in the market, rather than simply reacting to them after the fact.

Why Adopt an Outside→In Approach?

By embracing an Outside→In perspective, B2B companies can create more customer-centric, responsive, and resilient organisations that are better equipped to succeed in today's business environment.

Foster Customer-centricity

Is your marketing strategy talking at your customers, or is it really listening to what they need? By putting customers at the centre of your strategy, you can create more personalised and relevant experiences, fostering stronger customer relationships, loyalty, and revenue.

Outside-in analyses provide valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points at every stage of the buyer's journey. These insights help to align your marketing, sales, product, and brand teams around a shared understanding of your target audience, enabling them to collaborate effectively in delivering customer-centric solutions.

One key area where insights can drive meaningful improvements is in your content planning. By leveraging data on customer interests, challenges, and content preferences, you can develop more targeted and resonant marketing. Let this data establish the marketing channels, topics, and formats that will form the backbone of your content strategy. 

Leveraging data on customer behaviour, preferences, and journeys also helps you to optimise your advertising strategies. In particular, it enables more targeted and personalised campaigns across channels so you can directly address customers' needs.

This data also offers the chance to identify and address gaps in your marketing strategy. These might include under used channels, missed opportunities for personalisation, or ineffective content formats. By continuously gathering and analysing external data, you can stay aligned with your target audience and make data-driven decisions to optimise your approach.

Gain a Competitive Edge

A deep understanding of the competitive landscape and customer preferences helps you differentiate your offerings and value propositions, leading to a sustainable competitive advantage.

Look for ways to differentiate your value propositions, identify market gaps, and deliver superior customer experiences. When necessary, reposition your brand, products, or services to stand out and meet evolving customer preferences and marketing dynamics. 

Conducting a thorough analysis of your direct and indirect competitors provides valuable insights into their strategies, strengths, weaknesses and whitespaces you can capitalise on. By monitoring their marketing campaigns, product offerings, and customer feedback, you can identify areas where your company can differentiate itself and deliver superior value to your target audience.

An outside-in lens also helps you identify the key benefits and features that matter most to your customers, allowing you to craft messaging and experiences that highlight your competitive advantages. 

For instance, if your analysis reveals that customers value sustainability and social responsibility and your competitors don’t occupy that space, you can emphasise your company's commitment to these values in your branding and marketing communications.

Identify Opportunities for Growth

Outside-in analyses can uncover unmet customer needs, emerging trends, and market gaps that present opportunities for innovation, product development, and differentiation. Insights help you develop targeted solutions, including products, services, and messaging, that fill a void for your audience.

As customer expectations evolve (e.g. demanding greater personalisation, more self-service options etc.), gaps can emerge between what the market currently provides and what customers will want in the future. These represent opportunities to develop new solutions tailored to those unmet needs.

By closely studying customer behaviours, pain points, and desires, you may uncover needs that are not being adequately addressed. For example, your analysis might reveal that customers would benefit from bundled or integrated solutions that no single provider currently offers, identifying opportunities for reconfiguring existing products and services in new combinations. 

Monitoring broader societal, technological, or consumer trends can also reveal emerging customer preferences or market shifts that existing offerings do not cater to. Identifying these gaps early allows you to get ahead of the curve.

Future-proof your Strategy

Gathering insights into customer needs, the competitive landscape, and market trends helps you to adapt quickly to sudden changes and future-proof your strategies.

By understanding evolving customer expectations and market dynamics, companies can refine their value propositions to remain differentiated, relevant, and engaging for their target audiences. This might involve rethinking propositions in the context of emerging technologies like AI and marketing automation, as well as new distribution channels.

For example, a cloud software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) tools may need to adapt its value proposition from a basic data management tool to an AI-powered solution for smarter customer engagement across the entire sales cycle as AI capabilities become more advanced.

Optimise your Technology Investments

New martech capabilities can enable innovative, highly automated offerings aligned with changing customer needs. By aligning your martech investments with insights gained from outside-in analyses, you can create a technology stack that supports your ability to engage customers and deliver value. 

If your analysis reveals that customers increasingly prefer personalised, real-time interactions, for example, you might invest in AI-powered chatbots or marketing automation tools that can deliver tailored content and support across multiple channels.

Similarly, if your analysis uncovers emerging trends in the market or competitor activities, you can use this information to guide your martech strategy. Generative AI, for instance, is opening up opportunities for operational efficiencies and new ways of gaining a competitive advantage from data.

