Today if you have a product or a service to sell, the first place you will desire to take it is online. Experts also advise us to embrace digital marketing for our businesses to flourish. By the way, what is digital marketing? It is a modern way of marketing using the Internet, and it includes:
- Emails
- Social media ads
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
- Blogs
- Videos
- V-blogs, etc.
Anyway, what are the dark sides of paid digital marketing?
It’s a worrying trend that digital marketing scams are spreading like wildfire – a serious matter concerning even tech giants. After all, a scammer can be anyone from a digital marketing agency to a social media firm. This challenge affects many advertisers worldwide. Are you even aware of fake clicks and views?
Advertisement is a multi-billion sector targeting businesses. Already, entities are vulnerable, and most suffer from poor sales. As we all know, opportunists are good at making profits where problems exist. Marketing is a very big problem to organizations, and this is where digital marketing frauds thrive.
Also Read: Digital Colonialism by Michael Kwet, Aljazeera
Beware of the following digital marketing con games.
4 Common Digital Marketing Scams
a) Buying Followers on Social Media
Buying followers is generally not recommended as a marketing strategy. If you buy followers, they are probably bots that will not give you credibility. Your digital campaigns should target human beings interested in your business. Consequently, we expect these people to become paying customers.
b) A Quick Fix for Your SEO
Did you know that if your website ranks well on Google, your business stands a good chance of making sales? Most importantly, search engine optimization is crucial in this mission. With excellent SEO features, a website can easily achieve its goals.
Every website’s owner wants conversions. A website conversion happens when a user completes a desired action on it, like making a purchase or filling out a contact form. Unfortunately, fraudsters are using the demand for SEO to exploit businesses. Anyone who promises to fast-track your SEO is likely to scam you.
c) Social Media Companies Conning Businesses
Big Tech corporations are also involved in online scams, and they target startups and small businesses. These days, some are even selling badges to make profits. In fact, these firms keep luring people to subscribe to their services.
Despite paying them, they provide poor services to enterprises and individuals. To make matters worse, they will continue raiding their payment cards monthly. Such companies promise a lot of goodies, and on the other hand, brands are desperate. They go ahead to promote them, hoping for the best.
Did you know that businesses spend billions of dollars on digital advertisements?
Shockingly, very few succeed through these programs. Most still collapse within the first 2 to 3 years in business. Is it worth relying on paid digital marketing or it’s just milking SMEs?
Nowadays, you cannot post anything on social media and get meaningful engagement. That is contrary to when social media platforms started. Of late, Big Media wants users to boost their posts with payments. Failure to do so, only the author or a few people will engage with that content – God knows where they will come from!
Bots also dominate the Internet and use very harsh algorithms on brands. These days, it’s like a crime to post any link online. That means brands are in hot soup!
How will businesses grow if bullies do not allow their websites to be visible online? It’s no longer free internet! Have you noticed this pattern? Most of these agencies/platforms will not direct any profitable traffic to your links. It’s a man-eat-man society; let no one lie to you!
d) Website Performance
You are likely to have ever received an email from an untrustworthy marketing agency. That is quite common for businesses today. Marketing agencies keep spamming you with jargon, and their messages contain weird technical issues they claim to have spotted on your existing website. Did you know that most of these claims are false, but they will promise to fix them for a fee? Do not fall prey to these agents; these are scammers!
Why do Existing Businesses, Startups, and Upcoming Brands Keep Falling?
The globe faces no shortage of content creators, inventions, innovations, services, and unique brands. Seemingly, Big Tech monopoly is in control of everything. They are the gatekeepers who dictate what should be sold and which business to exist.
Also Read: Who is a Content Creator?
Nobody is talking about this, but that is what affects most businesses today. These companies will do everything to frustrate new and existing brands. For instance, tech startups have become the punching bags for giants.
Unfortunately, governments are not aware of what is going on in the tech world. Sometimes they may be wondering why their economies are stagnating. The sad news is that their produce is nowhere to be seen online. Additionally, it’s easier for a foreign tech company to penetrate and succeed in their jurisdictions, but the vice-versa is next to impossible.
Did you know that classified ads websites are also conning desperate merchants? These guys promise to deliver customers or help people sell quickly online. The sad news is that most people fail to get buyers even after paying for ads.
There is a big problem with paid digital marketing that no one is addressing!
People are also paying foreign companies to market products and services online, yet they are receiving no return on investment. Why not promote local printing businesses and hit the streets with business cards? Maybe you can get genuine customers or contribute to building your local economy…
Anyway, that’s just a suggestion!
Remember, small businesses are the ones funding these multi-billionaires, especially through advertisements. On the flip side, they don’t care whether small businesses will survive or collapse.
