Ethical Marketing Tips For Your Social Media Strategy

Ethics and social media don’t have to be on opposite teams!

One of the topics I’ve regularly covered in masterclasses and workshops, with entrepreneurs or college students, is Social Media and Ethics. Here are some of the key takeaways you can consider when it comes to crafting, or refining, your own social media strategy for your conscious brand:

1. START WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

• Prioritize your brand values and people over profit and sales and clarify what being an ethical brand means TO YOU. Then, communicate that clearly (and regularly) to your team and community.
• Create clear & practical guidelines for your team. You are all representatives of your brand. Why not amplify your brand messages and values in a positive way together?

2. INTERACT WITH YOUR COMMUNITY IN A POSITIVE WAY

• Whether it’s in the comments, direct messages, etc., focus on responding while coming from a place of respect and understanding, even (especially!) when it’s a critique.
• Create rich and meaningful conversations around your shared values (with followers, past clients, potential clients, partners, activists and organizations…).
• Be open to feedback (good & bad) and learn from it to improve your business.
• Actively ask your audiences for their feedback, inputs, opinions, stories…
• Aim to foster a safe, positive space where all feel welcome and like they can express their stories and feelings.
• Remember it’s ok to not get everything perfect all the time, own up for your mistakes, share your learning journey. Show what you’re trying to improve, why and how. A brand is made up of people after all, not machines. ?
• When faced with a tricky situation or ethical dilemma on social media, start by listening to your gut. If you still don’t know what to do, ask someone you trust for advice (preferably one who can be neutral and has experience dealing with similar situations).

3. ADAPT YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

• Communicate with authenticity and intention.
• Ask yourself the right questions before you post, like: Does this fit with, and reflect, my brand values? Is this inclusive and accessible? Does this contribute something positive? Have I taken other perspectives into account?
• Incorporate content that is educational, inspiring, entertaining, useful, personal and amplifies key voices that share your brand values, instead of just promoting your business & offerings.
• Regularly check that your content is as accessible and inclusive as possible. I dive deeper into this topic in this article on incorporating more DEI (Diversity, Ethics and Inclusion) into your social media strategy.
• Make sure the accounts you follow, repost and interact with reflect your brand values. Same goes for the influencers you work with. Intentionally seek out diverse voices (in terms of race, sexuality, gender, culture…) to follow and learn from – that’s where learning and growth happen ?. Sometimes that involves some manual labor because the algorithms are what they are & we have a natural tendency to gravitate towards what is more familiar.
• Avoid using manipulative marketing techniques (like false scarcity and urgency, FOMO, psychological pricing…) to generate sales, and sketchy growth tools/services to boost your social media presence. More on that below!

4. find out more about what unethical, manipulative marketing tactics are to better avoid them!

It can often feel like everywhere we look, there’s an almost sold-out item or program here, a countdown timer there. It’s easy and perfectly understandable to fall into the trap of doing the same as what we see around us or what we’ve been taught if, like me, you studied marketing.

However, what’s more, using tools and tactics like those can do more harm than good, especially if you’ve positioned your brand as one that values sustainability and ethics.

The Ethical Move has a great list of manipulative (and borderline) marketing tactics, including:

• Charm pricing, like $999 and $9.99 instead of $100 and $10
• Countdowns and false scarcity, to push you to click “buy” faster. Only 1 more day to get this once-in-a-lifetime offer. Only 4 spots left.
• Secret recipe offers that claim to give you THE way to solve your problems, make millions, and so on.
• Woke washing, to seem more ethical than a company really is. Same applies for greenwashing & all the other ‘washings’.

Go check out The Ethical Move’s full list – they go list more tactics and go into detail about what they are, why they are unethical, and what alternatives you could implement.

What impact do such tactics have?

Manipulative marketing tactics often involve leveraging how human psychology works, and frequently use people’s trauma and subconscious needs to get them to take a certain action, whether they really want to or not.

This plays a key role in our hyper-speed consumption patterns, and can result in significant debt, houses full of things, an ever-growing amount of waste (especially plastic & food waste)… and of course a negative impact on the planet, the animals we share it with and our fellow humans, from a constant sense of emptiness we try to fill by consuming to deeper social injustice and inequalities, especially for already historically oppressed and marginalized groups and the most vulnerable members of society.

*PHEW* That turned into more of a rant than I expected but I do stand by it. It’s taken me years to realize just how deep the impact of unethical marketing goes and how entangled it is with the social and environmental issues we face globally. 

5. finally, Step away from those sketchy tools & techniques to grow faster & generate more engagement

Not every account will grow at the same rate on social media. I recommend starting by returning your focus to your social media goal(s). Is it really to have 10k, 100k, 1M followers or thousands of likes? I doubt it. And if so… may I be so bold as to recommend reevaluating your social media strategy? ?

More likely, your social media goal is to help boost your sales via new or return clients, increase traffic on your website, promote a new offer/product/service you are launching, and/or help build a strong community around your brand and its values.

Now that we’ve got that at the forefront of our brains, does a follow/unfollow strategy, using bots to send DMs for brand ambassadors, or buying followers/comments/likes really bring you closer to your goal(s)?

UNLIKELY!

REMEMBER: you don’t need to manipulate people into buying from yoU and supporting your business!

Instead, focus on building a real social media strategy. One where growth will happen… the right way.

Here’s an article I wrote to guide you on how to craft or update your social media strategy.

Need some extra help? I also offer brainstorming sessions where we can tackle any social media topic you want or a done-for-you social media strategy package that you can read more about here.
Prefer chatting over video than reading or exchanging emails? Book a free discovery call with me!

I highly recommend checking out The Ethical Move. They are doing amazing work when it comes to building awareness about unethical vs. ethical marketing tactics and providing helpful resources and food for thought. You can take the Ethical Marketing Pledge for free on their website. Curious to find out why I took the Ethical Marketing Pledge? Give this article a look.