The Consequences of Using Plagiarized Content for Business Promotion

According to recent stats, it was discovered that over 90% of B2B marketers used content to grab the attention of their customers. Sounds surprising? Yes! It is indeed surprising, but this figure also reflects the great potential held by content in digital marketing. 

Digital marketing has become the host of all types of marketing these days, and content is considered the essential part of most digital marketing campaigns. Content is involved in email marketing, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), SMM (Social Media Marketing), PR (Public Relations), and even inbound marketing.

All kinds of marketing campaigns are structured around quality content that is capable of educating the audience, promoting the business, generating leads, and adding value to the life of readers. If the content fed to your audience succeeds in adding value to their life, you will earn a great brand reputation in return. A large portion of the targeted audience appreciates valuable content that is free of any kind of plagiarism. The same is the case with search engines.

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism can be defined as the act of picking or stealing someone else’s idea and presenting it as your own. Plagiarism in content is mostly done by picking someone else’s content or a section of it and publishing it under your name. The act of plagiarism is considered unethical and immoral worldwide. Many writers and brands have tried it back in the old days. However, things have changed quite significantly these days.

The modern-day audience has become more aware of the content fed by brands to them. Moreover, search engines have implemented strict policies against plagiarized content and brands or websites publishing such content. There are various types of plagiarism in content. Some of these types are briefly discussed below:

• Patchwork plagiarism reflects the act of plagiarism in which an entity picks writings from different sources and mix and match them to create new writing and publish it under its name.
• Verbatim plagiarism is the type of plagiarism where plagiarists pick up selected words or sentences from someone else’s writing and include it in their content.
• Paraphrased plagiarism means the type of plagiarism that involves rephrased words reflecting an idea or topic that was discussed by someone else but in different words.
• Direct plagiarism is the act of directly picking the entire writing articulated by someone else and publishing it under your name.
• Self-plagiarism is yet another type of plagiarism in which an entity includes its prior-written work in the new writing or presents old writing as the new one.
• Accidental plagiarism is the type of plagiarism in which you may find duplicated or influenced writing to some other sources. It mostly occurs because of common keywords.

All the types of plagiarism discussed above can cause repercussions that can impact the promotional and marketing campaigns of any business severely. You will learn more about it in the next section.

Aftermaths of Plagiarized Content for Business Promotion

As we all know, using plagiarized content is an unethical act. However, it is essential to understand how this act impacts your business promotion campaigns. We have put together some important details to shed some light on the consequences of using plagiarized content for business promotion. Further details are given below:

Inbound Marketing Gets Ruined

Inbound marketing is the process of building a connection with the targeted audience by providing them with the content they need and driving them to your website to generate leads. However, if your inbound marketing strategy revolves around plagiarized content, the chances are that you will receive limited or no traffic to your website because of content.  

It is necessary to ensure that your inbound marketing strategy is properly aligned with the requirements of the targeted audience. Additionally, your inbound marketing campaign should feed them with unique and useful content that differentiates you from other competitors in the same niche.

Search Engine Repercussions

SEO is a great part of your outbound marketing strategy. The outbound marketing campaign makes sure that readers who are interested in the products or services offered by a business can find it with the help of blogs and other types of content. However, this is only possible when your domain or its certain pages are ranked on SERPs significantly. However, the use of plagiarized content in the outbound marketing campaign for the promotion of business can ruin your SEO efforts.

The advanced algorithms of search engines like Google and Bing can easily identify plagiarized content. Once plagiarized content is spotted, your website will face penalties. These penalties may involve blacklisting several pages of your website, and you may end up getting your entire domain blacklisted as well. This blacklisted domain or landing pages mean you will be unable to earn anything or do business online because of no traffic from SERPs.  

SMM Campaign Will Not Do Any Good

SMM is the acronym of Social Media Marketing. The SMM campaigns tend to leverage the high volume of targeted audiences available on various social media platforms. If your social media marketing strategy is built around plagiarized content that you plan to use as a tool to promote business, then you are in for an unfortunate surprise.

The audience present on social media is already aware of content published by other brands as well. If you are trying to feed such an audience with duplicate content, be it your or someone else’s, they will quickly identify it. Once they spot plagiarized content promoted through social media handles, you will see a sharp decline in the rate of new followers as well as a significant decrease in existing followers. Read more about how to avoid duplicate content in detail.