Why should a platform take your money, proceed to flag your content, possibly block your account, and fail to refund you? A few days later, you will see it marketing similar products you wanted to advertise. These events happen after stealing your ideas. Furthermore, they frustrate businesses with overwhelming content moderation.
Giants Vs. Small Businesses
Giants always pretend to help or finance startups, but their end goal is to stifle them. Eventually, these schemes benefit them by providing consumers with few alternatives.
For instance, there is a popular e-commerce platform that competes unfairly against sellers. Cunningly, this company sells similar products offered by merchants on the same platform. What do you expect?
Whereas merchants continue paying for ads on that website, the platform’s owner is the one selling his products. It’s a weird experience powered by bots or algorithms favoring the culprits.
Go and do research about this e-commerce platform. Has anyone of you experienced this before?
How do Social Media Platforms Frustrate Brands?
First, they don’t like losing traffic to external links promoting other businesses. They desire to keep social media users active within their platforms.
As a matter of fact, they will not stop taking money from brands online. They are the beneficiaries, and their main goal is to make profits. Nothing else!
6 Techniques Used by Big Tech to Destroy Startups
Giants put upcoming businesses in a startup kill zone. In fact, it’s like a quarantine to suffocate potential competitors. The aim is to paralyze any company providing alternative products or services big tech offers. Sadly, startups do not survive in this scale of contest.
Big tech companies have mastered their game, and they will do that by:
- Buying startups and rebranding them to favor their interests
- Completely destroying potential brands
- Developing alternative products to counter startups – and this comes after stealing their ideas
- Siphoning revenue from struggling businesses like in the case of digital marketing scams
- Frustrating the online marketing efforts of SMEs
- Poaching the best employees from companies such as managers, engineers, designers, technicians, innovators, and others
2 Ways to Measure Effective Digital Marketing
If you run an ad online, we expect your sales volume to increase. In case you get one customer or more, you can trust in your digital marketing agency. In any online campaign, two things may happen – either you will get new customers or not.
If there are no measurable engagements via phone calls, emails, text messages, or even sales, the marketing entity possibly exploited you!
Another technique you can rely on is to keep inspecting your web traffic. You can view those stats on your server end. I am suggesting that you should monitor the inbound links. An inbound link, or a backlink is a link from another website to your site.
Are you receiving any traffic from the digital marketing agency you recently engaged? If you see nothing, that’s a red flag!
Potential Solutions to Counter Digital Marketing Scams
Better half a loaf than none. Why should you chase online likes that don’t help you? What if bots are doing what they do best?
Nowadays, people have resorted to doing funny and shameful things online to boost sales. It’s not strange to see memes and clout in marketing today. Anyway, as long as that strategy attracts customers, there is no harm!
I’d rather target ten people with hand-delivered business cards and win one serious client. Still, traditional marketing saved many businesses for decades. We are brainwashed to believe that digital marketing is the only weapon to success, but marketing agencies and big tech are riding on our backs.
Experts argue that digital marketing saves money and has the potential to go viral, but nowadays, we are seeing the opposite. The only digital marketing platform you can completely trust to reach the masses is television broadcasting; though it is very expensive!
If symptoms persist, it’s high time businesses go back to traditional marketing. Print your brochures, flyers, business cards, etc., and put marketers on the ground! Alternatively, attend trade fairs to fetch real customers.
Remember, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush!
Try blogging too, and do not forget to fix your website’s search performance. Blogging is a fast, flexible way to keep organic traffic coming to your site.
Effectively, good SEO practices can be a gateway to success!
Another reliable trick is to work with Influencers. This type of marketing can save you some coins – these are people who convince others to buy your products and services. In business, this model is identified as the power of networking!
Parting Shot
It’s better to have one serious, paying customer than a thousand ghosts online (fake customers that cannot be verified). For how long will you feed billionaires while your businesses continue suffering? The society has also programmed us to be followers, but we do not gain from following others!
Also Read: The Challenges that Content Creators Face
If the internet purports to have billions of active users, why is it possible that when you post something online, it hardly gets an engagement? That’s a strange experience, isn’t it?
Bias algorithms are all over the Internet – discriminating users. They subject them to non-profitable segments. We are living in a world of content moderation where bots prioritize you based on your origin and how much you pay Big Media.
This effect is seriously costing businesses and many genuine online users. Perhaps that is why many companies are shutting down – they are spending a lot on paid digital marketing, but the return on investment is terrible!
Don’t you think Technology is benefiting a few – say 1%? The rest are followers helping billionaires live their dreams! Someone is busy commercializing online marketing for personal gain. Is anything ringing in your mind?
By the way, are you aware of the new scramble for Global South?
Entities should come out and debate this trend. These are real experiences businesses encounter while dealing with the parties mentioned here! What is your view on digital marketing scams? Have you spent a fortune on paid ads that offer no return on investment?
Also Read: Digital Colonialism by Michael Kwet, Aljazeera