Don’t Shout About Features, Connect With Customers About Solutions

What would change if your marketing focused on what your best customers need instead of what you sell?

It’s a simple question, but it’s often the simple questions that have the most impact.

First, a reality check.

Your marketing is drowning in noise. Every day, your potential customers are exposed to 6,000-10,000 marketing messages. Most of these messages follow the same tired formula: “Here’s our product. Here’s what it does. Here’s why we’re great.”

And what’s happening now? 

Your marketing is contributing to the noise. 

This means your offers go unnoticed because your marketing doesn’t break through the noise.

I’ve worked with many business owners who struggle with this reality and are frustrated that their marketing isn’t delivering results. They’ve increased their budgets, hired an agency, and tried the latest tactics, and yet the needle barely moves. Leads trickle in but don’t convert, and the customers who buy don’t stay. Revenue growth has stalled despite growing marketing expenses.

The problem is probably not your budget or your team, or even your product. The problem is your approach.

Most companies practice what I call “inside-out marketing.” They start with what they want to say about themselves or what they think their customers want to hear, and push it out. 

But the businesses that consistently break through the noise have flipped the script. Their approach is “outside-in marketing.” Their marketing starts with what their customers need at each stage of their journey and follows them along their path.

This outside-in approach centers on a powerful insight: not all customers are created equal. In fact, a small percentage of your customers are what I call your ‘force multipliers,’ and they drive most of your success. When you identify these best customers and organize your marketing around their journey using what I call the Hub + Spoke strategy, you create connections that naturally break through the noise. The result? More qualified leads, higher conversion rates, and sustainable growth without increasing your marketing budget.

“Efficiency is doing things right. Efficacy is doing the right things.” ~ James’ism

This isn’t just theory. Recently, a podcaster told me about the Hootsuite case study. He told me that it mirrors this transformation. I looked it up and he was right. After years of flat revenue, they completely revitalized their growth by shifting from talking about themselves to serving their customers’ needs.

In this post, I’ll show you how Hootsuite made this transformation, explain why it worked so spectacularly, and how you can apply the same principles to your business using a framework I call the Hub + Spoke strategy. You’ll learn:

• Why inside-out marketing fails in today’s environment
• How Hootsuite transformed its business with outside-in marketing
• The Hub + Spoke framework for customer-centric marketing
• Why focusing on your best customers is crucial for growth

If you’re tired of shouting into the void about how awesome your products are and ready to start creating meaningful connections with your best customers, read on. The solution might be simpler than you think.

The Problem With Inside-Out Marketing

Most businesses are stuck in an inside-out marketing mindset. It’s the default approach because it feels logical: start with what you make, explain its features, and hope customers see the value. And in simpler times, this worked.

Inside-out marketing sounds like this:

• “Our software has 27 amazing features.”
• “We’ve been in business for 15 years.”
• “Our product is the best in the industry.”
• “We just won an award for innovation.”

Notice something? It’s all about the company, not the customer.

This approach might have worked back when information was scarce and buyers had fewer options. But in today’s noisy marketplace, jam-packed with parity products, inside-out marketing is a recipe for mediocrity at best and failure at worst.

The Inside-Out Marketing Warning Signs

How do you know if your marketing is inside-out? 

Look for these symptoms…

Flat or declining revenue despite increased marketing spend. You’re investing more in ads, content, and campaigns, but your bottom line doesn’t reflect it. The return on marketing investment keeps shrinking.

Poor engagement rates. Your open rates, click-throughs, and social engagement metrics are declining. People scroll past your content without stopping.

Increasing customer acquisition costs. You’re spending more and more to acquire each new customer, making your unit economics increasingly problematic.

Declining customer lifetime value. The customers you do acquire don’t stick around long enough to become profitable. They churn quickly, buy less frequently, and rarely upgrade. This drastically reduces their long-term value to your business.

Dependence on aggressive outreach tactics. Your sales team relies heavily on cold outreach and follow-ups because inbound leads are scarce or low-quality.

If three or more of these symptoms sound familiar, your marketing is inside out.

