How are Scammers Affecting Your Marketing?

With the recent increases in Energy and Petrol prices, coupled with the worry that everyone has about spiralling costs, it is not necessarily a surprise that a number of, not exactly honest, companies have hit the adverts offering seemingly too good to be true, super efficient heaters and fabulous fuel saving devices.

This blog is not about the various reasons why these heaters and devices cannot match their bogus capabilities, but more about how these Scammers affecting your marketing and what it does to your marketing efforts.

1. Using Reviews – The use of positive reviews has been a mainstay of helping to build confidence in your product or service and in the same way the bogus companies do the same thing. Theirs tend to be completely fake, which can normally be identified by dint of them being an image rather than a link to an actual review system. Are yours? If not, make sure that any reviews you show on your site can be verified with an easy to find link to your review pages.

2. Buying Stock Clips or Images – A number of recent adverts have used purchased imagery, which is made all the more evident when you look carefully, especially in a video, and note that all of the people and locations have no relation to each other, aside from perhaps the ‘people in a laboratory’ image tag. When you look at your marketing materials, do you show that you are a real company, with real people? Or do you also rely, perhaps a little too heavily, on stock images.

3. Use of too much Hard Sell language – With over use, certain phrases have become almost permanently linked to the more ‘Spammy’ sales techniques. Phrases such as, Taking the [insert name of country] by storm, and Breaking up the Monopoly of the [insert major company or industry] should now be avoided in your marketing communications as these, amongst others, are now seen as big red flags.

4. Over Use of Fake Timed discounts – The use of vouchers and discount codes is not something new and many of us are aware of the ‘Sale Ends’ statements. These are usually over a few days or are linked to an actual event or holiday, such as Bank Holidays or Seasonal Events like Halloween. What we are seeing now is an extension of this, where the ‘great deal that cannot be missed…’ runs out in a couple of hours or even minutes. To check this, log back on to the same webpage some time later but use incognito settings and you will see the same timer which never actually runs out. So be careful in your own marketing to avoid the over use of this technique, or at least have a justification for the timer such as Black Friday.

Creatively Yours…

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