Digital Marketing Strategy: Ethical Online Marketing – GM6

Learn about ethical digital marketing strategy and what you can apply from unethical tactics without emulating them.

Digital Marketing Strategy: An Ethical Approach

[0:00] – Introducing this episode of the Grey Matters podcast: Ethical online marketing.

One of the biggest challenges at the very beginning of becoming an online and social marketer is the sleazy side of online marketing.

[1:51] – Ethical online marketing and unethical practices.

Unethical marketing practices sacrifice one’s reputation for potential revenue benefits.
Ethical online marketers could help you set your own standards for what’s right and what’s wrong.
As an online marketer, you don't need to engage in unethical practices in order to be successful.
However, you can take a look at unethical practices and figure out why they work and what you can take from them and apply in an ethical fashion.

[4:16] – Learning about “the Syndicate.”

[5:57] – Irritating things that aren’t necessarily unethical.

Depending on what your age is, more and more of the world becomes irritating to you for no good reason — and it's easy to mix up things that are merely irritating with things that are unethical.
Clickbait creates controversy but is hardly unethical. In fact, we all participate in it from time to time.
Chat bots, where you're talking to a machine and not a person, can also be irritating.
Gated content is becoming increasingly common, and while it’s not exactly an ethical sales funnel, it’s far from being a mortal sin.
If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

[9:37] – Unethical marketing practices.

The first is exaggerated claims. Transparency is an increasingly endangered species in the online space. If you hear somebody make an exaggerated claim, recognize that most of the online community does this — but also that it's the beginning of that slippery slope towards unethical practices.
Second: shadow products, or products that are marketed before they are made, in order to gauge interest before even starting with production. If you've never developed a course before to teach people, to do that as a system is unethical.
BS origin stories play the sympathy card, tying in the human interest angle just to build a compelling, but not necessarily truthful, story.
Another example: hidden affiliate relationships, where you're going to benefit from somebody purchasing a product, especially in the review space or in the recommendation space, and you're not disclosing to your community that you're being compensated for that relationship.

[15:07] – The mechanisms that enable unethical marketing practices to work.

The first is hidden, enforced upsells. The mechanisms are things like countdown timers, where you have to purchase within a limited period of time before the price goes up (which is arbitrary for a digital product).
Others don't put clear pricing on their pages, making you go through a series of upsells to get the full value that they're marketing.
It's worth considering families of products as you put your digital products together, as opposed to just standalones. Alternatively, you can segment your products into different value propositions to get more value out of them.
False scarcity is where an arbitrary limit to a product’s quantity is imposed, for the sole purpose of driving sales.

[19:31] – Including a live component for courses.