How to get your competition marketing for you!

[Chris Clothier]

Before I go any further, I am being facetious (i.e. - funny and not to be taken too seriously) when i write that title!

I have posted some crazy examples of poor marketing on here before from people using article spinners that would be funny if they weren't so bad and companies that mimick marketing messages poorly. But this example of a marketing blunder may be the worst.

I Googled my company name along with another term (it was a news outlet) to find a story. One of the results was a PDF and the text displayed by Google looked familiar. The company linking the PDF was one I had never heard of. I clicked the link, opened the PDF and had to start laughing at the stupidity of this company.

The company had taken the EXACT text from a page on my old website titled "Why Memphis". They turned it into a PDF report from their company on why you should invest with them. They linked the PDF on their website and titled it in the name of their company. They also sent this PDF out to people when they registered for a Free Report on the Memphis market.

Unfortunately, I wrote the text to be not only informative, but also key word rich since it was a webpage. In their infinite laziness, they left my companies name all over the text of the report so when they send this PDF out or when people hit on it, they get a report written by me that states how Memphis Invest feels about the market.

So the moral of the story (there are actually two here):

1. Proof Read if your are going to "borrow" from someone else's work!
2. If your competition is lazy, produce a ton of material that they may copy and disseminate for you!

When I started writing this, I really thought I was going to name the company kind of like publicly shaming them. Then I looked at their website and realized by mentioning them on a site like this, I might actually give them publicity! At this point, i could not care less about that company, but I thought it was another good example of stupid things not to do when you are marketing your company.