Salesmanship has a poor reputation among many people, and it is mostly due to unethical marketing. This poses a problem for businesses that need to market their goods and services without wishing to be tarred with the brush of questionable ethics.
Before you learn how your business can adhere to ethical marketing practices, it is first worth defining the difference between ethical and unethical marketing.
Put simply, ethical marketing is when you advertise your business truthfully, are confident in your ability to help your customers, and avoid cynical, false ploys to attract customers.
It sounds simple, but it is tempting to fall into less ethical tactics, especially if you urgently need more customers.
However, in the long run, unethical marketing will only threaten to tarnish your reputation and do more harm than good.
This is what you need to know about ethical marketing and how your business can adhere to it in the future:
You could work with ethical marketing agencies
One of the best ways to become more ethical with your marketing is to join forces with an ethical marketing agency. This is a good option for a number of reasons.
Firstly, if you have an in-house marketing department but you sense that it has lost sight of its ethics, then having them collaborate with a digital marketing company that prides itself on its ethical marketing techniques may instill a new ethos in your workforce.
Secondly, if you don’t have your own marketing team, hiring the services of a digital marketing agency like Eleven Marketing will both save you the trouble of building a team and show you how to market effectively using an ethical approach.
If nothing else, be honest
When it comes to being ethical with your corporate marketing, you may struggle at times to gauge whether you are overstepping the line or not. Given that persuasion is not an exact science, this is easy to do. However, there is a simple way of deciding whether you are being ethical or not.
You just need to be honest.
If you are being honest with your product or service claims, avoiding the temptation to embellish or exaggerate your advertising, then you can be pretty sure that your marketing is ethical.
In the same way that you instinctively know if you have lied to someone, you will probably feel whether you are being economical with the truth when you construct your marketing campaign.
Being dishonest is not just unethical. It can lead to lawsuits and severe reputational damage, so just avoid it.
You should be confident that your business genuinely helps people
In the same way that you should only make claims that you can back up with hard evidence, it is worth considering whether your business genuinely makes a positive difference to people’s lives – or at least helps them with whatever problem they have.
This doesn’t mean that you have to save the world. You just need to ensure you aren’t offering a product or service which is faulty or fails to offer anything of value to the buyer.
If you truly believe in your product offering, you won’t find it hard to market your business ethically.
