If you’ve been paying attention to recent marketing trends lately, you have most likely heard of inbound marketing or its extremely similar counterpart, permission marketing. Both are built on the concept that, by releasing meaningful content that is aligned with your customer’s interests and values, you will attract the right kinds of customers to you.

Tactically speaking, inbound marketing is achieved by releasing content through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, social media sites, and the like. While I agree these are important tactics, I also believe that when we get too caught up in the tactics, it is easy to forget that aligning our content with our customers interests and values is not enough. The most important thing is that we align our actions first and the content will follow. Some of the most effective things we can do to attract customers and generate word-of-mouth marketing through social media platforms come from the things we do offline.

Let me give you an example. One of our clients owns a movie theater in a small town in Washington. In an effort to generate a buzz on Facebook, he decided to put on special midnight showings of old favorites like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. To advertise the event, they did everything an inbound marketing campaign would suggest and more: they posted about it on their blog and on Facebook, passed out flyers, put up posters and sent out emails. For some reason, though, they just weren’t getting much interest or traction they were looking for and they weren’t very exciting events for their staff to put on.

The special showings really became successful when they changed their definition of success from a monetary one to a social and community one. They contacted charities and started doing midnight fundraisers for them. Once they did that, the events became far more compelling for them and other people to talk about. As a result, the content they produced in calling attention to these events was no longer about getting people to come to the theater, but about supporting organizations that were important to their community. This is a powerful notion.

From a monetary standpoint, the difference is negligible, but the real success is the word of mouth and good will that is spread as a result of the relationships they build in the community. People are actually talking about the theater in a more authentic way both interpersonally and online. The charities are talking about their events, and the charity’s followers are talking about the events and bringing people there.

The theater’s customers now see the special midnight showings as authentic events that they connect with on an emotional level.

The standard advice given to companies that are doing social marketing is to regularly post to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and to write a couple blog posts every week. Unfortunately, that advice rarely goes further in explaining how to use these tools to really connect, authentically, with like-minded people and organizations.

While Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and blogs are great tools for social marketing, they are not a strategy. They are the channels through which you connect to your customers, but how you use them is where the rubber meets the road.

The key to finding your customers is to meet them where they already are.

Social marketing is a very effective way to connect to new customers, in an authentic way, by finding the communities that align with your values, interests and beliefs. All of social marketing is community building, but finding your community requires you to participate in the ones that already exist.

For instance, let’s say you are in the restaurant business and your specialty is french dining. I’d suggest you do the following:

Look for relevant conversations and participate in them: Find forums where people are asking questions about french cuisine and answer those questions- free of charge and without promoting yourself or your business.

For example, I just did a search for culinary forums and found one called “Chef Talk: a Food Lover’s Link to Professional Chefs”. After doing a search for the word French, I found this post:

“Hi all,

Would anyone have the traditional recipe for Cassoulet as originated in South of France? Its such a hearty warming autumn/winter dish and I’d love to make some!!

Many thanks!

Dee =)”

Provide your insight on Cassoulet. After a while, you’ll start to find forums that regularly have conversations and questions that are in your area of expertise. Forums are not the only place to find conversations. There are a number of search tools you can use to keep an eye on the conversations around the topics you care about like Tweetdeck, Open Facebook Search, Google Groups and LinkedIn Groups.

Find the Thought Leaders of Your Industry and Connect With Them: Seek out the current experts on french cuisine and follow them on social networks and regularly read their blogs.

For example you might follow these well-renowned French chefs listed below. I found them by doing a google search on “French Chefs in the United States” (though you could definitely go broader, this search helped me focus on the ones blazing trails in the French Culinary industry in the US).

• Daniel Boulud, the OG master of French cuisine, is @DanielBoulud on Twitter.
• “The Modern” where the James-Beard award winning executive chef Gabriel Kreuther works his magic, has a Facebook and a Twitter page.

Retweet their Twitter posts and share their Facebook posts. Keep an eye on the conversations they are starting and participating in to begin to get a feel for their perspectives.

Build a Rapport with the Experts: Once you’ve followed them for a while and began to understand their perspectives, begin authentically commenting on their posts with intelligent information and perspectives. The goal here is to build a rapport with the leaders in your industry.

Remember that the goal is not to promote yourself. The goal is to make connections and show your potential customers that you are an authentic human being who is overflowing with enthusiasm and expertise on French cuisine.

In summary, posting content to your blog and Facebook page and expecting people to find you is like expecting to make friends by quarantining yourself to your apartment and waiting for new people to show up at the door. Get out, get involved in activities you like, meet like-minded people and take an interest in them. Be authentic and enjoy yourself.

We are here to break some news to you: your customers can smell bull shit from a mile away.

Gone are the days of slapping a grand claim of excellence on a billboard or shouting it to the world through a TV ad.

Great marketing is about being authentic; about knowing why you do what you do and making that the core of everything you do and say.