However, with the proliferation of martech options, it's essential to approach investments with a clear strategy and avoid falling into the trap of adopting every new tool or platform. Analyses will help you evaluate each technology's potential ROI, along with considering factors such as integration with existing systems, scalability, and streamlining to avoid redundancies.

External Insights Worth Exploring

One difficulty of shifting to an outside-in strategy is knowing where to begin. These focus areas will offer you comprehensive and useful information. 

Market Dynamics

Analysing the state of the market is essential to outside-in thinking. It helps you make sound marketing decisions built on evidence rather than intuition. 

Identifying Trends

Industry trends reflect customer interests and changes in the market. Use these sources to assess them:

• Google Trends: Use this tool to identify trending topics and search queries related to your industry. 

• Industry reports and market research: Review recent reports and research from reputable sources. Many companies conduct and publish original market research studies. While potentially biased towards their own solutions, these reports can still provide useful data on industry trends. Consider sources such as management consultancies like Gartner, Forrester, PwC, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group, as well as industry leaders.

• Primary market research: Get first-hand information by conducting your own surveys and interviews with industry experts.

• Regulatory and legal factors: Regulatory changes or new laws/policies can significantly impact market dynamics. Monitor changes that could influence product development, marketing practices, data privacy requirements and overall operations. 

Avoid taking information from a single source, as combining data will foster a deeper understanding of market dynamics.

Examining Key Market Indicators and Benchmarks

When analysing market-related data, pay close attention to crucial indicators such as market size, growth rate, market share, and customer acquisition costs 

Use this information to set benchmarks within your organisation, considering industry standards and historical performance. Note changes in market indicators and interpret how they might influence your business. 

Acting on Market Data

Market data helps you address your business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Conduct a SWOT analysis, where you look at your organisation's strengths and weaknesses against the backdrop of threats and opportunities in the market. Keep in mind that analysing market dynamics isn't a one-time job. It's an ongoing process of monitoring trends and data points and using them to adapt your marketing plans. 

Economic Factors

Like market dynamics, the economy is beyond your control. However, you can leverage data to take a proactive rather than reactive stance toward shifts in the economy.

Points to Consider

When evaluating economic concerns, focus on indicators specific to your industry and target markets and general data, such as GDP, inflation rates, and data like consumer confidence indices and unemployment rates.

Make sure you use reliable data from trusted sources, such as government websites and economic research institutions. 

Assessing the Impact of Economic Conditions

Changes to the economy affect purchasing decisions as businesses tighten their budgets, ultimately trickling down to your sales, revenue, and profits. Monitoring economic conditions makes it less likely that sudden changes will catch you off-guard.

You should also stay on top of industry reports that gather business leader's reactions to the prevailing conditions.

Prepare yourself for any outcome with scenario planning that examines how you would respond to different economic disruptions. 

Adapting Marketing Strategies to Economic Shifts

You can't change your marketing campaigns every time there's a minor shift in the economy, but you can adjust to ongoing or expected conditions. This might include altering your promotional or pricing strategies or changing your value proposition.

When times get tough, communicating value and empathising with your customers shows you’re a trusted partner with worthwhile products or services. Protect your interests by optimising marketing budgets and resources. 

Customer Dynamics

Your marketing methods should reflect a basic truth—customers are the heart of your business. The success of an outside-in marketing strategy largely hinges on what you can learn about your customers. 

Conducting Customer Research 

Use different types of market research to tap into the voice of customer (VoC), gather feedback, and better understand your buyers.

One of the most common is creating and distributing surveys via your website, email newsletters, or other marketing channels. 

Qualitative data complements quantitative market research for richer customer insights. For even more in-depth insights, conduct research through focus groups and interviews that dig deeper into your customers' specific feelings and concerns. You can also put in place processes to learn from support interactions and customer reviews. 

Employ social media to provide a direct window into customer pain points, preferences and sentiments. Listening tools help you analyse what people are saying and extract insights you can apply to your marketing strategy. 

Analysing the Customer Experience 

Use what you’ve learned about your customers to outline who they are and provide your internal teams with templates of buyer persona profiles. Developing detailed personas based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioural data helps everyone understand your target audience.

In addition, map out changing customer journeys to identify touchpoints and optimise their experiences. Focus on how they'll feel at each stage and how you can adjust your marketing approach in response. Analysing customer data helps you identify trends and behavioural shifts that could affect purchase decisions. 

