Black Marketing Magic

Have you ever been promised an infinite number of new customers or followers by simply subscribing to this innovative marketing software? Or better yet “Generate six figures in sales by simply adding your email and phone number to our mailing list!!”. I’m sure we’ve all come across them, the internet is rampant with fake gurus promising all the views and clicks the internet has to offer.

What is Black Hat Marketing?

Black hat marketing is the use of unethical (and sometimes, but not always, illegal) strategies to promote online business. In contrast to ethical “white hat” strategies, black hat strategies use deception and manipulation to accomplish their objectives.

These strategies while initially appealing can have many long term implications on your marketing efforts on the back end. This usually leaves clients confused as their marketing push that was doing record breaking numbers just a few days ago is now stopped dead in its tracks. There’s an increasingly disturbing trend of fake marketing gurus trying to sell you on a dream that many business owners have, financial freedom. But as many people have experienced, these sweet promises are based on fraudulent and sometimes criminal techniques that only temporarily raise the expected levels of engagement on your platforms. Real world progress takes time, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

If it sounds too good to be true….

Setting Expectations

When asked, some magicians complain that client’s budgets are too restrictive to demonstrate any sort of real measurable impact on their businesses. Others feel that because they’ll have cashed out and been long gone by the time client’s realized they’ve been scammed they couldn’t care less. A small percentage feel they have no tangible stake in their client’s success and therefore feel no need to do more than the absolute minimum needed to collect their paycheck. Most popular of these reasons is the notion that clients have unreasonable expectations!! Many clients truly believe that a week is more than enough time to create the kind of engagement results they are looking for. This is simply not true.

The first thing I do when onboarding a new client is to get their objectives, written and agreed upon by both parties. This action has two strategic purposes

· Create clearly defined benchmarks to measure my success or failure against

· Set expectations

I cannot emphasize the importance of the latter, you see clients don’t know any better. They’ve just paid you, the expert, what seems like an incredible amount of money and they’ll be expecting results. The same type of results they were promised on the internet by these fake actors. Your job then as an ambassador for ethical (white hat) marketing is to let them know that long lasting results may take time to appear. However, they have more permanence than the quick fire approach promised by these magicians.

Where are all the followers you promised me?

The Appeal of Now Now

The biggest reason for the success and popularity of black hat marketing techniques is the sometimes drastic and immediate impact it may have on your marketing campaigns. This may make it seem like it’s actually working but these spikes never last long or require unrealistic amounts of data. Data they can sell to you for an additional fee. Even worse these tools may get your IP flagged or your social media pages blacklisted. Let me give you a case study:

MB Catering is an Abuja based company that provides high quality catering services to influential individuals in government. MB Catering uses Instagram as its primary platform because of its visual nature, they use It to showcase their food menu items, high profile guests and provide testimonials for prospective customers. They employ a digital marketing agency to help grow their IG follower base.

Do they….

ACreate stimulating content folks can relate and engage with about catering and food while using paid ads to support traffic generation?

BPay a site hundreds of dollars to buy fake followers who do not like, comment, share, or even breath?

The latter may seem like a last resort option but subscribing to this method may get your page shadowbanned by Instagram’s terms and services or even worse banned from their platform. Asides from the joy of looking at your bio to see 10k lifeless bots following your page there’s not much else to be enjoyed.

Building a legacy takes a lifetime, sometimes several.

It’s always a good idea to sit your clients down and discuss their expectations before setting out on any marketing campaign. Digital Transformation is not voodoo magic, it is a series of carefully articulated processes that once executed properly is sure to bring long term results. Your clients have to understand this, or better yet you need to explain it to them!!

Is it worth the risk is a question only you can answer.