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There is a myth that only the marketing department controls the brand outside your business’s four walls. Even if you are the programmer who never talks to a single client, your marketing is how the program works, feels and functions. If you are the front desk worker, your presence is marketing how you reach out to people both in person and over the phone. If you’re the boss, every policy you make markets how you feel about your employees and your company.

Knowing that marketing isn’t just one aspect handled by one small group within a company makes you examine how you can get greater returns on your marketing efforts. If you hire the best coder in the world yet the design and troubleshooting are highly lacking, how does that reflect on the company?

What about the HR person who is told to hire someone for the lowest cost? Someone can be excellent on paper, yet move the company in the wrong direction with her marketing. It’s no fault of the HR person if he was told to find the best person for the lowest cost.

If you have a customer support person who hammers out calls but lacks in personality or compassion, how does that make the customer feel? Look at zappos.com. They built an entire company around talking with people on a personal level.

When you want to focus your efforts on marketing, don’t forget to look at the other people in the company doing the marketing. Cheers.

Then you have come to the right place, almost… Technically you want to go to Echelon Media (www.echelonmedia.com).

This project has been in the works for some number of months now, and I have to admit it is coming together quite nicely. I have teamed up with three other amazingly smart and talented people to bring the best possible service and information for those looking to gain a footing in Internet marketing and social media.

Who are these people?

Allyn Hane – Master of his own domain located at www.bloggerillustrated.net
Steve Sherron – Media Entrepreneur www.bloggerlens.com
Brian Matson – Mr Fargo/Moorhead when it comes to social media www.fargomoorhead.org
Josh Whitford – Myself, with an emphasis on marketing techniques and startegies www.joshwhitford.com

What is our goal?

We want to bring the world of social media and Internet marketing to real people running real businesses. How can a mom and pop flower shop use and gain a return on investment from communities like Facebook, Twitter or local sites. This would include using all kinds of different methods for promoting that include a little bit of everything, SEO, community websites, video and cross platform marketing and advertising techniques.

Who are we trying to serve?

The team we have assembled is very good at many different marketing techniques and we want to bring that knowledge and experience together to better serve more people. We are here to serve businesses of all size and have quite a foothold is some prominent industries already. We will also be creating products and services that everyday people can use to better utilize and leverage these social and marketing techniques to their advantage. This isn’t going to be another fly by the night membership site or service or just an excuse to be invited to conferences to speak. No, we are trying to further other people and businesses to the next level in the ever-changing landscape of Internet marketing and social media.

Where can you find info on the other guys?

Our Blogs

http://bloggerlens.com/ (Steve)
http://bloggerillustrated.net/ (Allyn)
http://www.joshwhitford.com/ (Josh)
http://www.fargomoorhead.org/fmnews/ (Brian)

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Monroe-Scoop/142453226861?ref=nf (Steve)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Blogger-Illustrated/127955991346?ref=ts (Allyn)
http://www.facebook.com/therealjosh (Josh)
http://www.facebook.com/FargoMoorhead?ref=nf (Brian)

Twitter

http://twitter.com/hyperlocalblog (Steve)
http://twitter.com/AllynPaul (Allyn)
http://twitter.com/therealjosh (Josh)
http://twitter.com/fargomoorhead (Brian)

Echelon Media Links

http://www.echelonmedia.com/
http://twitter.com/echelonmedia
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Echelon-Media/372799737541?ref=ts

What do you think?

We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas. What do you think of the site? What topics would you like us to cover?

When I fist started blogging just about two years ago on www.joshwhitford.com I had no real idea on what I was going to talk about. I love business and I love marketing and eventually that became the theme of the posts I continued to write.

In the beginning I figured I would learn how to rank for keywords and then continue to do so. One of the first keywords I targeted was the term Unconventional Marketing. I thought the term was just what I was looking for as my starting point and target audience.

I eventually ranked for the term after trying for a couple of months and now I continue to hold the first spot in Google roughly two years later. For the record, I got most of my link love by changing the title on my site to the Unconventional Marketing Blog and then people continually linking to my site with that description. Pretty easy huh?

I recall when I showed up #1 for the first time. I wrote a post talking about being #1 for the term and how proud I was. Then a thoughtful commenter showed up and told me how my term sucked because according to all major sites, the term gets little or no traffic to speak of. Way to rain on my parade, right?

So I shuck it off and continued without much thought.

A few months later someone emailed through my site asking for me to develop a marketing plan and help them execute it for them. The deal turned out being a solid 5 figures and low and behold they found me through the term Unconventional Marketing. Crazy.

Not only was that one deal a success, but I have had 3 deals in the 5 figures result from that one search term… So much for no search traffic, huh?

What is the point of all of this rambling? Simple. Just because someone comes and rains on your parade about something you worked hard to get doesn’t mean that you should take what they say as fact or the law.

It also means keywords and search terms that get “little” or “no” traffic to speak of can result in large deals.

So many people get hung up on the numbers, how many people visit, how many page views, how many this, how many that and so on. Really the numbers are deceiving and can be manipulated pretty easily to give people what they want… more numbers. Instead, focus on what will help you reach your goal. Will 5 buyers get you closer to your goal? You bet. Can you find 5 buyers out of 10 visitors? You bet.

Before you think about keywords and how “little” traffic they get according to whatever source, realize that until you actually rank for the term, you’ll never know. I can tell you that people search and click on Unconventional Marketing about 3-4 times a day or 1,200 times a year. But out of those 1,200 visitors I’ve made a fair chunk of change. Get the point?

Try whatever you can and see the results for yourself. What if I had given up on the idea of unconventional marketing because some naysayers analyzed and determined I was wrong? What have you given up on because of others’ opinions? What do you think would be fun to try just for the sake of trying?

What is Unconventional Marketing?

Doing what the majority doesn’t and getting results…