7 Ways a VPN for Digital Marketing Helps You Win
As a digital marketing professional, most of your work happens online. Building and launching campaigns, assessing your company’s search rankings, monitoring PPC ads -- without the internet, digital marketing couldn’t exist.
If you’re looking for enhanced cybersecurity, tools to better understand consumer behaviors, or to bypass censorship and geo-restricted content, adding a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to your marketing toolkit is a must.
The important and sensitive nature of the information you exchange daily makes you a target for hackers and cybercriminals. Using a VPN for digital marketing protects you by creating a secure, encrypted connection between your devices and an external network, allowing you to browse the internet safely and anonymously.
As a marketer, finding new ways to enhance your marketing strategies outside of the common tricks and practices can be challenging. This post will outline the 7 ways you can use a VPN as a powerful marketing tool to give you an edge and stay ahead of your competition.
1. Enhanced Cybersecurity
Exchanging sensitive data about your company, clients, and competitors comes with a responsibility to keep this information secure at all times. Data leaks and cyberattacks can impact your marketing efforts, damage relationships with your clients, and even affect your company’s valuation.
Using a VPN for digital marketing makes you completely anonymous online. It creates a secure and encrypted tunnel between your devices and the internet.
2. Geo-Spoofing & Local SERPs
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential part of most digital marketing strategies. And understanding your target audience’s behavior is one of the keys to successful SEO.
The rise of cookies, page crawlers, geo-restricted content, and censorship have made it harder to access untainted search engine results pages (SERPs).
Marketers targeting overseas audiences can struggle to analyze consumer behavior and identify what international prospects are looking for on their local search engines.
With a VPN for digital marketing, you can use a new IP address linked to one of our servers in the country of your choice. This “geo-spoofing” moves your internet connection to the location you selected, which gives you access to “native” SERPs from all over the world. These results can help you identify the real keywords your target audience uses on Google and other search engines when they’re searching for your products or services.
Another key benefit of geo-spoofing is the ability it gives you to monitor the wider market and view genuine local SERPs the same way your international customers are seeing them.
This powerful feature is essential for planning your PPC strategies and budget effectively.
3. Competitor Review
Another crucial aspect of digital marketing is monitoring what your competitors are doing. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses you can discover your own competitive advantages and maximize your marketing results.
A VPN masks your online identity so you can track your competitors anonymously. Even though you aren’t monitoring them to steal their strategies, keeping your research anonymous is wise.
4. Link Building Outreach
Another way for marketers to use a VPN for digital marketing is to find backlink opportunities. SEO specialists are probably familiar with this concept already.
Link building is another key area of digital marketing. It improves your website’s visibility and traffic, but also helps with search engine rankings.
A common issue marketers face with link building today is that some websites don’t allow them to create multiple links from the same IP address for different accounts. Since a VPN masks your IP and location, you can bypass this issue and create multiple accounts or links as needed.
5. Remote Work
Digital marketing can be carried out from anywhere in the world. Companies today are looking for marketers who can work remotely and be productive.
Unfortunately, the rise of remote work also comes with risks and an attendant need for cybersecurity. And as a freelance marketer, you may find yourself working and sharing sensitive information while connected to unsecured networks like public WiFi hotspots.
Using public WiFi without a VPN connection puts your data security at risk. Nowadays, most companies with remote marketing teams ensure that the team connects through a secure network.
6. Bypass Geo-Restrictions and Censorship
Over the last few years, internet censorship has become tougher in certain parts of the world. More content than ever is geo-restricted, or can only be accessed by users in a specific country or region.
As a marketer, you need to reach beyond these geographic barriers at times.
As discussed above, geo-spoofing is the process of changing your location or country online so you can appear to be in a location of your choosing. In addition to better keyword research, geo-spoofing generates access to geo-restricted content.
7. Avoid Bandwidth Throttling
Needless to say, a fast internet connection is very important to your digital marketing efforts.
You might have noticed fluctuations in your connection speed at certain times of the day. In fact, ISPs can slow down your connection deliberately to avoid congesting their networks. It also spares them the expense of additional equipment to handle traffic surges.
Once again, this can be overcome using a powerful VPN.
How to Choose a VPN for Digital Marketing
VPNs are popular because users can access geo-restricted content and local libraries from their favorite streaming services. A trustworthy and reliable VPN, however, can be a game-changer for digital marketing professionals.
From improving cybersecurity to giving you tools to better understand consumer behavior, a VPN can be used as a powerful marketing tool outside of the traditional tricks and tools most marketers use. A VPN for digital marketing is key to helping you stay ahead of your competition.