Black Hats Are For Magicians, Not Marketers

What­ever hap­pened to sales and marketing?

Sim­ple ques­tion, I know. But think about it. How many busi­nesses have you come across lately spout­ing the lat­est and great­est trick, tac­tic, or cashgrab?

You’ve heard of the say­ing, “Hate the game, not the player?” I’ve heard this many times too, and lately I seem to hear it a lot within our industry.

When my wife, Sylvie Fortin, wrote Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins, her premise was sim­i­lar. She said, “Hate the sin, love the sin­ner.” But her rea­son­ing was, she wanted to expose, focus on, and pro­vide alter­na­tive solu­tions to spe­cific prac­tices and behav­iors, with­out fin­ger­point­ing any­one.

How­ever, the more I think about it, the more I’m com­ing to the con­clu­sion that the player wor­ries me more than the game itself. And here’s why…

Because there is so much poten­tial for mis­use and abuse — even when the strat­egy may be, at its core, sound. (On the Inter­net, that poten­tial has grown exponentially.)

Take forced con­ti­nu­ity or upsells, for exam­ple. These strate­gies are not in and of them­selves bad. They have legit­i­mate and eth­i­cal uses. They can become use­ful tools in one’s mar­ket­ing arsenal.

How­ever, it’s their mis­use and abuse that are problematic.

Some unscrupu­lous mar­keters are lit­er­ally turn­ing what may have once been nor­mal, eth­i­cal, and intel­li­gent strate­gies into noth­ing more than mere games. Games mar­keters play.

And like it or not, it’s affect­ing us all.

I know this is not going to sit well with some people.

But after being in this busi­ness for more than a decade now, I have come to the belief that mak­ing money using tricks is mostly if not always short term, let alone shortsighted.

On the one end, busi­ness mod­els based on tricks are always short-​​term cash­grabs that will never result in any long-​​term, resid­ual income and sus­tain­able busi­ness growth.

On the other, sell­ing using tricks are often slick attempts at sell­ing a prod­uct that’s either worth­less or unable to sell itself based on its own mer­its. Prod­ucts peo­ple wouldn’t want, much less buy, otherwise.

Think of a magic show. How enter­tained would you be if you really knew how magi­cians car­ried out their tricks?

Tricks amaze and mes­mer­ize because they leave the audi­ence won­der­ing “how did they do that?” They are meant to make us think they are legit­i­mate. They leave us wondering.

But it’s all smoke-​​and-​​mirror, sleight-​​of-​​hand illu­sions.

The Inter­net makes this process so easy to do — and with so much poten­tial for it being abused — because you have more con­trol over what your cus­tomer sees, does, and gets. You can eas­ily force your cus­tomer to jump through your hoops.

For exam­ple, take “upsell hell.” This is the process where, after some­one buys a prod­uct and before they are pre­sented with a con­fir­ma­tion that their order went through (let alone the prod­uct they paid for), they are cor­nered with one upsell offer after another.

Once they’ve decided to go ahead, reached the shop­ping cart, and entered their credit card details in other words, that’s when the abuse starts.

So many mar­keters out there have this “gotcha” atti­tude once their cus­tomers reach this point. They look at their cus­tomers as num­bers. As float­ing, face­less, name­less wal­lets. They look at them as con­ver­sion rates, sales num­bers, click­throughs, etc.

(I know this per­son­ally. I’ve encoun­tered many a mar­keter who prac­ti­cally laugh at how easy it is for them to make money using such tactics.)

And that’s sad.

Same thing with forced con­ti­nu­ity. The abuse of forced con­ti­nu­ity, specif­i­cally hid­den con­ti­nu­ity or sleight-​​of-​​hand con­ti­nu­ity, is down­right abusive.

Sure, we can say “buyer beware” and pay homage to the Legal Caveat Emp­tor Gods.

But when you hold your cus­tomer hostage, even after this cus­tomer has read all your copy, has invested time and effort in decid­ing on whether to buy or not (i.e., whether to trust you or not), has stud­ied all the fine print, and has done all their due dili­gence, and you remove all choices from their pur­chase deci­sion, it’s no longer the customer’s fault.

And another con­tention I have is with those who say “but it works.”

Of course, it works. Hold­ing a gun to someone’s head and ask­ing for their money works, too. But when some­thing works doesn’t mean it’s right. Plus, your cus­tomer has made a sig­nif­i­cant, psy­cho­log­i­cal invest­ment up to that point, and feels they can’t leave because:

1. They want to make sure their order went through,
2. They want what they paid for (who would’ve thunk it?),
3. They’ve invested their trust in the per­son or busi­ness mak­ing the offer,
4. They hate being wrong (we all do, and mar­keters know it),
5. They don’t know if it’s a scam until the trans­ac­tion is com­plete, and
6. They’re stuck and afraid to leave because they’d hate los­ing con­trol over their credit card infor­ma­tion with­out get­ting what they paid for, even if they get fed up and would pre­fer to aban­don their shop­ping carts at that point.

So does it work? Absolutely! It has no choice but to.

