As consumers become harder to reach and marketing budgets face tighter scrutiny, businesses are turning inward for a fresh approach to growth.

Instead of relying solely on expensive paid media campaigns, leading brands are shifting focus to an “inside out” marketing model – leveraging their own assets and first-party data to deepen customer relationships, drive organic advocacy, and reduce ad spend.

From banks to global credit card giants, the strategy is proving to be a game-changer in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

Jonathan Hopkins, founding partner at Sonder Media, says owned media and the inside-out model is not only creating huge savings for marketers, it also better focusses the effort they put into their campaigns.

“If you think about the traditional approach to marketing, everyone is trying to get customers or prospects through a funnel, taking them on a journey from awareness to interest to purchase and ultimately advocacy,” says Hopkins.

“You might advertise in paid media to drive these prospects to owned media where they engage with your store or your website.”

This model, he says, has become out-of-date and transactional in a media landscape where people have more choice, more control and have become less attentive.

“What’s happened over the past 10 to 15 years is that the media world has become incredibly fragmented which makes it very hard to feed that funnel through paid media alone,” Hopkins says.

In response, Sonder has developed the inside-out model which begins by auditing and evaluating an owned media network first so that marketers can understand its contribution in terms of audience numbers, customer numbers and the value of the owned media network itself.

“It starts by leveraging your own channels first, then creating better content and better experiences by understanding your customer needs and serving them relevant messages within your own channels,” Hopkins says.

Using owned media as the starting point means that marketers are using their available resources to the greatest effect.

“These customer experiences can then be shared with more people which in turn drives value in earned media and that fulfils the advocacy part,” he says. “Paid media can then be used to draw people into those brand experiences.

“The best part is that the audience that has come through paid media, when you’re acquiring new customers, will have had a better experience than they would have done traditionally because the owned media has been carefully created and curated in the first place.”

Hopkins says clients that have adopted the inside-out model have typically seen savings of around 20 per cent in paid media investment “which then can be redeployed into extending marketing campaigns in whatever way they choose”.

One simple example of an underutilised owned channel is high street banks with digital screens.

“These are outward facing in every branch, in every high street in the country,” he says. “So why would you pay for digital screens down the road when you have got your own asset doing the same job?

“Again, it’s all about optimising where you can use your own assets first and then topping up with paid investments later.”

Sweta Mehra, managing director, Everyday Banking, ANZ, says Sonder managed to identify as many as a dozen different assets at the bank that could be used to drive audience growth.

“We’ve always been focused as a marketing organisation on three things: growing our reputation, driving revenue growth, and deepening the customer relationships,” she says speaking with marketing media platform Mi-3.

“There’s only so far you can go with your paid media,” says Mehra. “Where Sonder has really helped us is in quantifying the value and impact of our own media channels.

“We never had a number to it. We did not know that with our own channels we could create 85 million impressions a month,” she says. “It’s a massive number and many marketers would have paid a lot of money to get those kind of page impressions.”

“Being able to create all of that with our own media channels has led to a mindset shift in the way we approach and view the inside-out model which puts owned media at the forefront.”

While there will always be a segment of an audience that has never heard of a product – meaning there will always be a place for paid and earned media in attracting new customers – Hopkins believes its largely scattershot approach is already starting to lose market share to owned media.

Recent data out of the US from Emarketer shows that retail media – which is effectively owned media – will take 25 per cent of the ad revenue over the next three to four years.

“It’s currently at 14 per cent and it’s predicted to grow strongly as marketers realise that owned media and the inside-out model are an excellent way to reduce the wastage of paid media.”