Why Inside-Out Marketing Fails Today’s Buyers

This approach is increasingly ineffective because modern buyers, especially Millennials and Gen Z, have fundamentally different attitudes toward marketing and purchasing behaviors:

1. They research independently. They grew up with the internet. These buyers complete 60-80% of their decision research before ever speaking to sales, consuming an average of 13+ pieces of content.
2. They’re skeptical of marketing claims. Growing up in a world saturated with advertising has made them resistant to traditional promotional messages.
3. They trust peers over companies. Recommendations from others like them carry far more weight than anything your company says about itself.
4. They expect self-service options. They want to explore, learn, and even try your product on their terms, not through a salesperson’s guidance.

As we’ll see in the Hootsuite case study coming up next, these changing buyer preferences demand a fundamental shift in how you approach marketing. Shouting from your rooftop isn’t going to work.

Let’s look at a real-world transformation that illustrates both the problem and the solution.

The Hootsuite Transformation

So what does it look like when a company escapes the inside-out trap? 

In this section, I’ll examine what Hootsuite, the social media management platform many of you likely know, did to return to growth.

For years, Hootsuite was stuck in a revenue plateau despite having a good product and strong brand recognition. They followed the traditional SaaS playbook, aggressive outreach, feature-focused marketing, and a sales-driven approach. This got them to a respectable size, but their growth had stalled.

The Turning Point

When Irina Novoselsky joined as CEO in January 2023, she recognized that Hootsuite’s approach wasn’t aligned with who their customers were and how they wanted to buy. The company was pushing features while customers were looking for solutions. They were interrupting while customers wanted to self-educate.

The disconnect was especially pronounced because Hootsuite’s buyers’ attitudes had shifted dramatically. Their audience was now predominantly Millennials and Gen Z, a group of buyers notoriously resistant to traditional marketing and sales tactics.

Instead of doubling down on the old playbook, Novoselsky made a bold decision: Hootsuite would completely flip its approach from inside-out to outside-in.

The Four Pillars of Hootsuite’s Outside-In Strategy

Here’s how they transformed their marketing:

1. Customer Empowerment, Not Sales Pressure

Hootsuite stopped pushing features and started creating value upfront. They:

• Built educational content that helped buyers understand social media marketing challenges
• Created self-service product demos that allowed customers to explore solutions at their own pace
• Reduced friction in the buying process by minimizing required touchpoints with sales

This shift acknowledged a fundamental truth: today’s buyers don’t want to be sold, they want to be empowered to make informed decisions.

2. Content That Serves the Customers, Not the Business 

Recognizing that modern buyers consume multiple pieces of content before making decisions, Hootsuite invested heavily in content that addressed real pain points rather than just promoting its platform.

Their content strategy evolved to focus on:

• Practical guides solving specific problems
• Research reports providing valuable industry insights
• Educational resources that were useful regardless of whether someone became a customer

This approach positioned Hootsuite as a trusted advisor rather than just another vendor.

3. Digital-First, Frictionless Experience

Hootsuite redesigned its entire buyer journey to mirror consumer expectations:

• On-demand access to information
• Digital-first interactions
• Seamless progression from awareness to purchase

They minimized required form fills, made pricing transparent, and ensured buyers could progress through their journey without unnecessary obstacles.

4. Authenticity Over Promotion

Perhaps most importantly, Hootsuite embraced authenticity in its communications. They:

• Shared real customer stories focusing on outcomes, not just features
• Made their teams more accessible and human
• Emphasized peer reviews and social proof over self-promotion

This approach resonated particularly well with Gen Z buyers, who value genuine communication over polished marketing messages.

The Results: From Stalled to Growth

The impact of this transformation was remarkable:

• Enterprise core growth jumped from 8% to 22% in less than a year
• Revenue nearly doubled, breaking away from the $200 million plateau to reach almost $400 million
• 95% of business now comes through inbound channels

These aren’t minor improvements. They represent a fundamental shift in business performance. By focusing on what customers needed rather than what Hootsuite wanted to say about itself, the company broke through the noise and resumed strong growth.

The Broader Lesson

Hootsuite’s story illustrates something I’ve seen repeatedly across industries: outside-in marketing isn’t just a nice theoretical concept; it’s a practical approach that delivers measurable results.

It’s also not new. When Apple launched the iPod, it didn’t talk about the device or the innovative iTunes store. It talked about what its ideal customer wanted: 1,000 songs in your pocket.

The key insight is that Hootsuite didn’t achieve these results by simply changing tactics. They changed their strategy, going from focusing on their product features to focusing on their customers’ journeys.

