Avoid sleazy online marketing tactics and respect your customers

You know the kind of marketing we mean. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth like a used car salesman, and suggests that the company responsible doesn’t think too highly of you.

It’s 2017. We all know that the type of business that is likely to succeed today is one backed by strong values and ethics. The tide of public opinion has turned against the ethos of profit for profit’s sake.

It’s important for businesses to sell their products in an ethical manner. Despite the perception that competition is fiercer than ever, digital channels have gone a long way towards democratizing the way companies do business.

As we’ve explored in a previous post, marketing and advertising has changed. No one likes sleazy marketing. It’s time to leave the cheap marketing tactics behind and embrace a new form of selling.

It’s not the 80s anymore

Popular culture and history tells us that the mantra of the 1980s was “greed is good”, and large budget films like The Wolf of Wall Street portray a culture of unhindered excess combined with a complete absence of morals.

A couple of decades ago, it was almost fashionable to obsess with wealth for its own sake, flaunt your material goods, and care only about yourself.

Now, whether you personally care or not, it’s more fashionable now to care about others and social causes. Research shows that many millennials would rather buy from brands with an ethical culture and purpose.

Companies have picked up on this and sometimes get it wrong when they try to shoehorn social justice in with thinly veiled marketing tactics. For example, Pepsi was strongly criticised for piggybacking on protests against police brutality and trivialising the issues.

Don’t jump on any bandwagons unless you’ve thought long and hard about it, and it’s very relevant to your business. Customers will resent you if you take advantage of any serious ‘causes’ to generate marketing dollars.

Avoid cheap lines at all costs

You know the ones. Overselling your products. A countdown clock. A pop-up that stops your customers leaving. Anything that gives the impression you are desperate for business.

Let your customers behave naturally when they interact with your company, and give them compelling reasons that would make it worth their while to buy your products or services.

The key is to avoid coming across like a used car salesman, or pick-up artist. This also means avoiding ‘marketese’ like the plague - language that has become commonplace in the marketing or advertising industry, but has very little meaning to regular people.

Keep it authentic

You won’t get it wrong if you genuinely build a company on a foundation of morals and principles that you refuse to break. Your marketing will naturally flow from these solid foundations.

Your authenticity to the core of your business is enough to attract customers to you, combined with a thorough and consistent marketing message. Remember, all marketing means is communicating your brand to more than one person at a time.

Image: Pexels

Most businesses have good intentions, and are often duped by the dubious advice peddled to them by some marketers. They’re not too sure about the best way to promote their business online, so they defer to the ‘experts’.

The experts teach them to create lots of low-quality content or gain low-quality backlinks from many websites. These same experts may tell you to stuff keywords or use writers who have little expertise in your area of industry.

It’s a no-brainer, but use content creators who are knowledgeable about the topics they’re producing content on. Companies feel under pressure to compete, but it’s worth investing time in quality. Underhanded marketing tactics may give you a quick boost in sales, but it isn’t sustainable.

Don’t compete on anything but quality

It’s hard to do but don’t compare yourself to other companies. By all means, take inspiration from the content of others, but avoid trying to do the same things as your competitors or to outdo them.

Be creative in your marketing and have fun with it. If you have to compete, aim to grow the best marketing strategy you can by building a company worth sharing.

Companies like Hewlett Packard are getting it right. They’ve got a solid content marketing strategy containing tons of useful articles and videos for their savvy tech audience. Their articles are deep and satisfying, clearly written by experts in their fields.

Considering that the digital age means audiences can simply switch off or close any marketing campaign that isn’t to their liking, it’s better to spend your time producing content that your audience is actively looking for.

Aim for a diverse culture

If your company is representative of society at large, you’ll avoid poor marketing tactics that may alienate people.

It helps to employ people in your company who have a conscious knowledge of history, or wider social context, to avoid any huge marketing blunders. Having a representative team helps you avoid offending a lot of people on social media or elsewhere online, and being forced to apologise.

Diverse teams can include men and women or non-binary people, as many ethnicities as possible, various sexualities, religious faiths and atheists alike. This will result in the most creative and productive thinking in your marketing department and company at large.

This all might sound like a lot of effort, but a rigorous hiring policy means you can develop a company culture that results in top-quality marketing materials.

Tie marketing with customer service

Your marketing strategy is closely tied with your approach to customer service. It’s better to do no marketing at all than to risk taking advantage of your customers.

Image: Pexels

Your customers will be eternally grateful if you put them at the heart of everything you do, and if you follow this rule, you will never market your company in any way that comes across as sleazy or disingenuous.

Even if people aren’t actively seeking to make a human connection when they do business with your company, the majority will be grateful if your customer service exceeds all expectations. This keeps your customers coming back, and has a positive effect on your bottom line.

Final remarks

The most important thing to remember is that your future customers want to buy your products. If they didn’t want to buy your products, you wouldn’t be in business. You don’t need to persuade them (or baffle them) with your marketing copy.

Your job is not to motivate your customers to spend money, but to provide a route towards the solution you offer.

Your job as a marketer is to remove any ambiguity over whether your product is suitable for your customer, and to let your customers know that you’ll be a positive company to do business with.

Feeling inspired? Check out our 12 guidelines for better content marketing.