Ethical Marketing Statement

We believe that all marketing efforts should provide genuine value to the target audience in order to earn their attention and their trust. Our strategies are based on a foundational belief that marketing should be honest and that marketers should not take advantage of anyone’s personal data. This policy statement lays out the ethical marketing practices we follow at Coach Advancement Limited and the commitments we have made.

 We Commit to Honesty in Marketing

We commit to honesty in our marketing and communications.

We pledge to:

  • Never use dishonest marketing tactics for our own or client marketing campaigns, including:
    • False advertising: exaggerating values and benefits of products and services.
    • Fake or overly doctored reviews and testimonials.
    • Inflated analytics or results when creating messaging for advertising.
  • Only using words that are realistic descriptors of the products, services, or impact we are promoting.
  • Rejecting impact washing.

We Commit to Permission-Based Email Marketing

We pledge to focus our email marketing on:

  • Creating value within any free content (including videos, blogs, online resources, online classes, social media posts, etc.)
  • Being GDPR compliant.
  • Maintaining the trust of email lists by continuing to offer value and restricting messaging to content related to the original opt-in intent.

We Commit to Ethical Digital Advertising

All advertising content lands somewhere on the honesty spectrum–from manipulative and dishonest to accurate, ethical and honest. Coach Advancement Limited is committed to ensuring the accuracy and ethics of the content we promote through digital advertising.

Aside from considering the accuracy and honesty of the content, we must also consider the ethics of the targeting approach. Digital advertising brings its own unique set of ethical issues related to data privacy. Facebook, Google, and many other digital media companies have developed sophisticated tracking technologies in order to understand, profile, track, and target users online so that their paying advertisers can reach their exact target audience via their digital advertising products and services. This kind of granular targeting often comes at the cost of individual users’ privacy. As consumer attitudes and technologies change, the ethical considerations that surround digital advertising are rapidly evolving. It is highly likely that the line of what is both legal and ethically acceptable will shift many times over the short and long term.

Our Approach to Ethical Advertising Includes the following considerations:

  • False advertising: If an advertisement makes untrue claims about a product or services or clearly misrepresents what is being offered then it is false advertising which is clearly an unethical marketing tactic.
  • Website modal windows –Here are a few best practices for modal window use:
    • Use them in ways that offer clear value.
    • Limit how often they are used, allow people to opt out of modal windows.
    • Make it easy to close them.
    • If a user closes a modal window save that info so that they don’t see them over and over again.
    • If a user completes a modal window for an opt in, then you don’t need to show that user the window again.

We Commit to White Hat Search Engine Optimization

Search engines use algorithms to determine what content to show at the top. Anywhere where computers are making decisions that will affect business outcomes opens up the opportunity for hacking and manipulation. In the world of SEO and content marketing, any tactics that are considered manipulative or unethical are typically referred to as “black hat” tactics. On the opposite end of this spectrum, you’ll find ethical or “white hat” SEO tactics based on providing valuable and useful content that aligns with what users and search algorithms are looking for.

We Practice and Encourage the Following Best Practices for White Hat SEO and Content Marketing:

  • Link building: Create valuable content that people will want to link to.
  • Proper use of redirects to help users find the right content.
  • Creating helpful, well branded 404 pages with useful navigation.
  • Put the user first, focus on value, create content that aligns with our mission.

Black Hat SEO: Tactics that We Avoid and Discourage

  • Purchasing links – Paying for links from other websites. Links should be built organically out of merit and from real relationships and partnerships.
  • Automated link building – Using software or online bots to build links.
  • Hidden content and links – Intentionally hiding content or links so that only the search engines can see them.
  • Automated, stolen or plagiarised content generation – Using content scraping technology, AI content development, or direct content theft to generate high volumes of content to build your site’s size and perceived authority.
  • Keywords stuffing, over optimization – There is a fine line between manually optimizing content for SEO best practices (white hat on-page optimization) and over optimization which can also be called keyword stuffing. It takes experience and a deep understanding of the latest algorithms to learn where this line is. As the algorithm changes, the line may shift over time.
  • Misdirection – Unethical redirects: Cloaking and doorway pages. There are a variety of shady redirection schemes used in black hat SEO. These typically involve redirecting people away from long form content into pages that are more focused on conversions/sales, affiliate marketing, or paid advertising. In these cases the content that appealed to the search engine algorithm which resulted in the high organic ranking is not what the user sees after they click the link.

We Commit to Update these Practices as the Industry Evolves

We expect for ethical marketing practices to continue to evolve along with the technologies marketers use to discover, reach, and engage audiences. The line that separates ethical from unethical marketing practices can shift rapidly as major online platforms such as Google, Facebook, and other search and social applications roll out updates and new options for data-driven targeting. We will continue to monitor the state of the field across different marketing channels and tactics and update our practices accordingly.

Questions and Feedback

We always strive to do the right and adhere to these ethical practices. If you have questions or feedback to share that will help us do better, we encourage you to reach out and let us know. Please contact us for any of the following:

  • To request more information.
  • To provide feedback.
  • To access, edit, or delete personal information we may have about you.
  • To register a complaint.