This is the essence of outside-in marketing. And in the next section, I’ll describe how you can implement this approach in your business using a framework I call the Hub + Spoke strategy.

Understanding the Hub + Spoke Model

Now that we’ve seen what outside-in marketing can achieve, let’s look at how to implement it in your business. I use the Hub + Spoke strategy framework to help clients understand how to implement outside-in marketing.

Think about a bicycle wheel for a moment. It has three essential components:

1. The hub at the center, which everything connects to
2. The spokes that extend outward and provide structure
3. The rim that connects all the outer points together

As individual parts, they don’t have much value. When the parts are connected, you have one of, if not the most important, inventions in the history of mankind. Your marketing works the same way:

• Your website is the hub – the central point where value is created
• Digital channels are the spokes – the pathways used to deliver value to customers and deliver customers to the value
• Your content and messaging strategy is the rim – what ties everything together and creates a cohesive experience

“The wheel stands as one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. Its impact goes far beyond moving things around – it revolutionized transportation, facilitated trade, and became the foundation for countless other innovations.” ~ Civilization Chronicles, “The Evolution and Impact of the Inventions of the Wheel”

As separate parts, there’s not much value. When the connections happen, value is delivered to customers, and customers deliver value to the business. And the connection comes from the rim; the rim is the strategy that’s the glue that gives the hub + spoke system its integrity and power.

Like you saw in the Hootsuite case study, this approach is effective because it organizes marketing around the customer avatar and journey rather than around products or services.

For a deeper dive into the Hub and Spoke strategy, I suggest you read our post, Is Your Marketing a Pile of Parts or a Marketing Wheel?

Understanding Your Best Customers

Now that we’ve established the Hub + Spoke framework, let’s focus on its intended audience: your best customers. Which begs the question, “Who are the best customers?”

The 80/20 Rule in Action

You’ve likely heard of the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule. In business, this often manifests as 80% of your revenue coming from 20% of your customers.

But in my experience working with many businesses, the actual ratio is frequently even more dramatic. Sometimes it’s 90/10 or even 95/5.

The point isn’t the exact numbers. It’s the recognition that not all customers contribute equally to your business. Some customers are dramatically more valuable than others, which means they are very important to you, and it also means your products or services are very important to them.

“If we did realize the difference between the vital few and the trivial many in all aspects of our lives, and if we did something about it, we could multiply anything that we valued.” ~ Richard Koch, “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less“

These high-value customers aren’t just incrementally better, they’re force multipliers for your business.

Why Best Customers Are Force Multipliers

Your best customers differ from average customers in five critical ways:

1. They stay longer. Best customers have higher retention rates and lower churn, providing consistent revenue over time.
2. They spend more. They purchase more often and typically have a higher average order value.
3. They pay full price. They’re less discount-sensitive and more value-focused, protecting your margins.
4. They cost less to serve. They understand your processes, make fewer support requests, and generally require less hand-holding.
5. They tell their friends. Best customers become advocates, referring others and lowering your customer acquisition costs.

When you combine these five factors, the lifetime value difference between an average customer and a best customer can be 5-10x or even higher.

Force multipliers!

For a deeper dive into identifying your best customers through data analysis, check out our guide on How to Use RFM Analysis for Better Digital Marketing, which shows you how to segment customers based on recency, frequency, and monetary value.

Acquisition Marketing: Attract More Best Customers

Many businesses make a critical mistake here: they create marketing that tries to appeal to everyone rather than focusing specifically on attracting more customers like their best customers.

Your acquisition marketing strategy should be based on your best customer profile. This means:

• Targeting channels where your best customers spend time
• Creating messaging that resonates with their specific pain points
• Designing offers that appeal to the qualities they value most
• Developing content that addresses their unique questions and concerns

When you base your acquisition strategy on your best customer profile, you naturally attract more high-value customers who will stay longer, spend more, and cost less to serve. This approach dramatically improves your customer lifetime value and marketing ROI.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product and services fits him and sells itself.” ~ Peter Drucker

From Inside-Out to Outside-In: Understanding Your Force Multipliers

You need more than a simple profile to focus your marketing on your best customers. You need to understand who they are and how they make a purchase decision. 

First up, I’ll take you through the avatar and explain why it’s foundational to outside-in marketing.

