Dishonesty and marketing often go hand in hand.

This is a very unfortunate fact if you’re trying to be a honest marketer.

To general public, marketing is nothing short but a fraud. And there is a reason for that. After all, who hasn’t ever spotted false claims made by a company about their products or services? Or have been misled about price, availability or delivery?

Consulting businesses are no different. There are many unscrupulous techniques consultants and agencies use to lure new clients to use their services. What’s even worse, many don’t even realise that what they do is unethical and hurts their businesses.

Like these 4 strategies for instance. On the outset, they might even feel like legitimate business practices. In reality though, they are dishonest ways to trick customers to buy or spend more.

Bait and Switch Advertising

According to American Marketing Association, bait and switch is:

“The advertising of a product or service at an unusually low price with an intention to switch the customer to a higher priced item when the customer comes to the store to buy the advertised item. This practice is illegal if customers find it difficult or impossible to buy the advertised item.”

In other words, bait and switch advertising happens when you openly advertise a cheaper service, a very basic SEO audit for instance. But when a client indicates their interest in it, you either claim it won’t work for them and offer a more expensive one or use various other techniques to get them to upgrade.

At a quick glance this might look like an innocent up-sell. In reality though, because the customer virtually has no option to buy the cheaper service, this is a highly unethical strategy to trick them into spending more.

Piggybacking on the Competitor’s Brand

This method involves using your competitor’s brand name or any other names associated with them to gain traffic and exposure for yourself (i.e. bidding on your competitors’ brand or products in Adwords).

Even though many marketers will not consider this a dishonest practice, it still obstructs the customers search intent and trust as they don’t get what they wanted to find.

Using Fear Tactics

Fear has become one of the most common emotions used by marketers in some industries (take pharmaceuticals or health supplements for example). After all, it is a strong emotional appeal that can pressure any customer to buy.

You might actually be using fear tactics unknowingly for instance by presenting prospects with an exaggerated and negative vision of a future coming for their business if they don’t engage in SEO. If you’re convincing enough, you can scare prospects to taking action.

The problem with this technique is that nobody likes to feel pressured or manipulated into a purchase. But when your income depends on the amount of new projects you bring in (which is a case for any consultant in fact), you might feel that using fear tactic is the best way to quickly increase your sales.

Optimising for False Keywords

Customers use keywords to find relevant information, products or services related to what they are searching for. Ranking for targeted keywords is a great way to promote a business, we all know that.

Many marketers are often too obsessed with gaining traffic that they decide to optimise and bid for unrelated keywords, making impression that they have what customers are looking for. When landing on the site, customers realise that they are now offered something completely different.

A common example includes phrases relating the word “review” (Hint: many SEO software companies use this trick bidding for their competitor’s products “reviews” and luring customers to their site instead).

Consequences of Dishonesty in Marketing

Even though those dishonest strategies can drive traffic and even bring you clients, in a long run they will cause problems for your company.

Losing Customers’ Trust

The first problem is losing the customers trust. When someone feels they have been cheated or pressured to use your services, there is very little chance they will develop a good opinion about you and will want to work with you in the future

Gaining Bad Reputation

Together with losing customers’ trust, you might also develop a bad reputation for your practices. There was in fact a company here in Dublin that became known for using shady tricks to lure clients into spending more. Needless to say, they soon went out of business.

Customers talk, and these days they not only talk between themselves. They also post what they feel about a company online, to their personal connections and the wide world, through forums and review sites.