Home » Blog » Marketing » What is The Gray Market, and How to Protect Against it?

Marketing

What is The Gray Market, and How to Protect Against it?

The gray market, gray economy, and gray securities. Here we are talking about gray market products rather than gray securities or the gray economy.

Published

1 year ago

September 16, 2021

TwinzTech

5 Things To Learn Immediately To Succeed As An Online Marketer

Three things could be confused with one another: the gray market, gray economy, and gray securities. Here we are talking about gray market products rather than gray securities or the gray economy. Gray securities are shares of a corporation traded before being publicly distributed. At the same time, the gray economy is made of assets and services that elude state taxation.

1. So, what is the gray market?

Anti-counterfeit items that are sold legitimately but outside sanctioned distribution ways are called gray market goods. It hurts the brand and violates the intellectual property protection of any business. The gray market includes everything from vehicles and cameras to software and medicines. The gray market has been running for a long time. To quickly explain it, let’s take a more straightforward example.

The first thing that a manufacturer or brand does is sell a product to a distributor. After that, the distributor sells it to accredited retail shops. Subsequently, those outlets sell the product to buyers. Although this might be a way to sell anti-counterfeit items, it still hurts a brand. In a perfect system, the precise quantity of products would be produced and put up for retail, hoping that the public would purchase all of it.

Nevertheless, the reality is a bit different. If a merchant or retailer is left with surplus or old stock, they can sell it at slashed rates to other traders. This violates intellectual property protection, but some merchants still chose to sell surplus stock to such dealers.

These traders later market the store to the public at further discounted prices. And it is way easier to fool the public because unauthorized sellers often look the same to customers as authorized sellers. The only noticeable contrast is lower costs. But these traders can’t provide company warranties. And some of the products might not satisfy regulatory criteria for the country in which they are being sold.

Gray Market

Sometimes the brands or distributors supply the gray market themselves. However, brands usually refrain from doing so as it hurts their reputation and helps those retailers who sell counterfeit items.

2. How to protect against the gray market?

The first step is to identify unapproved dealers. Knowing who is running the gray market is the key to stopping them. And the best way to monitor the gray market dealers is to look for the products at lower prices than the official retailers or sites. For brands, they must watch the MAP of the products. Most of the MAP violators are often connected to the gray market.

Secondly, the brands must educate their consumers about the official stores’ sites. While advertising and marketing products, the brands can easily throw in the knowledge and importance of buying the products from original and authorized stores and locations. Consumer education helps offline and online brand protection, allows customers to purchase anti-counterfeit and authentic products, and gives the customer a warranty.

If the brand spots gray market retailers, they can send a cease-and-desist letter. It serves as a prelude for the subsequent legal actions that the brand can take in case the dealer doesn’t stop selling unsanctioned products. The brands can take legal steps because they violate intellectual property protection and MAP violations, including many other offenses.

Business

4 SaaS Link Building Tips For Beginners

Published

2 days ago

November 25, 2022

TwinzTech

The most effective techniques to promote your software as a service (SaaS) business and increase organic traffic to your website are content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

Note that improving your SEO rankings entails acquiring more high-quality backlinks. Thus, it’s essential to increase the number of backlinks to your SaaS business’s website from authoritative, high-quality websites in order to boost its search engine optimization performance.

In reality, link-building is a tough process, especially in the SaaS context. Why? Backlinks for SaaS websites are difficult to come by, and with the rise of new SaaS businesses, this will get more challenging. Therefore, building links the right way is the key, and you can find out how to plan your own link-building strategy from https://linkflow.ai/saas-link-building/ and other helpful resources.

Link-Building Strategies For SaaS Companies

Regardless of your niche, you may need to actively develop backlinks to your SaaS business in order to get your content discovered, consumed, and, ultimately, attract new clients. Here are ways to do it.

Table of Contents

1. Write Guest Posts

Building backlinks and establishing yourself as an authority in your field can be accomplished effectively through guest posting. When you create content that is both original and helpful, other websites may link to it.

Take the website’s domain authority into account when guest posting. It’s recommended that you start with a well-regarded website with a Domain Authority (DA) of 50 or above. In addition, it would be beneficial to search for niche-specific websites interested in your writing.

After discovering a website open to guest posts, your next step is to learn more about the site’s target audience and content before seeking content marketing managers. Also, check to see if there are any guest posting requirements for the site.

However, you should exercise caution in deciding which blogs to publish on. There’s a wide variety of authoritative websites, and the same holds true for blogs.

2. Take Advantage Of Brand Mentions

Utilize your SaaS network to its full potential and make the most of brand-mention opportunities.

Backlink mentions are an excellent approach to making use of the websites, businesses, and services that you discuss in the content you create. Utilize methods such as co-mentioning or mention-me-back to get the advantage from your network.

This is an excellent strategy to obtain backlinks with very little effort on your part.

Link-Building Strategies For SaaS Companies

3. Pitch Link Round Ups

SaaS isn’t the only industry that can benefit from link roundups, but it is one in which they excel.

A link roundup (also known as a link list) is a regularly scheduled set of external links to relevant online content, such as articles, blog posts, and other online resources. Audiences can use them to find new content to read and share. They provide a dependable method for website owners to acquire inbound links.

Creating high-quality content that follows SEO best practices is the first step to being featured on authoritative link roundups.

Content that is educational, thoroughly investigated, and supported by reliable sources has a much better chance of being included in link roundups. The odds of being featured will improve if you establish yourself as a reliable source of high-quality information.

4. Use Digital PR Tactics To Earn Backlinks

Digital public relations (PR) is one of the most effective long-term approaches to building SaaS links. Digital PR entails expanding a company’s brands using means like podcasting, webinars, and more to attract the media’s attention.

Here are some suggestions for digital PR link-building:

Surveys and studies
Trend reports
Podcasts, webinars, and conferences

In order to get journalists and publications to write about your material and include links to it, you need to generate linkable assets (also known as link bait) and market these to them.

Important Factors In Back Linking

There are differences in the quality of the links. However, how can you evaluate whether or not a link is of high quality?

A link’s anatomy can tell you if it’s high- or low-quality. Look at these principles:

Relevancy
Anchor Text
Domain Strength
Page Strength

Once you’ve made it to the first page of Google’s search results, you can take it a step further by analyzing the anchor texts used by your top competitors to learn which type of anchor Google prefers and then using that data to guide your own link-building efforts.