Marketers are psychologist who make money off people instead of fixing their mental problems. Most of us are actually trying to help people too. But we’re also trying to make money.

Today we’re going to talk about a couple kinds of marketing. These aren’t going to be your typical “hey, try e-mail marketing” type strategies. These are some of the best-kept secrets in the marketing world, and I’m going to show you them right now. Let’s look behind the curtain.

1. Account Based Marketing

This kind of marketing isn’t exactly geared toward individuals. It’s a B2B marketing strategy and it’s brilliant.

You need to already have client accounts in your system for this to work. This isn’t your typical sales funnel because you’re targeting businesses who are already clients.

When you have access to clients already, you’ve got a wealth of data on those clients. You can now target clients based on need and based on budget.

With account based marketing, you don’t have to guess at what your leads need. You can simply look.

You can efficiently learn more about your leads and then personalize your offerings.

2. Sunk Cost Fallacy Marketing

We all think we make rational purchasing decisions. The truth is we all actually suck at making rational decisions.

Marketers often take advantage of this human failing and get us to put our money into all sorts of useless things. The best example of this kind of human failing is the “sunk cost fallacy.”

We fall for the sunk cost fallacy all the time. In fact, I saw a travel company using this very logical error to their advantage this last weekend.

Wyndham resorts took over several timeshare companies and now they’ve pivoted to a “more flexible point system.” Their sales funnel uses the sunk cost fallacy to get people to buy.

They sell a “tester” package of a certain number of points to prospectives for several thousand dollars. You get to take their points system for a test drive. If you decide to buy after “trying” their system, you get your whatever thousands of dollars back.

“If you walk away,” they tell you, “you’ll lose thousands of dollars.”

The truth is you most likely got your money’s worth out of whatever you spent on the tester package. If you walk away now, you’ll avoid trapping $45,000 or more dollars in Wyndham’s massive conglomerate. But you’ve invested a certain amount of time and money already and you feel like you’ll lose out if you walk away now.

We do this with so many things in life: relationships, jobs, gambling, etc. Anywhere you invest time and money.

As a marketer, you totally can take advantage of human illogic. Just know that you’re responsible for your own conscience.