Marketing that respects privacy

Written Jul 11, 2023, tagged under post,marketing,facebook,instagram,google,small business,question,privacy

The title of this post should be taken more as a question than as a statement. It represents a dilemma whose horns I'm currently perched over. On the one hand, I deeply object to the way that big companies like Facebook and Google are hoovering up all our personal data in order to feed an advertising engine. I also deeply object to the way that these same companies actively seek to distract me with advertising. On the other hand, I need to get a marketing message for a local service in front of potentially interested people, and the same list of companies look like the most effective option.

In the "old days", there used to be special interest magazines who would offer advertising, which actually made the magazine more interesting. I remember reading Byte magazine and, after starting off with some articles, I would often dive into the classifieds with relish to get a sense for the state of things.

Now, though, there are only a few places that are currently guaranteed to get good readership of people in a particular area and set of interests. And they're all the ones I listed above - Facebook, Instagram, Google. So I am struggling to see an alternative to using them for targeted advertising, when the need arises.

This is especially true in the context of the activity being fairly low-key, ie with a low marketing budget in the orders of just a few ££s. With that in mind, the options that I use or have tried so far include:

• Organic web traffic - ie having a website that is search engine friendly, to allow people to search for the message in question
• Building an email list - which is fine, but I personally also object to receiving ever-increasing volumes of email, even for things I'm interested in, so I feel this isn't scalable and I'm not hugely happy here either
• Cards in local coffee shops etc - should probably do more of this
• Posting and creating stories on Instagram - useful, but pretty haphazard, and slow
• Using Facebook events and group postings - probably the closest to the old magazine approach
• Occasional Google and Facebook ads - ie dancing with the devil

Other options I could consider are:

• Putting ads in local magazines - expensive and too broad in scope, so mostly wasted
• Fediverse - very unlikely to have suitable geographic / demographic coverage, and not a great fit either

The conclusion I'm coming to is that any form of marketing involves doing something in a place where potentially interested people spend time. And, realistically, at present those places are all controlled by the above-mentioned companies. So spending money with them is going to be hard to avoid. And bear in mind that there was no shame in spending money with magazines for marketing in the past, that was also a commercial transaction.

My greatest concern about this is that such actions feed the current growing problem of privacy and data collection. And so my dilemma - are there other options I can explore that are also commercial arrangements giving options for getting a message in front of a potential audience, but that aren't so horrific?

I would really welcome feedback on this one!

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash