Digital marketing is all about the subtle art of manipulating other people’s feeds. It’s like in the movie Inception, where you work hard behind the scenes for people to think that your idea is actually their own.
You manipulate the SEO so that they think that they found your site on their own (with no external assistance). You engineer your advertising policy so that they don’t even realize that the sense of familiarity they see in a brand comes from those 12 banners that they barely even registered.
Now, doing something so subtle and precise requires a great toolset. With that in mind, here are a few benefits of VPN for digital marketing that you have to keep in mind.
1. Checking what content is available locally
When it comes to content marketing, you’re not starting from scratch; you’re actually building up on the existing available formats. Just think about writing a guest post for a website. Are you going to check out their existing content before coming up with a topic? You probably will.
Well, why not check out what kind of content is published locally in order to optimize your topics, come up with great backlinking opportunities, and figure out your content strategy in general? Regardless if the content is in the same language, the locality may change its nature drastically.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that it’s not just that the location will affect your feed search. Sometimes, the content will be geo-restricted. Some videos or sites cannot be accessed from certain regions.
The reasons behind this are numerous, ranging from government censorship to local rules and regulations. Sometimes, it’s about copyrights and censorship that are always enforced nationally. Fortunately, you can get around geo-restrictions with the use of a good VPN.
Even if you’re just looking for some inspiration, it’s always best to look for it locally. Why? Well, because even in the modern hyper-connected world, you’re mostly competing locally.
2. Studying local rules and regulations
The next thing you need to understand is the importance of abiding by local rules and regulations. Sure, sometimes doing the initial research will discover that there are regulations that make your work in a given area completely impossible.
At other times, it will show you why you need to tweak your marketing campaign to promote your business legally in any given area.
One such example can be seen on the example of the online casino industry. In some regions, you can play on sites that are hosted internationally, seeing as the regulation is only against local or locally hosted sites.
In some regions, online casinos are completely legal, which means that you can just promote them in whatever way you want, even advertise them through legacy media.
The problem is that this issue is not always clear-cut. For instance, in some regions, there’s only a ban on luck-based games, which means that while slots are out, there are no restrictions when it comes to poker.
Not to mention the fact that crypto casinos are becoming more and more popular, which makes the thing even more confusing, seeing as how the majority of regions are still to regulate cryptocurrencies, to begin with.
All in all, this kind of knowledge will shape your strategy and it needs to be taken very seriously.
3. Boosting your local SEO
One of the things you might not have known about SEO is that there is not one single ranking system. This is the only logical way to go about things when you really stop to think about it.
For instance, imagine looking for a pizza place to go to, and instead of getting a local answer, you get the best-rated pizza place on the internet. Sounds good? Well, yeah, until you figure out that this pizza place is half a world away.
Another thing you need to keep in mind is that every site has a rank within its own industry. For instance, when you’re a tech site, and you write a tech-based topic, it will always rank better than if you made a health-related, house improvement, or lifestyle post. Social media is all about authority, and you gain authority for each of these industries individually.
The problem with the latter lies in the fact that you have a hard time checking out your own industry since, as an industry veteran, your search history greatly deviates from that of an average internet user.
So, the use of a VPN helps you rank better locally, both geographically and (“locally”) within your own respective niche.
4. International partnerships
Establishing a strong social media presence is great; however, when trying to penetrate a local market, you need your following to be locally relevant. First of all, you can’t afford to have a great discrepancy between following and engagement. This will make it clear that you’re using bots, and you won’t be taken as seriously.
In other words, it’s not just about reaching a certain number of followers. After all, reaching 1,000 followers is not that difficult with the right strategy. The problem lies in finding the right audience and ranking with them.
When trying to impress a local business or specialist, you need to show them that you’re already established in the local community. This means that they need to see that your followers actually exist locally and that there’s some overlap (that the same people follow you).
Now, your recommendations (friend and profile suggestions) will be determined by your location. By using a VPN, you’ll get access to a whole new section of your social media profile of choice.
5. A fresh perspective
Earlier on, we mentioned that you’re already deeply involved in the industry and that Google remembers everything.
You see, your feed is determined by your search history, which makes it very problematic to provide content. After all, as a marketing expert, you’ve spent an ungodly amount of time on your client’s website and returned there so many times. You’ve already seen all of their competitors and researched every topic related to their activity. That is if you’ve done your job right.
Google sees this and recognizes that you’re deeply interested in the topic at hand, so they give you more of it.
This is especially problematic if your client is paying for ads. You enter your Facebook and Instagram profiles, and you’ll get their targeted ads wherever you turn. While this sounds harmless (or even a good thing), the truth is that it will give you the impression that these ads and your digital marketing, in general, are working much better than they really are.
By making a new account, using incognito, and adding a VPN to the mix, you’ll actually get a fresh perspective. This way, you will see what someone who’s not as deeply into it as you are sees when they browse things online.
The role of VPN is essential for any kind of digital marketing research
There’s no digital marketing without proper research, and as a specialist, you need to know more. You know how the internet works, so to prevent it from treating you like an average internet user, you need to learn how to fly a bit under the radar. With all of that in mind, the use of a VPN can help you out with this immensely.