Email Marketing Campaign Becomes Ineffective

Whether you agree or not, email marketing is still considered the most effective method in digital marketing. Credible sources state that digital marketers earn $38 against every single dollar they spend on email marketing campaigns. However, plagiarism can make email marketing highly ineffective. The general demand of any email user who opens up a newsletter received via an email wants something new or unique. A piece of valuable content received via email will be appreciated.

If a brand or business entity puts repeated or duplicate content over and over again in the email template sent to the prospects, it will lose its credibility. Once the credibility is lost, you can’t expect ideal results from your email marketing campaign. Additionally, if you are using someone else’s content to promote your business via email marketing, you may face penalties under allegations of infringement of copyright laws and be the recipient of cease and desist letter.

You Will End Up Losing Customers

People these days look for quality content that is useful and unique as well. If you fail to feed your audience with unique content, you will end up losing customers, no matter how much the content published under your name is useful for them. Simply put, you need to sell a unique idea, copied or over-influenced ideas will face discouragement from the audience right away. As a result, you will end up losing a significant portion of your existing clientele.

Investors Will Walk Away

As mentioned earlier, everyone demands unique ideas, and your content is the very first thing that reflects how creative or innovative your brand is. Investors look for unique ideas that can help them get a significant ROI (Return on Investment). If you are publishing plagiarized content under your name, it will show your inability to come up with new ideas. Investors will simply walk away after seeing your plagiarized content. The process of getting further investment will be halted, which will bring long-term repercussions for your business.

Brand Reputation Will be on the Stake

The worst thing you would want for your business is its ruined brand reputation. However, if you don’t put a considerable amount of effort and time into creating useful and unique content for your audience, you will end up ruining your brand reputation. It is obvious that the readers who read your content trust your brand and want something valuable every single time.

If they get plagiarized content in return, they will not trust you again, and some of them may not make any purchase from you again. Once your trust is lost, there is no coming back. It will take a lot of time for your brand to regain confidence. Additionally, your brand may become a victim of word of mouth; negativity about your brand will be spread from person to person. 

Monetary Losses

A business is meant to generate revenue, gross profit, and net profit. However, a slight mistake can push it into the phase where monetary losses are obvious. These monetary losses can take things to the stage of break-even and an overall financial loss. Publishing plagiarized content for business promotion can be one of those mistakes.

You may face legal matters because of infringement of copyright laws that may lead to monetary fines by legal authorities. Moreover, the blacklisting of landing pages or the entire domain will make it impossible for you to drive organic traffic from search engines to your website. In such a scenario, there will be limited or no chance of online business. 

Opposite to the Purpose of Content Marketing

The main purpose of any content marketing strategy is to connect with the targeted audience, promote your business, and generate valuable leads. However, the use of plagiarized content for business promotion will act entirely opposite to the objective of content marketing.

You won’t be able to build a trusted relationship with the audience, promote your business, or generate valuable leads based on the plagiarized content. A content marketing strategy structured around plagiarized content will only do counter-effect. It will simply ruin the reputation of your brand on search engines and in the eyes of the targeted audience.

Effective Ways to Get Rid of Plagiarism

Here are a few tried and tested ways to help you make sure that you serve your audience with unique content that is free of plagiarism:

Take Substantial Time to Generate Content

Most of the time, plagiarism happens when you are in a hurry to publish content for your business. You will get ideas from your competitors and may get over-influenced by the content they are offering. This over-influence ultimately leads to plagiarism.

The best way to avoid such a scenario is to take time and think of topics that will be helpful for your audience. You can go through the content of your competitors. However, the objective of this act should be to understand how they work on topics related to your industry. Once you have the idea, create an outline and work on it. Doing this will help you avoid plagiarism effectively.

Check for Plagiarism

You have done proper research, found relevant keywords, and written the content by yourself, but there are still chances that there will be chunks of plagiarism in your content. The reason behind this is you are working on the same topics and keywords that were used by your competitors. It will result in accidental plagiarism.

Before publishing your content, you need to gauge the percentage of plagiarism in it yourself. You may think of expensive tools with monthly or yearly subscriptions for this purpose. However, you can check the plagiarism in your content with the help of a free plagiarism checker available online as well. If you want to make the most out of the content used in your marketing and promotion campaigns, then you need to make sure that it is free of duplication or plagiarism

Putting it Together

Plagiarized content is not something to overlook; it can bring serious repercussions for your business if you use it for the promotion of your business. We took a deep dive into this topic to understand the meaning of plagiarism, its types, consequences of plagiarized content, and how way to avoid it. We hope these details will be helpful for you in taking your business to a new level with the help of content marketing.