Ethical marketing is when you promote a product, service, or brand in a way that aligns with your values and morals. In this guide, we’ll explore the principles it encompasses and how you can incorporate them into your business. What are the principles of ethical marketing? This depends on your principles and what you define as ethical—but to get more concrete answers, we spoke with some marketers and ran polls on Ahrefs’ and my personal Twitter accounts. Here are five common themes that made our list:
Honesty and transparency
Being honest and transparent means not making misleading, inflated, or untrue claims across the whole process: production and delivery of goods and/or services, employment practices, the value proposition of your product, and more. As marketing consultant Maria Soleil puts it: The principles of ethical marketing include being responsible, honest and transparent in promotional activities, prioritizing data privacy, not engaging in pressure tactics, avoiding using UX dark patterns, using inclusive language, and more. It’s also about using suppliers, partners, and platforms category email list that align with your morals and values. For example, I no longer use Meta to promote my business, and am exploring how to help my clients be less reliant on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Maintaining user privacy
This is essentially a subset of the above points: honesty/transparency and fairness/respect. For instance, Ahrefs doesn’t use cookies or tracking unless necessary. We also avoid retargeting tactics in our marketing Bold Data campaigns—a reflection of our business ethics. This also feeds into why we built yep.com, a privacy-first search engine that rewards content creators with 90% of ad revenue. Here are more questions to ponder, in Jamie Indigo’s words: Is it ethical to ask candidates to do hours of free labor for an opportunity to work for you? Once someone has interacted with your campaign, website, or converted, how does your business store that data? If you’re buying data, how was it obtained?