Why You Should Never Use a “Swipe File”
Frequently you will see sponsored posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social media platforms/blogs that tout being a must have “swipe file.” These vary in all manner of marketing “hacks” that various entities are giving away. They can be anything from “Great social media posts swipe file” or “5 of the greatest email subject lines to use” to “Website copy that will guarantee improved traffic.”
Here is the hard truth of all of these things; they are inherently bad for your business.
The harmful nature of these posts is sometimes intentional or sometimes the mark of a bad marketer that doesn’t know the true intentions. The rationale being that if you click through to whoever is posting it, you will then be targeted for retargeting of their ads and a target for their services. This then allows them to further advertise to you based off of your perceived interest, which in the case of “swipe files” is marketing services. The unscrupulous types know that often businesses will attempt to implement these “swipe files” for internet content only to fail in the endeavor. This failure arrives by either the immense amount of time needed to implement a proper content strategy, the improper use of brand voice, or through penalty due to duplicate content.
Through such failure, some agencies hope to make businesses realize that they need marketing services. Once they realize that, then the brand hopes that they will be remembered as being so helpful and friendly with the swipe file that they will be your first choice in hiring a marketing consultancy or agency. Here are the ways that the three design flaws work in these swipe files and why you shouldn’t use them.
The first one, the realization of lack of time, often comes in the form of inundation of information. This is not unlike what a vast majority of SEO companies do, in that they will just pile on pages of graphs and numbers that are an attempt to overwhelm you. By making you feel like there is no way of understanding and implementing everything they are giving you, they are positioning themselves as an expert in that field by making you feel stupid. This tactic not only allows for you to be retargeted but erodes your confidence as a business owner, which may cause you to make rash decisions.
The second flaw lies in the fact none of this content has been written in the voice of you or your company’s brand. This will harm your business in several ways. Not only will it alienate your current audience through a sudden shift in brand voice, but it will also serve in attracting consumers that might not be in your target demographic. This will then inflate your audience base to those that only come for the content and not the services, bloating your numbers and bogging down your marketing based conversations. Furthermore, once you have run out of “swipe file” fodder, you are then left with nothing. A reversion to your old brand voice will then further reduce your audience and you well be back to behind where you even started.
Finally comes the death knell of all “swipe files,” Google. Google operates on the business model of relevancy and serving up the most accurate websites to whatever people are searching for. This model has led them to cracking down on duplicate content for several years now, a problem that Facebook and Youtube are just now beginning to crackdown on with all the instances of Freebooting. Google has been at the forefront of preventing duplicate content for years and now has it down to a formulaic science. Each time a website updates with new content, it will be crawled by Google. As it does this, it checks for duplicate content on the entire internet. If enough duplicate content is found enough times, Google penalizes the website and significantly lowers its ranking and the probability that it will be a search result.
This isn’t to say that marketing advice or tricks don’t work. Quite the contrary, a lot of marketing agencies enjoy giving out free, good advice as it builds their reputation in a positive manner. However, the next time you see a one size fits all, quick fix, too good to be true, this will make you a millionaire swipe file, take a hard pass. In the end, good marketing done in the white hat manner by an expert will always perform better than anything else.
