Ethical Marketing Strategies: 3 Ways to Reduce Your Reliance on Google and Facebook
How Conscious Companies Can Continue to Attract and Engage Digital Audiences
By Justin Belleme
Facebook and Google have helped facilitate connection and information sharing around the globe while growing into two of the world’s biggest powerhouses of marketing and advertising. As documented in works like The Social Dilemma and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, concerns about threats that Google and Facebook pose to us as individuals and as a society have grown along with these companies. Critics argue these big tech platforms violate our privacy; help spread misinformation, hate speech, and anti-democratic disinformation; cause emotional — and in some cases physical — harm to vulnerable individuals and communities; exploit human psychology for profit; and many other serious issues.
As a digital marketing agency that focuses on serving Certified B Corporations, conscious companies, and mission-driven organizations, we at JB Media Group — along with many of our clients and colleagues — are increasingly concerned with the potentially harmful consequences of these platforms. We’ve heard from many brands that are moving away from paid campaigns on these platforms — either reducing their ad spend or leaving altogether. But leaving is not an option for many companies. Our world is digital, and having a digital presence is often the best and most affordable way to reach and engage the people you need to attract to achieve your goals and mission.
The good news is that there are ethical and creative ways to use these platforms that will allow you to completely divest your advertising dollars while using them to their highest good. There are also highly effective alternatives that don’t rely on these platforms.
An Ethical Approach to Digital Marketing
As the big digital platforms have evolved and gotten more sophisticated, JB Media Group has continued to evolve its approach to help clients find ethical ways to reach and engage their most crucial stakeholders digitally.
We put a lot of time, energy, and resources into developing strategies to reach, grow, and connect with different audiences that don’t require direct payments to Facebook and Google. We even created our ethical marketing policy to ensure everyone on our team has clear guidance on how to stay on an ethical path when coming up with strategies or campaigns for Facebook, Google, or other platforms.
The tactics we have used over the years may have evolved, but the core philosophy we have always abided by has remained the same. Our approach is rooted in delivering information that provides genuine benefit and value to the people we aim to reach.
With that in mind, here are the top three ways we help our clients reach their audiences through digital channels without relying on advertising.
1. Organic Content Optimization
Organic SEO strategies can still help your content attract visitors to your website without paying for ads. Take a good look at the existing content on your website and ask yourself a few questions:
- Are you utilizing an organic strategy based on best practices for search engine optimization?
- Are you focusing on the right keywords and search intents that your target audiences are looking for online?
- Does your content feature title tags and meta descriptions that are both compelling and optimized for search?
- Are you building links to and between the best evergreen content on your website?
- Are your images optimized for search?
Most importantly, are you regularly producing strategic, high-quality content that serves your audiences? There are ethical and reputable artificial intelligence-based tools you can use to improve the quality of your content while optimizing for specific keywords and search intents. JB Media uses a software called Clearscope, which many of our clients have adopted internally for ongoing content optimization support.
If you expand your content, improve the usability of your website, find partners for reputable backlinks, and update your blog posts, your content will attract your target audience through search engines without paying the platforms directly.
2. Forge Values-Aligned Partnerships
Actively seek opportunities to partner with local, regional, or national companies, influencers, or niche online media that align with your brand. Team up to create powerful win-win partnership campaigns to realize the compounding impact of coordinated, partner-driven marketing.
Write a blog series together, co-host an event, coordinate on email swaps, or co-produce a webinar series or online summit. Collaborate to create and cross-promote valuable content that will help both of your organizations grow without the help of an algorithm or paid advertising. My free book Effective Marketing Partnerships can help you get started crafting your own partnership strategy.
3. Thought Leadership
Are you answering questions people are asking online that are relevant to your organization, brand, product, service, and/or industry? Are you providing helpful educational resources on topics you are an expert in? Serve and attract your audiences by helping them find the answers, information, data, and analysis they are looking for.
You can publish your thought leadership on your website or as a guest post on a partner’s site, or pitch it to a media outlet that is influential among your target audiences. Some of the most successful online niche media and influencers started with a simple strategy of creating great, helpful content online. There is no reason why your brand cannot follow this formula to build authority.
Information to Help Drive Change
We are mindful of the potential negative impacts of the leading platforms and hope the big tech companies will make meaningful changes to make their products and services safer for everyone.
We hope to drive change by sharing information about ethical digital marketing and by helping our clients navigate the current digital landscape so they can remain true to their ethics, values, and missions while achieving their goals for growth.
To help drive change across our industry, we partnered with B Lab to help other B Corps understand the impact of their marketing. The B Impact Assessment now includes a section about ethical marketing developed with feedback and input offered by the team at JB Media Group. We’ve also created a free Ethical Marketing Policy Template that you can use to create your own custom policy.
Justin Belleme is Founder and Director of Strategy at JB Media Group. B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
