How unique content can make or break your marketing strategy

Content marketing strategy has been one of the best marketing methods for a long time. It has many benefits such as better ROI, more trust growth with your audience, and better leads. That’s why it is no wonder that so many people use it for their own marketing.

But all its benefits aside, content marketing has its own challenges and pitfalls. One of the most important aspects of content marketing is creating unique content. The degree of uniqueness of your write-up can make or break your marketing strategy. That’s because the opposite of uniqueness is plagiarism, a highly unethical act.

Plagiarized content opens you up to troublesome situations such as lawsuits, search engine penalties, and even damage to your career. Let’s take a better look at all of these things and by the end, you will have a better idea of why uniqueness can make or break your strategy.

Table of Contents

The Importance of Unique Content in Content Marketing Strategy

Unique content is important because of multiple reasons. It has a lot of benefits, and failing to create unique content has a lot of demerits. Let’s start by discussing the advantages of unique content and how it can make your content marketing strategy.

Then we will discuss how you can create unique content and avoid plagiarism.

Advantages of Unique Content

Some of the most common advantages of unique content are given below. All of these benefits serve to improve marketing and get more people interested in your business.

1. Better SERP ranking

SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”. Every digital marketer strives to improve the SERP ranking of their online platforms. The higher your website appears in the search results the more people can find it and interact with it.

Unique content has the benefit where it signals to search engines that the content on a webpage is useful and valuable because it is unique. It is not available anywhere else, so it has a special value that the relevant audience will enjoy.

Search engines like Google and Bing wish their users the best results. Creating and posting unique content helps them realize that your content checks all the boxes. So, they rank it higher.

2. Improved User Engagement

Unique content is better at user engagement and retention than plagiarized content. There is research available that proves uniqueness increases the number of people interested in the brand.

So, if a content marketer takes the time and effort to create unique posts, then visitors are bound to read them as well. Conversely, plagiarized content is usually left early on as visitors realize they have seen the same thing before.

3. Improves Reputation

When you consistently post unique content, it establishes you as an authority in your niche. It helps build trust with your audience, making them more likely to return to your site, recommend it to others, and engage with your brand.

As a content marketer, what more do you want? A good reputation and improved engagement naturally supplement each other. This in turn increases the number of leads you get.

Disadvantages of Using Plagiarized Content

Plagiarized content is the direct opposite of unique content. Using such content has a lot of demerits. Let’s discuss some of them, and by the end of it, you will know how it can break your strategy.

1. Poor SERP Ranking

SERP rankings are the most important source of traffic in digital marketing. When you use plagiarized content, then search engines penalize your web pages. Search engines are very good at distinguishing whether some content is unique or duplicated. The fact that they have access to the largest library on the internet makes them suited for the job as well.

Since search engines wish for authentic and valuable content to rise to the top of the SERPs, they penalize inauthentic content such as plagiarized work. There are two such penalties that search engines can give;

A sharp drop in SERP ranking
Complete deindexing of the webpage with duplicate content

Admittedly, both of these consequences are pretty harsh and can cripple your content marketing strategy.

2. Legal Problems

If the owner of the content that is plagiarized finds out, they can sue the perpetrator and seek legal restitution. Granted that people don’t usually sue a single blog post because it’s not worth the trouble. However, multiple infractions can create a solid case against the perpetrator which may be enough for the owner to pursue legal action.

Legal action typically results in:

Cease and desist orders
A hefty fine
Payment of damages if the plagiarism resulted in a breach of contract

If a company has hired a team of writers to create their content, the plagiarizing writer may be fired from their position. The payments for damages and fines also take a large toll on the company, and it also creates negative publicity.

3. Poor Reputation

If one thing can kill any marketing strategy, it is a company’s poor reputation. Plagiarism is a source of bad publicity and poor reputation. If a company is found to be guilty of plagiarism, it paints them in a bad light.

Other potential customers can and will turn away from the brand when they learn that they are plagiarists. After all, if a brand can’t even be truthful enough to use unique content, what’s to say they will trustworthy in other facets of their business?

As such fewer and fewer people will interact with your brand and the content marketing strategy will fail.

How to Check the Uniqueness of Your Content?

Most people check for plagiarism with online tools. The tools in question are plagiarism checkers. There are plenty of paid tools as well as free ones available. Paid tools are really good and they are more accurate as well, but that’s not to say that free tools are not useful at all.

To check the uniqueness of your content, you need to find a good plagiarism-checking tool and use it to check your content. With a popular plagiarism detector like Check-Plagiarism, you can easily check your content and:

Identify accidental, coincidental, and even intentional plagiarism in the content
Find the sources that are plagiarized and cite them
Pinpoint the exact sentence in the content that is similar to another source

All of this information is enough to effectively find and root out all the plagiarism in a piece of content. By doing this you ensure that your work is plagiarisms free (thus unique) and that you’re content marketing strategy will not break.

Conclusion

And that is a small, yet concise guide on how unique content can make or break your content marketing strategy. To read more, you can visit this blog post. Hopefully, this article was able to provide you with basic knowledge about unique content and how it affects your marketing strategy.