Why is Plagiarism-Free Content Important for Digital Marketing

plagiarism free content

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the act of using someone’s work (typically word for word) in your own and then passing it off as your own work (without giving credit to the original author).

Plagiarism is considered theft of intellectual property in most countries. At the very least, it is morally incorrect and unethical. Plagiarism affects many people in different professions and the consequences of plagiarizing content can be pretty severe.

Students can get their assignments rejected, get suspended, or even expelled from their institute for committing plagiarism. Yes, that can happen. The 2016 scandal at the Deakin university isn’t too far back in history. 13 students had faced expulsion on that occasion.

Nowadays, plagiarism affects not just academics, but digital marketers as well. This is because ‘content’ is very much involved in digital marketing…and content can be plagiarized.

There are different forms in which plagiarism can be perpetrated:

  • Mosaic
  • Direct
  • Complete
  • Source-based

Let us look into some ways that content is used in digital marketing and why it needs to be free of plagiarism.

Why Is Plagiarism-Free Content Important for Digital Marketing

1. Plagiarism-Free Content Improves SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It refers to all the steps you can take to improve the ranking of your website on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Plagiarism negatively affects SEO. We shall see how it does that in more detail.

Traditional marketing is becoming obsolete. It is becoming less and less effective with each passing day. The new marketing method is digital marketing. 

Here is why SEO is important for digital marketing:

  • By harnessing the power of the internet, companies can reach out to a lot more people than they ever could. However, there is a lot of competition in the current landscape of digital marketing. 
  • To ensure that customers find their business, brands need to conduct SEO of their sites. When good SEO has been done, a website will show up on the first page of the SERPs and probably in the top three results.

SEO is very dependent on good quality content. Quality content that features a proper arrangement of heading styles, images, and links is much more likely to help increase a site’s SEO as compared to a bland wall of text with no optimization whatsoever.

This is also where plagiarism comes in, if the content is plagiarized, then search engines will penalize that website by lowering its rank, or outright removing it from their search index.

2. Plagiarism-Free Content is Essential for the Effectiveness of Content Marketing

Content marketing is not a stand-alone digital marketing technique. It refers to the usage of content for marketing. This content could range from blog posts to news articles and even podcasts.

For your content to be effective in attracting an audience, and building a regular readership, it needs to be unique and original. People don’t like to read content that’s spun from a popular source, or content that’s riddled with plagiarism.

There are essentially two ways in which plagiarism-free content can be helpful for your content marketing campaign.

First off, there is the aspect of SEO. Like we mentioned in the previous heading, unique content is good (or necessary, more like) for SEO.

If you use unique content for your content marketing endeavors, you will be able to make sure that it shows up close to the top of the SERPs. That way, it will get more exposure. And getting more exposure is more or less the main objective of marketing.

Secondly, using unique content can increase the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign by appealing to your readers. By publishing plagiarism-free material on your website, you will be able to build a good reputation, and your readers will be more likely to share and spread your content.

There are a lot of online tools that you can use to check plagiarism in your content before finalizing it. You should make it a routine to run your content through a plagiarism checking tool every time you finish writing a draft.

3. It is Necessary for The Integrity of Your Email Marketing

Email marketing is the oldest form of digital marketing. It has been around since the 90s when the internet was first commercially available to the general public and over 30 years later it is still very relevant. However, it can also be affected by plagiarism.

Email marketing is very personal compared to other forms of marketing. It is a one-to-one conversation between a company and a customer. It is important to note that email marketing includes sending emails to only those customers that have consented to receive emails.

Here are a few steps that you should necessarily do in order to make your email marketing effective:

  • Don’t use generic emails (they can be considered plagiarized), they are very off-putting to read and may drive your clients away.
  • Make the customer feel special. Loyal customer bases should never be contacted through mass emails. A personal touch for each client will make them feel valued.

From these tips, you can understand why plagiarism-free email content is important. Due to the personal nature of emails, they have to be unique and tailored for each client. This makes the customer feel valued.

On the other hand, plagiarized emails will make them feel the opposite way.

Conclusion

These were the reasons why plagiarism-free content is necessary for digital marketing. We checked out three techniques of digital marketing that require content and how plagiarized content could negatively affect the efficacy of these techniques.

Using reliable online tools to detect plagiarism, content writers can keep their write-ups free from plagiarism. In digital marketing, plagiarism-free content will naturally result in increased customer retention and exposure.