There is no more room for putting on airs. Authenticity is THE necessity in all marketing strategy, including inbound marketing strategies that focus on attracting customers through blogs, social media and organic keyword searches rather than buying them through paid advertising.

This can seem complicated and overwhelming until you realize that blogs, social media, etc. are simply your channels through which you implement your larger marketing strategy. And that larger marketing strategy is as simple as defining your story and aligning all your communication and actions around that.

“Marketing gets easier – and more effective – when you realize it’s just communication. It’s everything you say to customers, and it’s also everything you do. Focus on what your words and actions are communicating – your content, your site, your support team – and you’ll find that your relationships with your customers start to ‘magically’ get better. And that’s when you see the loyalty, social sharing, and referral business that create vibrant health for your business.”

-Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger

So take a look at your marketing efforts and ask yourself one question: what am I communicating and does my communication inspire authentic connections to my potential customers?

For more information on Inbound Marketing, visit these pages:

The Ultimate Resource for 2013 Inbound Marketing Stats and Charts [SlideShare]

Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

Image courtesy of foto76 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Sean Bagshaw, outdoor photographer and outdoor photography educator, is the only guy you actually WANT to corner you in a dark room with a projector. Sean’s love for the art of photography and his zeal for adventure shine through every one of his captivating images.

“All my life I have loved exploring. I grew up in the country and backpacked with my family. In my 20′s it was the mountainous regions where I searched out adventure. In my 30′s I found photography and for the past decade I have been on an ongoing journey in search of fantastic landscapes, dramatic weather and magical light. I photograph because it allows me to focus and perceive in ways that I don’t otherwise and it allows me to hold on to powerful, but often fleeting, experiences. Photography is as an outlet for expressing my creative ideas and allows me to communicate something about my experiences in the natural world with others,” says Sean.

His passion for his work has earned him a Facebook following of over 8,000 fans and won him numerous awards. Sean’s images have been amongst the winners of both the Nature’s Best Windland Smith Rice International Awards and the International Conservation Photography Awards every year since 2008.

To top it all off, he also enjoys sharing his love of photography through hosting workshops, teaching digital image developing classes, offering private instruction and guiding, guest instructing at the Cascade Center of Photography and offering a series of video tutorials on his site.

We were excited when it came time to refresh the Outdoor Exposure Photography website. When content is as beautiful as this, building the container for it is a joyous process. It was exciting to build his site into the Magento system because of the user-friendly interface that would save him time. Sean’s old website required that he manage all of his products from one massive data file. Anytime he needed to add even a single product, he had to run a full import. Since launching his Magento site, not only is his site beautiful, but he can quickly and easily add products from a user-friendly back end interface.

“I really like the clean, graphic look of the new site as well as how funtional it is for visitors. I also appreciate how easy it is to manage and that I can add, change or remove content quickly and on my own,” says Sean.

Thank you, Sean, for your love of capturing the beauty in the world. It’s an inspiration to us all.

If you receive a letter from “Domain Registry of America” or “Domain Renewal Group” alerting you that your domain is about to expire and asking for payment, please ignore the notification and throw out the letter. It is a scam and will not in fact renew your domain name.

The perpetrators of this scam have obtained your address and domain info from the public “WHOIS” database of registered domains. With many scams like this, and potentially this one, if you send payment and renew your domain through the company sending the notification, you will also be transferring ownership of your domain to this company.

Read more about this scam here: http://www.gn.apc.org/support/domain-registry-america-scam

We are delighted to announce that our good friends, Vincent and Tamara Smith at Silent Springs, have a new website!

Vince and Tamara are true social entrepreneurs. They are passionate to the core about healthy and sustainable living and they bring this drive to everything in their life: their family, their work and their play.

“Silent Springs has been a dream of ours for many years.  We have always wanted to work together on a common project and creating a business that shares with others what we feel is so important in the world just seemed like the right sort of project for us.  Certainly we wanted to find a way to help support our family, but we thought it important to support our neighbors and our planet as well.  With DCJ’s help we are finding ways to turn a dream into a business,” says Tamara Smith.

It is this authenticity that has allowed them to build a following of over 4,400 on Facebook, fueled a constant flurry of conversation on their Organic Times Blog and brought the heart and soul of an open-air artisan market to the web.

They are serving the underserved: artisans that don’t have access to a wide customer base and customers that don’t have access to open-air artisan markets in their community. In addition to that, they are leveraging the best ecommerce tools available to do so.

We built this version of their website using the Magento CMS platform so they could leverage Magento’s advanced catalog management system. This allowed them to create a navigation paradigm that makes it easy for their customers to browse their vast array of artisans and to easily see which products are recycled, fair trade, made in the USA, etc. They’ve made it possible for their environmentally and socially-conscious customers to shop by the values that matter most to them.

