Preventing competitors from submitting a Marketo form

[Anonymous]

Hello community! Is there a way to program a Marketo form to block people identified in our exclusion lists (i.e. competitors) from submitting the form and accessing the gated data? Any help is appreciated!

[Gerard_Donnell4]

A competitor most of the time will just sign up with a personal email though to circumvent this.

Do you have double opt in implemented on your site? This would at least stop them entering dummy email addresses to access your data.

When they fill in the form the rules would only be checking that the form has been completed correctly not that the email is a competitors. You can put in checks for certain domain names etc.., some people would block leads from using outlook.com or yahoo.com in the email field.  This would be done through javascript though and not through flows or inputs on the backend. 

You can have rules on the backend that deal with competitors once they enter the system. (Black lists Add Person to Blacklist - Marketo Docs - Product Docs ).

Instead of putting the content on the landing page you can just include a link to it in an email and once they fill in the form you can direct them to a landing page that says "thanks and your content will be emailed to you shortly".  Your system rules would then check the lead and stop the email from being sent if they used a competitor email address.

Thanks,

Gerard

[Josh_Hill13]

this is the standard way.

Also, many people  say "Delete these people immediately." WAIT.

Once they sign up, you can now track them and watch what your competition is interested in on your site. If you had a Competitive Research person (rare), this info could be quite valuable. You could even start to mislead your competition if you had a lot of time to do that sort of thing.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh Hill​ for the good laugh! I am one of those people who NEVA delete the competition because I do like to track them and we are fortunate to have a competitive research analyst on staff. We keep him busy! I wish I had some luxury time so I could get creative. Hmm, maybe a new niche service?!?!?

[Anonymous]

Thanks Gerard Donnelly - but not an option. Most of our content is gated and then delivered by email, by which the blacklist is working well. However, we have some new content that mgmt is wanting to make available immediately, within the same LP, so I'm looking for a way to circumvent the competition from seeing it. Looks like my web developers will have to get creative.

[Josh_Hill13]

The developer would have to somehow identify the IPs or domains and then redirect or show different content to those people. It will not work 100% if someone works from home or is a contractor.