When your content succeeds, competitors notice. It’s that simple.
Viral videos, popular blog posts, creative and fun social media campaigns quickly become targets for competitors to advertise on and piggyback off of. And before you know it, people search for your brand and content but find another company.
Here is what’s happening: you are investing time, money and creative energy into making and creating content that is fun and gets people talking. Your campaign works – people are putting your brand name into Google and trying to find you.
However, competitors are able to bid on your brand name for their advertising, intercepting these customers and costing you a purchase. This is why you don’t just need branded content, but proper brand protection to secure the traffic as well.
The Cost of Unprotected Content
Unfortunately, the problem goes a lot farther than ‘just’ clicks you are missing out on. When third parties are hijacking your content, they are effectively stealing the traffic you helped create. You’ve done all the hard work, but they get the rewards.
What is even more frustrating is that you are losing out twice: first for creating the campaign and promoting the content, but then also for the fact that due to this increased interest in your brand name, it is more costly to successfully bid on your own name and advertise, driving up prices.
The more successful your campaign becomes, the more expensive it gets to maintain your position in search results. All of this is not even considering the potential for repeat business, mouth of mouth recommending and organic growth that comes from finding your audience and maintaining their satisfaction.
Safeguarding Your Market Position
The financial aspect is undoubtedly key, but your reputation and online presence are just as important. When competitors can freely advertise on your brand terms and content, it can blur the lines between your authentic brand presence and imitators.
This dilution of your brand’s unique position in the market can have lasting effects on your ability to stand out and maintain premium pricing. Even if customers still manage to separate out these competitors from your brand, they might still damage consumer trust.
When people have a hard time finding you or need to click multiple times before they get where they want to go, it reflects poorly on your brand, even if you are not the one responsible for causing the confusion and diversions.
Taking Action
The first step in protecting your content is establishing clear brand usage guidelines. This means setting explicit rules about how your brand terms, campaign names, and content titles can be used in advertising. From there, taking direct action is not only possible but easy enough to do.
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Regularly auditing search results and keeping track of competitor websites is key. Even easier, online brand protection tools have made this process nearly automatic, letting you spot and address issues before they impact your business.
When you combine these various protection strategies with consistent oversight, you can ensure your content marketing efforts deliver their full value instead of inadvertently supporting competitor growth.
Your Content Needs Brand Protection
Let’s be honest: creating good content isn’t cheap. Every video, campaign, and social media push requires significant budget. When you look at those numbers – the time invested, the creative costs, the promotion budget – it becomes clear that letting competitors freely piggyback on this investment is simply bad business.
It’s like paying your marketing team to generate leads for your competition. It is not an exaggeration to say that branded content and brand protection need one another. Without the one, the other is just not as effective.
Just having branded content but no protection means you are allowing competitors to swoop in and intercept these customers, an unnecessary and likely costly error. When they work in concert, however, they can make and protect brilliant online campaigns that are the centerpiece of your online presence.
Your branded content is a valuable business asset. Just as you wouldn’t leave your physical store unlocked at night, you shouldn’t leave your online presence unprotected. By combining creative content creation with smart protection strategies, you ensure your marketing investments deliver their full value – directly to your business, where they belong.
