Jumping on the bandwagon of a current event is often referred to as piggyback marketing. In this article, I’ll explain why I’m not a fan, and how it could potentially damage your business.
If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen the piggyback marketing blog posts such as “What Every Sales Person Can Learn from the Wimbledon Championships” or “How Business Owners can recover from a Setback like Adam Scott’s” (British Open Golf).
Below are some reasons why I believe this kind of marketing isn’t a good idea:
- It lacks originality
If you’re stuck for an idea for a blog post one week, it can be very tempting just to take a current event, such as a sporting competition or high profile celebrity mishap and try to shoehorn some relevant content around it.
By doing this and using hashtags on Twitter, you may get the attention of more people, but for all the wrong reasons.
- The content is often tenuous
Let’s face it, if your business is fixing vacuum cleaners, in reality it has very little to do with professional tennis for example. If you do try to make an event such as Wimbledon have some relevance to your business, the content in a blog post is likely to be very tenuously linked, making the article sound a bit ridiculous.
- It can come back to bite you
One of the problems that could come back to bite you with piggyback marketing is copyright infringements. There is of course a major sporting event about to take place in the UK, and as well as this one, there may be other events that take a dim view of their name being used for promotional purposes.
- It can damage your credibility
While you may get away with a one-off piggyback marketing blog post, if you rely on this as a regular source of blog material, your credibility will soon be damaged.
It doesn’t look good if you just churn out post after post of unimaginative content which doesn’t actually take into account what your target market wants to read.
What do you think – do the potential benefits such as more traffic outweigh the negatives of piggyback marketing mentioned above? Please leave your comments below.
Image credit: martinb (image license)
This isn’t always as bad as it sounds mind you. There are clever ways of Leach Marketing, which are completely legal – although they may not always be ethical.
Earl Dickerson recently posted..Systematic Problem Solving Approach with Cause and Effect
Thanks Earl. I agree there are benefits, but in my experience and opinion, these are outweighed by the negatives. I think the recent Paddy Power ads related to the games show how these things can backfire, although they did get a fair bit of publicity out of it, but I wonder how much money they lost on the ad space they booked.