If there’s one les­son I want to offer here, it’s that you should stop focus­ing on tac­tics, tricks, short­cuts, tech­niques, etc. In short, stop focus­ing on play­ing games — whether it’s an attempt at gam­ing sys­tems, web­sites, busi­nesses, or, above all, customers.

I mean this for both busi­ness mod­els and mar­ket­ing processes.

For exam­ple, for­get things like “Twit­ter Cash,” “Google Ninja,” “Black Hat Magic Machine,” “Mega Social Media Money,” etc. (I made those up, but you get the gist. My apolo­gies if they do exist. Any sem­blance was purely unintentional.)

Black hats are for magicians.

Also, for­get things like NLP, mind con­trol, myr­iad upsells, hid­den con­ti­nu­ity, etc.

Instead, start focus­ing on devel­op­ing solid busi­nesses and mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships through long-​​term, eth­i­cal, value-​​driven prod­ucts and strate­gies. Because these are the ones that will make you more money than you’ve ever dreamed possible.

When I was writ­ing copy full-​​time, I was amazed by the sub­tle tricks and split-​​test results that would help increase sales for my clients. Things like test­ing dif­fer­ent col­ors, dif­fer­ent posi­tions of graph­ics, dif­fer­ent fonts, dif­fer­ent col­ored backgrounds.

Small, insignif­i­cant changes that resulted in small bumps in response.

But in my expe­ri­ence, I have found that the most sig­nif­i­cant increases in sales — the ones that would make dra­matic boosts in con­ver­sions — typ­i­cally occurred when:

1. You are tar­get­ing the right audi­ence for your offer.
2. You have the appro­pri­ate mes­sage for that audience.
3. You make it eas­ier for peo­ple to buy from you.

The more wildly dif­fer­ent the tests were, the greater the results they gave. Look at it this way: small changes often resulted in small improve­ments. Big changes often resulted in big improve­ments. Espe­cially when those changes were focused on your customers.

Sim­i­larly, I think long-​​term busi­ness comes down to three prin­ci­pal components:

1. Solve prob­lems,
2. Sell solu­tions,
3. Serve cus­tomers.

Sim­ple, isn’t it?

So I ask again, what­ever hap­pened to good, old-​​fashioned sales and mar­ket­ing? I mean, what­ever hap­pened to mak­ing money cre­at­ing value and sell­ing what peo­ple really want?

I’ve heard some mar­keters, espe­cially those who teach black-​​hat stuff, say that mar­ket­ing is just one big game, and to suc­ceed you need to play along.

Non­sense.

It doesn’t have to be a game unless you decide to play. What I’m say­ing is that you don’t have to. If you do, you are lit­er­ally forc­ing oth­ers to play along with you, too. And like most games, there’s always a win­ner and a loser.

What­ever hap­pened to win-​​win?

Granted, attempt to game sys­tems or cus­tomers, and you might be suc­cess­ful for a while. But they’ll even­tu­ally grow wise to your tac­tics. Either they will change and you lose out on the long-​​term, or you kill it for the rest of us.

Most mar­keters who teach such tac­tics don’t really care, because they’ve used the same strate­gies, sat­u­rated the mar­ket, and made their money. Once they start teach­ing their tricks to oth­ers, by and large such tac­tics have out­grown their use­ful­ness for the marketer.

In other words, the moment some “guru” teaches a spe­cific tac­tic, often­times it is out­dated the moment they are taught.

And now, by teach­ing it to oth­ers and thus pro­lif­er­at­ing its usage, they are leav­ing more and more foot­prints to be dis­cov­ered and penal­ized by the sys­tems, and the cus­tomers, they were try­ing to game in the first place.

I know this for a fact because I’ve heard it from some top mar­keters. Some even do so will­ingly and strate­gi­cally, know­ing full well that by hav­ing oth­ers dupli­cate their “tricks” will even­tu­ally kill off their competition.

I’ve said this many times before…

Make money not at the expense of oth­ers but at the ser­vice of others.

The for­mer will make you money. The lat­ter, wealthy.

Sadly, how­ever, the for­mer gets more attention.

Per­haps it’s the reces­sion. Per­haps it’s just me. I don’t know. But one thing I do know is, we are all start­ing to look like scammy, smarmy, snake-​​oil sales­men just hus­tling for a quick buck — if we’re not already.

Whether the reces­sion is to blame or not, I also know that I’m get­ting more and more dis­en­chanted, even dis­gusted, with what our indus­try is becom­ing and how it’s being per­ceived. An indus­try I once loved and enjoyed… An indus­try I was once very proud to be in… An indus­try, sad to say, I’m get­ting less and less pas­sion­ate about.

And if you think it’s just me, think again. With the a grow­ing num­ber of alpha­bet agen­cies swoop­ing in, slap­ping a few mar­keters on their wrists, and insti­tut­ing new laws and reg­u­la­tions mak­ing it harder and harder for any­one to mar­ket online…

… I fear that one day the Inter­net mar­ket­ing indus­try will be…

“Game over.”

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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