Acting on Customer Insights

Put the data you've gathered to use, adapting your products, services, and marketing messages to their evolving needs. If your customers have diverse preferences, use personalisation and segmentation methods to address all of them equally but individually. 

Leverage intent data to determine what questions in-market buyers are asking online. Finally, determine what it will take to provide an answer to their questions and help to solve their problems.

Competitor Dynamics

Competition in today's market is fierce. Understanding the competitive landscape is crucial for understanding overall market dynamics. This includes identifying major players and their market share and assessing new entrants disrupting the market.

Leveraging data about your competitors ensures you’re taking the most effective approach to attracting and maintaining customer relationships. 

Conducting a Competitor Analysis 

Conduct a comprehensive competitor analysis that looks at a variety of elements, such as product portfolios and pricing strategies, target audiences, marketing strategies, and hiring practices. 

This information is widely available through public sources, including websites, shareholder reports, press releases, and industry press. Your goal is to apply what you learn about your competitors’ strengths and to benchmark against key competitors on important metrics, not copy them. 

Tools for Monitoring Competitor Activities

Use tools to simplify your research, such as setting up Google Alerts for competitor mentions and relevant keywords. Likewise, use social media monitoring tools to track competitor activity, engagement, and brand sentiment. Turn to competitive intelligence tools, such as SEMrush or SpyFu, to analyse competitor advertising and SEO strategies. 

Using Competitor Insights to Inform Your Strategy

Your competitor analysis pinpoints gaps in the market so you can fill them. It also emphasises your business' unique value proposition, preventing it from getting lost in a mix of similar offers. Use competitor benchmarking to set realistic goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business. 

Technological Trends

Marketing technology (martech) accounts for around 25% of the a, and it's important to invest those funds wisely. Investigating technological trends helps you determine what technologies will connect with customers and offer the most benefit to your organisation. 

Staying Informed About Emerging Technologies

Impulsively jumping on every technological trend is risky, so it’s crucial to learn about the benefits and costs of new developments first. Read resources and publications for marketing technology trends, such as Martech Today, Marketing Land, or Gartner. 

Attend industry conferences and webinars to gain exposure to innovative ideas. You can also share knowledge and experiences with other marketing professionals by networking online and at in-person events. 

Adopting New Technologies

Innovative technologies like AI and automation offer substantial benefits to marketers. Around a using AI incorporate it into their marketing because of its versatile applications, including:

• Chatbots that communicate with prospects or customers with low-level needs

• Personalised recommendations based on customer actions

• Predictive analytics that give you insights into what actions customers might take in the future

Automation can also speed up and simplify essential marketing processes, such as lead nurturing, email campaigns, and social media management. 

Before making a change, take time to evaluate a technology's potential impact and return on investment (ROI). Consider your budget, your team’s skills, and integration with your existing systems. If a technology is relevant and feasible, create a phased implementation plan. Testing and scaling new technologies gives your team time to confirm that they're a good match for your business. 

Creating a Flexible and Adaptable Martech Stack

Your martech stack comprises every analysis tool, piece of software, and online platform you use, including these core components: 

• Customer relationship management (CRM) software 

• Marketing automation tools 

• Analytics tools 

• Content management systems 

Your tools will inevitably change as you scale your business. With a modular stack, you can make changes with minimal impacts to other technologies or systems, maintaining consistency in your marketing efforts. 

Staying on top of changing technology doesn't mean you need to change your martech stack constantly. However, it's worthwhile regularly assessing and optimising it based on developing needs and technologies. 

Go Outside-In With 1827 Marketing

Making the shift to an outside-in mindset can be a major change for companies that have been internally driven. It requires taking a step back from your existing framework and priorities and making room for new ideas based on external data. Examining developments in technology and the economy, not to mention the market, your customers, and your competitors, allows you to refine and future-proof your marketing.

That’s not to say that making the change is easy. Maybe you’ve never done a complete competitor analysis before, or you feel overwhelmed at the prospect of taking on advanced technologies. You might feel boxed-in by the structure of your current marketing strategy and struggle to see how an outside-in approach could improve it.

No matter what challenges you’re facing, 1827 Marketing is here to help. We know how important it is to keep your finger on the pulse of the market, and an outside-in approach can help you achieve that goal. Book a demo to see how 1827 Marketing can work with you to create a successful marketing strategy.