The Customer Avatar – The Who and Why

A customer avatar isn’t just demographic information; it’s a holistic picture of your ideal customer that includes four key elements:

1. Demographics 
2. Characteristics
3. Pain Points
4. Desired Gains

With a best customer avatar, you know what they are like demographically, which helps with media selection, what they are like as people, which helps you craft messaging in a relatable style, what they struggle with, which helps you determine the best offer, and finally, what they are hoping to achieve. This combination gives you the “who” and “why” fundamental to an effective marketing strategy.

Next, I’ll describe the journey map and how it’s the foundation for an effective marketing plan.

Mapping the Buyer’s Journey – The How and When

This maps how they move from awareness to solution:

• What happens to them that causes them to start seeking a solution?
• Where do they look for information when this problem first arises?
• Who influences their decision-making process?
• How do they talk about their problem?
• What questions, objections, or concerns do they have at each stage of their journey?
• What’s the transformation they’re hoping for?
• What factors ultimately drive their purchasing decision?

With the buyers’ journey map, you know how to get your avatar’s attention and support them through their journey, which builds trust and makes the purchase feel like the next logical step in their journey, not a sale they’ve been tricked into.

The deeper and more specific your avatar and journey map, the more effectively you can create marketing that resonates with your best prospects, builds trust along the way, and sets you up for a long-term mutually profitable commercial relationship.

For more on avatars and journey maps, I suggest you read our post, How to Develop an Efficient Marketing Plan (In 3 Steps), If you want some help developing your best customer avatar and journey map, Marketing Sage Advantage is the tool we built to make this powerful strategic platform available to all businesses.

The Strategic Framework: Who, Why, How, and When

Understanding your customer avatar and journey map gives you a powerful framework for your entire marketing approach:

Customer Avatar = Who + Why = Marketing Strategy

Your customer avatar defines who you’re targeting and why they buy. Together, these elements form the foundation of your marketing strategy, guiding all your marketing activities.

Journey Map = How + When = Marketing Plan

Your customer journey map defines how prospects move through the buying process and when they need specific information or touchpoints. These elements form the basis of your marketing plan, which is the tactical execution of your strategy.

This framework ensures that every marketing activity is directly connected to your best customers’ needs and decision-making process. It transforms marketing from random acts of marketing into a cohesive system designed to attract, convert, and retain your most valuable customers. The power is in the connections.

This framework is powerful, but we understand that creating detailed customer avatars and journey maps can be challenging. That’s why we developed Marketing Sage Advantage, our AI-powered tool that gives business owners an objective, data-driven approach to understanding their best customers. 

Unlike subjective methods that rely solely on assumptions, Marketing Sage Advantage analyzes 6-10 customer interviews to reveal who your best customers truly are and how they make buying decisions. 

Are you ready to move beyond guesswork and build marketing that truly connects?

Explore Marketing Sage Advantage and discover how your best customers can become your greatest force multipliers.

The Strategic Advantage of Outside-In Marketing

When you truly understand your best customers, who they are, what they seek, and how they get to a purchase decision, and organize your marketing around their needs and journey, you gain three significant advantages:

1. More efficient marketing spend. You can focus your resources on the prospects most likely to become high-value customers, rather than casting a wide net.
2. More effective messaging. Your marketing speaks directly to the specific concerns and desires of your ideal customers, cutting through the noise.
3. Higher customer lifetime value. By attracting more of your ideal customers and serving them exceptionally well, you build a business with stronger economics and greater stability.

In the next section, we’ll explore how to implement this customer-focused approach in your business through the practical application of outside-in marketing. Later, in Section 6, we’ll see how these best customer insights form the foundation of your Non-Icky Marketing Funnel.

Case Study: From Inside-Out to Outside-In

Let me share a hypothetical example of how this approach transformed marketing results for a B2B business.

A B2B software company struggled with high acquisition costs and disappointing conversion rates. Its website was organized around product features, and its marketing emphasized its technology’s capabilities. Its CTAs were primarily “Schedule a Demo” and “Contact Sales.”

After interviewing their best customers, they discovered that their buyers weren’t primarily concerned with features but with implementation failure and team adoption. Their decision process involved extensive research and peer validation before they were ready to speak with sales.

