Most marketing platforms are not inherently ethical or unethical. They can be used by marketers for good or as we all know, not so good.

Marketing platforms (for example, Hubspot, Clearbit, or Google Analytics) are useful to us as things that allow us to operate at scale and advertise goods and services to people beyond the limitations of in-person conversation. 

Often, digital marketing tools are analogous to offline, human, activities. 

However, platforms that offer people’s data for purchase might be unethical in the case of deceptive collection and dissemination of people’s data. We run into this using tools for purchasing leads. Not all platforms like this are unethical. But, we think this is an area that should be explored more with respect to verifying ethical sourcing of leads throughout the “data supply chain” from where data came from in the first place, to how it is used.

 What does this look like in practice?

Here are a few types of platforms along with some examples of how they might be used ethically and unethically:

Email marketing (e.g. Hubspot, Mailchimp, Mailshake, Close.io)

• Ethical use: sending emails following up with leads who are a good fit for the products you’re selling, and would benefit from using them.
• Unethical use: sending emails to 50,000 people who may or may not match what you’re selling (spam). 

Advertising (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Ads)

• Ethical use: attracting traffic to your website to sell products via honest and clear ads.
• Unethical use: using highly optimized psychological copy to imply false claims to “trick” people into clicking your ads. I.e. “clickbait”.

 Analytics (e.g. Google Analytics)

• Ethical use: measuring conversions by referral channel to your eCommerce store.
• Unethical use: using behavioral and location data to increase prices for people in need after a natural disaster.

 Data scraping/mining (e.g. Phantombuster, GetProspect)

• Ethical use: Using publicly available data to find market insights, or source contact information.
• Unethical use: Sourcing data on people from platforms where they expected their information to be secure and unaccessible.

 SEO (e.g. Moz, SEMRush, BuzzSumo)

• Ethical use: Identifying keywords to build content around or optimize your website for.
• Unethical use: Finding websites that you can use for a link scheme to manipulate search rankings without adding value.

 Conversion optimization / UX (e.g. Fullstory, Hotjar, Mixpanel)

• Ethical use: Identifying gaps in perceived value and user experience and improving conversion rates accordingly.
• Unethical use: Optimizing content and marketing material for “clickbait” - psychologically appealing but empty, false, or misleading.

 Design (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator)

• Ethical use: Enhancing product photos to better show off key features.
• Unethical use: Creating a false or deceptive expectation of what people get from your products or services.

 SMS tools (e.g. TextUs, Textible.io, Twilio)

• Ethical use: Engaging your audience with content, offers, giveaways, and value-adds that are welcomed on SMS as a channel.
• Unethical use: Mass-texting large lists of people where the majority will think your message is spam, even if it results in some sales.

 Voice/Phone (e.g. CallFire, CallHub)

• Ethical use: Engaging your audience at scale via direct one-on-one voice calls to ultimately provide value of some kind.
• Unethical use: Spam calling thousands of people to sell them something they don’t want or need.

 Conversational/Chat (e.g. Drift, Intercom, Manychat)

• Ethical use: Providing a fast way to get answers, help, support, product information, and more directly through chat on your website, while also qualifying leads so that sales can better assist them.
• Unethical use: Using conversational interfaces to withhold useful information in order to extract contact information from people.

Automation (e.g. Hubspot, Zapier, Activecampaign, Mailchimp)

• Ethical use: Segmenting and enriching leads in your database so that you can automatically send them content that better fits their unique needs.
• Unethical use: Triggering marketing campaigns through channels like email that could be considered spam, in the interest of pushing hard to the sale.