Watch out for this manipulative selling technique
- November 29, 2017
- By Yostina Wasef
- 0 Comments
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| Image by Yomare on Pixabay |
I’m sure you’ve seen in one place or another someone offering a free guide to finding clients or a free video to know how to do this or that or whatever. I have fallen prey for these for far too many times before I realized that I was being manipulated and tricked. I would always feel disappointed at the end of that free stuff, whatever it was, because they would ask you to buy something that has the information you TOUGHT you would get in that free stuff and while the price was reasonable in many cases, I didn’t have a way to pay online for anything, so I never followed through on any of these and through repetition of these incidents, I realized that the technique is all the same and I was being manipulated.
First, they throw the bait by telling you something like
“get my free guide on marketing ‘Top marketing tips from the top marketing
experts’ ” or “watch my free video to know how to increase traffic to your blog” …etc. They
make you think that you will find what you came for in that free stuff they’re
offering.
Then, they will hook you emotionally by telling a story
because stories are known throughout the ages to connect emotionally with
people and keep them hooked, a good story that is, and it’s usually their own
story to how they arrived at the place they are right now.
They keep babbling on an on until at the end of that free
stuff they offered, they will ask you to buy their product or service so that
you could “complete” moving towards what you want. By buying from them, you
obtain that missing piece that they left out from the free stuff which you came
for at the first place and thought you would get by reading or watching it.
They lied to you by telling you will get something for free
but you discover that it was a dirty marketing technique that manipulated you
into getting their marketing material, the free stuff, and used it to sell you
their product that has the information you TOUGHT you will get in the free
stuff, because it was titled in a way that would make you think so. That is
downright manipulative because it’s falsely promising people of something only
to find that they need to buy something else to get it and the free stuff was just a
marketing technique, only an introduction. This technique is called cross
selling, watch out for it.
It feels fishy that they resort to something like this to
sell you their product. It makes me feel like they are desperate and that they
are not doing very well and that’s why they resorted to such a manipulative
technique. I would rather be sold something clearly without tricking and
manipulating. Or at least they should tell people that it’s an introduction not
the whole thing they want.