“The searchability of the new site is awesome. It is easy to navigate around and we love having the shop by conscience navigation. Now that we’re learning how to use the system, we’re finding it is much more user-friendly, both on the front and the back end,” says Tamara.

We love being in this business because we get to meet people like Vince and Tamara. Thank you, Silent Springs, for doing what you do and making our world better.

For privacy purposes, the real name of the Company in this success story is not disclosed.

Company Y’s success story has two chapters. In the first chapter, Dotcomjungle identified an opportunity to increase sales for Company Y. This opportunity increased revenue so quickly that, within six months, they faced a new challenge: how do we keep up with all these orders?

Chapter 1:

When we first met Company Y, we learned that they owned the rights to several patented products, were importing additional products from China for retail and were selling their products wholesale and retail and in bulk to institutions. Through further conversations, we learned that Company Y was running Amazon campaigns that were very small, but very promising. We recognized an opportunity here to begin bundling their products in groups of 2, 3, 6 or 10 in order to increase their product mix on Amazon as a way to support the needs of the retail and institutional customers and increase their brand presence on Amazon. Five months later, we received a phone call from the business owner saying that, because of our suggestions, their sales had increased from $1,000/mo. to $40,000/mo., a 4,000% increase in just 5 months!

As Company Y entered the Christmas season, their staff was all hands on deck working 18 hours a day. Even with all hands on deck, it was still difficult to keep pace with their new shipping volume, causing them to have a 3 to 4 day turnaround on orders. As a result of this, they began to see their Amazon rating drop due to their inability to service the new volume of customers.

Chapter 2:

Company Y now needed to retool to allow them to efficiently process a high volume of orders so they could maintain their Amazon rank and high level of customer service. Here is what we did to help them:

• We assisted them in developing, buying, and installing a set of computers along with a POS system that could allow them to systematically track their inventory and sales.

• We integrated that system with UPS and USPS to eliminate data entry and increase shipping efficiency.

• Then we built a desktop-based integration system that eliminated almost 100% of their data entry issues for all orders or sales originating from Amazon, eBay or CompanyY’s website. Now, with just a few clicks each morning, every order entered their system with 0% chance of user error

In the end, orders that used to take between 1 and 3 days to fulfill now took less than 3 hours per day. With the changes we implemented, the business was able to increase sales, again, by 500%, giving them an average monthly revenue of around $200,000 in under 2 years.

One of the great successes of Dotcomjungle’s history came as a result of an open-to-buy system we developed for a company who we will call CompanyX (for privacy purposes).

Company X was a 5-year-old company with a retail presence in a brick and mortar location. At that time, their inventory was about twice as high as it should have been, their product mix didn’t match sales per department (though they didn’t know it yet) and their turn ratio was barely over 2. It was clear they needed a more systematic way of tracking their sales and inventory in order to make more educated decisions.

It became clear to Steve that what they needed was an open-to-buy tracking system that would give them the customized reporting they needed. Within months, he developed a system for them that allowed them to take snapshots of all of their inventory, sales and margins every month.

The open-to-buy system now made it possible and convenient for Company X to:

• make reasonable sales goals for the next 5 years
• make projections 6-12 months in advance for their buying seasons, so they could pre-order their inventory in correct amounts and product mix
• make informed decisions about their product mix in real time each month based on real sales-per-department data
• identify departments that were underserved or overbought and scale them appropriately

Within just a few years, the company realized some impressive benefits:

• their turn ratio increased from 2 to over 7
• their inventory doubled appropriately, but now with the right product mix,
• as they found the departments that were underserved, including a
• clothing department that grew from 2% to over 35% of their sales while maintaining the highest margin of any department in their shop.
• their sales increased by over 600% without any need for outside investment.

The key to success in this case was that Steve helped Company X get clarity around what they needed to measure in order to make informed purchasing decisions. Once that was mapped out, he helped them turn the process of reporting into a convenient task that could be completed with the click of a button. Putting these focused systems in place provided the environment they needed for their business to grow.

Dotcomjungle’s number one mission is to grow business. In support of this mission, we often encourage our clients, and ourselves for that matter, to pinpoint the daily excuses that are standing in the way of their business success. Just the process of identifying something as an excuse, rather than a truth, opens the door to removing that barrier. Here is a list of our own excuses:

• We don’t have enough time
• We don’t have enough money
• It’s too difficult
• We don’t have the support we need
• We don’t have the resources we need
• We don’t have the hardware we need
• Our scheduling or project management tools aren’t sufficient
• We haven’t done this exact thing before
• I have a hard time saying no to clients

What are your excuses? We’d love to hear from you. Tell us what excuses are standing in your way.

Sometimes we think we are pretty funny around here and our quote board can speak for itself. Recently, we decided to start pairing some of the better items from the quote board with our favorite trending meme characters.

Here are some highlights. Enjoy (or just roll your eyes)…either way, we’ll get our laughs!