They redesigned their marketing approach:

• Hub transformation: They restructured their website around customer challenges, with dedicated pathways for different roles and implementation concerns.
• Content strategy: They created an extensive resource center with implementation guides, ROI calculators, and customer success stories.
• Progressive CTAs: They developed multiple engagement options, from downloadable guides (no sales contact) to product tours (minimal sales contact) to consulting sessions (full sales engagement).
• Channel focus: They shifted the budget from broad industry publications to specific online communities where their best customers spent time.

The results were dramatic:

• 43% decrease in customer acquisition cost
• 156% increase in qualified leads
• 68% improvement in lead-to-customer conversion rate
• 22% increase in average deal size

The same product with the same features achieved dramatically better results by simply aligning marketing with the customer’s challenges and how customers buy.

While this example is made up, it was easy to write because I always see the same things, and I expect you do, too.

Making the Shift in Your Business

Transforming your marketing from inside-out to outside-in doesn’t happen overnight, but you can begin with these strategic steps:

1. Audit your current marketing from your best customer’s perspective. Identify where it feels company-focused rather than customer-focused. Ask yourself: “Would my best customers find this valuable, or am I just talking about what I want to say?”
2. Develop your best customer avatar to reflect who they are demographically, what they’re like as people, the problems they struggle with, and the transformation they seek. The deeper and more specific your avatar, the more effectively you can create marketing that resonates.
3. Map the buyer’s journey your best customers take from initial awareness to purchase decision. Document what triggers their search, where they look for information, who influences them, and what questions or concerns they have at each stage.
4. Organize your marketing hub (your website) around your best customer’s journey, not your products or services. Create clear pathways that guide visitors based on who they are and what they need, rather than what you sell.
5. Align your content and messaging strategy (the rim) to ensure consistency across all touchpoints. Every piece of content should connect to your best customers’ needs and journey to reinforce your value proposition.
6. Deploy your digital channels (the spokes) strategically to reach your best customers where they already spend time, using messaging that addresses where they are in their journey.

Remember, the power of outside-in marketing comes from the connections between these elements – the hub, spokes, and rim working together to create a cohesive experience for your best customers. When each piece serves your customer’s needs rather than your organizational structure, you’ll break through the noise that drowns out most marketing messages.

And there’s a hidden bonus in this idea. Keep this quiet, but when you work to connect things, you will quickly see that there are things that just don’t fit. These can be dropped, so the end result of this approach is almost always doing more with less. 

At this point, you are likely asking yourself, “How quickly can a change like this impact my business?”

Our experience suggests that a few changes will have a significant impact quickly. 

In December, we took over the marketing for Early Bird Farm & Mill. They produce stone-ground organic flour that’s ideal for baking. We redesigned their website and marketing materials using the approach described in this post. The site and the new marketing were launched in January. Less than six months later, sales increased almost 200% compared to the same period a year ago.

Is your business ready to make this transformative shift?

We began this journey with a simple question: “What would change if your marketing focused on what your best customers need instead of what you sell?”

As we’ve explored throughout this post, the answer is profound. When you shift from inside-out to outside-in marketing, everything changes. Your messaging breaks through the noise because it resonates with your audience. Your marketing budget works harder, your customer relationships strengthen, and your business results improve dramatically.

The path we’ve covered takes you from being part of the marketing noise to creating meaningful connections:

1. We identified the problem – inside-out marketing that talks about your features rather than addressing customer needs.
2. We saw Hootsuite’s transformation – how they revitalized growth by focusing on customer needs rather than product features.
3. We explored the Hub + Spoke framework – specifically, making your marketing and website a customer-focused resource.
4. We dug into understanding your best customers – identifying what makes them force multipliers for your business.

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this post, it’s this: marketing isn’t about shouting louder; it’s about connecting better.

You don’t need to revolutionize your entire marketing approach overnight. Start with these manageable steps:

• Interview three of your best customers this month
• Audit your website homepage through the lens of customer needs
• Identify one mid-funnel opportunity where you could add value
• Measure differently by looking beyond raw lead numbers to engagement quality

In a world where most marketing remains stubbornly inside-out, outside-in marketing gives you a powerful competitive advantage. When you understand your customers, who, why, how, and when, and organize your entire company around serving their needs, marketing becomes less about promotion and more about connection.

And connection is what breaks through the noise.

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Ready to transform your marketing approach? Book a discovery call to explore how we can help you implement outside-in marketing in your business. Or dive deeper with our Marketing Sage Advantage service, which helps you understand your best customers and create marketing that truly connects.