Any effective digital marketing strategy relies on different factors to be successful. You need to be able to collect relevant information, while also ensuring your brand is protected and that your content is optimized for search engines. This can be difficult as many things can obscure your results and cause challenges.
In this article, we take a closer look at how a proxy service can help you gain a competitive edge and improve your marketing strategies. Proxies from reliable providers like Smartproxy can be used for so much more than just protecting your online privacy. Continue reading to see how it can improve your marketing as well.
What Is a Proxy?
A proxy server acts as an intermediary, or middleman, between the users and the internet. It’s basically the middleman that you route your traffic through. This means that any searches or connections you make get routed through the proxy before reaching the search engine or website you’re trying to access.
You might be wondering why you’d want to use an intermediary server in the first place. In most cases, it’s better to cut out the middleman, right? By using a proxy service you never actually connect to the sites yourself. Therefore your personal information, such as your IP, is protected. The proxy assigns you a new one that will be visible to the search engines, browser websites, and platforms.
This provides you with better online anonymity, and security and they allow you to bypass geo-restrictions. However, that’s not all that proxies can do.
If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of proxies and understand the differences between proxies and VPNs, this video offers a detailed overview – The Difference Between a VPN and a Proxy
5 Ways Proxies Can Help with Marketing
There are numerous ways that proxies can benefit your digital marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at five different ways a proxy service can improve your marketing efforts.
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Effective Information Gathering
Proxies make it easier for marketers to gather relevant information. They do this in a few ways. First off, your searches are all affected by your previous actions. This means the results you see will be based on your previous search history. While this is great when you use the internet for personal reasons, it can completely obscure your results when doing research. A proxy provides you with a new IP that’s untainted by your previous browsing behaviors which are more accurate for research purposes.
Web scraping is also a way for businesses to streamline and automate their data collection process. These tools can collect vast amounts of data across many different web pages and combine them into a single format you can analyze. You can use it to collect information on competitors, product descriptions, and more. However, without a proxy, these tools will get blocked.
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Ad Verification
Ad fraud is a major threat to digital marketing. One way to ensure you don’t become a victim is to verify your ads and ensure they’re displaying as they should be. This can be a challenge when you want to verify local ads that aren’t within your area. In these cases, a proxy can help you change the location of your IP so that you can see these ads the same way a local might.
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Brand Protection
Brand protection is another important factor for marketers to consider. In an online market, your brand is everything. It’s how people identify you amongst the sea of competitors. However, there are situations in which other people can use elements of your brand without your permission – either intentionally or accidentally. For example, another business might see your logo or business name online and use it for themselves.
This can have a negative impact on your reputation and cause distrust amongst your target audience. With a proxy service and web scraper, you can search the web for any case where your branded content is used without your permission so that you can address it before it causes any negative consequences.
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Managing Multiple Accounts
Social media is one of the best, and most effective, tools in a marketer’s arsenal. By utilizing these platforms, marketers gain direct access to millions of potential clients. However, utilizing the platforms effectively comes with its own challenges. The biggest one for marketers is the limitation of the number of accounts from a single IP address. As soon as you create too many accounts, you’ll receive an IP ban. However, in many cases, businesses need multiple accounts. You can use a proxy service to overcome this restriction as you can use a new IP for each account you create.
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SEO Evaluation
Proxies are also great to evaluate your SEO. As we mentioned, your search results are heavily impacted by your browsing behavior. This means that as a marketer if you try to analyze your rankings, the data can be skewed because you’ve likely searched for your business many times before. To get accurate results you can use a proxy to see results that haven’t been affected by your previous browsing habits. This will give you a much clearer idea of where you land in the rankings and what you can do to improve.
Final Thoughts
A proxy service has many benefits aside from just protecting your online anonymity. They can also be used to improve your marketing by giving you better search results, improving data collection efforts, verifying ads, and more.