Digital marketing is a ball game that is hard to master by itself, but now we seem to be hearing a lot about “ethical” digital marketing campaigns. Is this just another subset of a digital marketing campaign that is picking up traction only now, or is it a product of innovation in the realm of marketing strategies? Read on to find out.
What is Ethical Marketing?
Ethics are undeniably important in any niche. The ethics that your company or brand displays to the audience and projects to the customers reinforce its professionalism and help it to develop lasting relationships with people.
When a group of people representing a company follows the pre-defined code of ethics, a line which they will not cross for company profits, it upholds the brand’s reputation and instills a sense of security for the consumers’ money. Such profound philosophical significance of ethics in our daily professional lives has given birth to the world of ethical marketing.
Ethical marketing refers to all the marketing practices of a company that are planned to achieve the long-term goals of the company, such as building a good reputation, increasing customer engagement, and improving customer retention.
It is imperative to realize that ethical marketing aims to provide results in the long-term. Hence, you cannot use ethical marketing tactics to generate immediate sales or make quick adjustments for your organization.
Ethical Marketing in the Digital World
A large and extensive digital presence is important for your company. But what is more important is that your presence on the internet should be valued and respected by the masses. This is where digital ethical marketing comes into play.
Digital ethical marketing is a way for companies to leverage the digital marketing strategies in a way that produces beneficial and lasting results for the brand in the long-term. These techniques help companies to build and cultivate trust among their consumers and develop positive relationships among communities.
There are no established or written-down rules that a company can follow to ace the ethical marketing space. It is unique to each brand and also differs from one product or service to another. Hence, ethical digital marketing is a highly repetitive and iterative process with incremental results based on your analytical abilities.
With multiple companies racing and hurdling towards quick revenue generation through digital marketing, many of them can sometimes end up implementing unethical practices. Hence, through marketing ethically on social media platforms like Instagram, you can create immense value for the Millennial and Gen-Z generation of customers. This is one of the biggest reasons why large companies like Lexicon are leaning towards ethical marketing.
Use Ethical Marketing Strategies on Instagram
With one billion active users on Instagram, the Facebook-owned company has become one of the prime digital marketing platforms. Here are three ethical marketing tactics that will help your brand gain a loyal fan-base through Instagram marketing.
- Educate your audience.
- The unicorn strategy.
- Market a cause.
1. Educate Your Audience
The first rule, figuratively, of effective digital marketing is to create value for your audience. With about 71 percent of active Instagram users being under the age of 35, according to Oberlo’s video marketing statistics 2020, you should churn out content, which is both a mix of entertainment as well as learning.
Since educational content is widely respected and is very easy to digest when presented in an unconventional way through entertainment, you can expect to see higher conversion rates as time progresses.
You can create such content in the form of still posts like posters or even video presentations. Online platforms like Invideo can help you create share-worthy posts for your social media accounts in a matter of minutes for free if you do not have the required expertise.
2. The Unicorn Strategy
The unicorn strategy is an evergreen tactic of digital marketing because it is unaffected by the social media platforms’ or search engines’ algorithms. Hence, it has worked 2 years ago and will also work 2 weeks or 2 years from today.
This strategy is very easy for anybody to use, especially on Instagram. All you have to do is find another company, brand, organization, product, or service that is very similar to yours and visit their Instagram page. Then, you would want to go through as many posts of theirs as possible and rank the posts with the greatest number of likes and comments.
Once you have filtered out some of the highest performing posts, all you have to do now is replicate it or re-post it. But if you choose to re-post, make sure you credit the source.
The idea behind this strategy is that your audience is now presented with content that has already been established as “engaging” by many people. Although it may not be completely original, your viewers will now start to perceive your brand as something that delivers relatable and engaging content.
3. Market a Cause
It will not do you and your organization much good if you are only obsessed with your company’s products and services. You need to show the world the true purpose of your products and how they solve a persisting problem in society. This projects to your audience that your products and services do not just exist to help you mint money but have a very heartfelt purpose.
An interesting example is how the American personal care brand, Dove, marketed its products in association with Peta to emphasize that they are animal-friendly and cruelty-free. This way, Dove had managed to market not only their products, such as soaps and shampoos but also plant the idea into the minds of their audience that using their products will indirectly result in the overall decrease of animal-cruelty and unethical experimentation on poor animals.
Conclusion
As important as it is to create digital ethical marketing content, it is critical that all of your production is relevant to your targeted audience, highly creative and of the highest quality in terms of both information as well as resolution. Using free online content creation platforms like Invideo will help you save a lot of time and money, enabling you to exclusively concentrate on the authenticity of your content and information.
