There are many different schools of thought on the right way to market a business, and an entire array of professions have grown up around the question of best the marketing practices, and the best marketing techniques and strategies, for any given situation.
As a general rule, the fundamentals of marketing are more or less set in stone. People know about calls to action, and Search Engine Optimisation, and feeding a sense of fear and need in the prospect, and so on, and so forth.
To an extent, marketing strategies are ambiguous and morally neutral. You can use them in a tasteful way to draw attention to a service that will genuinely benefit your benefit your customers or clients in some way.
But, unfortunately, many people get carried away with the art of the “hustle” and put tricks and strategies above things like integrity and usefulness, in their professional lives. This a terrible idea for various reasons.
Here are some reasons why you should always put integrity and usefulness above tricks and strategies, in your marketing.
People can detect pretty easily when they’re being hustled or maneuvered
You may be able to get a few people to fall into your marketing funnels through sheer hustle and strategy, without having a decent product or a sense of professional integrity, but you can’t expect this to happen more than a few times before word gets out, and your reputation suffers, or else falls apart completely.
People, as a general rule, are pretty good at detecting when they’re being hustled or maneuvered. If you have a terrible product or service, this combination will lead to your business folding in a hurry.
Even if you have a fantastic business or service, though, overcooking the marketing tricks can cheapen your image.
Your self-respect is a key element of your professional endurance and vitality
Unless you’re a psychopath, you’ll want to be genuine and to feel good about what you do as a day job. Running your own business is difficult, and it requires a long-standing investment of time and effort. You need to not only read books and papers on your industry, and write out business plans, but also grind through long nights and days.
If you respect yourself and believe in what you’re doing, professionally, you will have much deeper resources of will, professional endurance, and vitality, to draw on when times are tough.
If, however, you’re just hustling to try and make money and don’t feel particularly good about yourself, everything can collapse in an instant.
When you genuinely help people out in some way, they’re much more likely to be positively inclined towards you and your services
Customer loyalty isn’t, first and foremost, won through clever marketing stratagems, but through providing a useful product or service that genuinely helps people in some way.
If you are an air freshener manufacturer, for example, your products will have a tangible benefit on people’s lives on a daily basis — even in a small sense.
If you offer excellent after-sales care and customer support, people will be much more likely to come back to you and recommend you to their friends. If you just make the sale and then pull a “gotcha” and leave them stranded, however, the opposite will happen.
