The Ten Commandments of Marketing. Pt. 3
Thou shalt covert they neighbours marketing.
This does not mean steal, it means see what’s working for your competitors, or even in an area outside your niche or category, and highjack the elements that work best, or that will appeal most to your audience (that’s your audience, not you), and then, as Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy suggest “swipe and deploy”!
Now, if you’re going to do this, don’t just copy an idea element for element, or a piece of copy word for word. That’s stealing and it can get you into deep water on the grounds of copyright infringement. It’s also bad karma.
No. What I mean is adapt, adopt, and improve something, hone it and sharpen it so that it becomes a part of your category or your niche; make it your own. But if an idea’s working well in one area of business there’s no reason why it cannot be transplanted and implemented in another area—namely, your area.
It makes far more sense to leverage other people’s work than it makes to do all the work yourself, with the risk of seeing little reward and a reduced level of ROI.
Am I advocating stealing other people’s content? CERTAINLY NOT! But what I am suggesting is figuring out ways to make your marketing work smarter, not harder.
And this means learning by other people’s mistakes and maximizing their successes to your advantage, but doing so using ethical methods and techniques.
