A VPN or Virtual Private Network is a technology that encrypts all your data and Secures your connection over the internet. Think of it as an encrypted tunnel through which your data flows back and forth through your ISP to the intended website. The encrypted tunnel starts at your device and ends at your VPN server; without the possibility of anyone deciphering traffic between the two points.

A VPN is designed to make an air-tight encrypted tunnel connection. One that cannot be compromised, tapped into and your data traffic be listened to, watched, recorded, or manipulated midway between your computer and the website (server) you are browsing.

There’s a rising Need for Strong VPN services

We are living in the digital information age, where information can be relayed from one place to another place halfway around the world in microseconds. This technology has become so ubiquitous that it is virtually present in all spheres of our lives.

Hospitals have adopted digital records keeping, government services have been digitalized, businesses are done online, learning has gone online, and even our private communication between family and friends happens a lot online.

Sure, the internet has brought about unprecedented efficiency and cutting costs and time wastage. However, on the flip side, it has presented equally unparalleled opportunities for thieves of that information.

Well, the term thieves might be an overkill considering even your ISP is mining your traffic as part of big data to identify your consumer behavior pattern to sell to marketers. The government too, as the big brother, is keeping a keen eye on your internet traffic to ‘weed out’ dissidents and their supporters.

Then there are the real thieves, the hackers, whose sole mission is to steal from you. They do that in various ways, including:

Stealing your banking information to wipe out your account

If you are a business or corporation, record your information and sell it to your business rivals (cyber espionage)

Lock you out of your computer or important files so you can pay them to grant you access (ransomware).

How PureVPN could up your Digital Marketing campaign

Traditionally, VPN has been viewed as a tool for people who want to mask their online activities from governments, hackers, their ISPs, and access geo-restricted streaming services. It is quite unconventional to see digital marketers employ it for purposes of their work unless, of course, it is for the reasons mentioned above.

In this article, we are going to look at the various way a VPN can help you level up on your digital marketing campaign.

1. Secure and Expand your Social Media horizons

In today’s world, social media has become the go-to platform for most people for a wide number of needs. That includes communication with family and friends, keeping up with news updates, trends in fashion, gossip, and just about everything else. Stats show that there are about 3.5 billion active users of the various social media platforms.

Like how lions lurk around the watering point and grazing plains where the antelopes visit, a digital marketer must, therefore, have a strong social media presence representing their brands.

That means engaging with prospective and current customers on social media and building a strong relationship over time. However, that poses another problem on its own. The bigger your engagement and following you gather on social media over time, the bigger a target you become to hackers.

The hackers are after people’s confidential information (usernames and passwords for various online accounts). To protect both yourself as a company and your customers, it is advisable you bar them by encrypting your internet traffic.

Secondly, VPNs can give you access to foreign markets as if you were operating locally there. This feature is particularly useful to a digital marketer contracted to market a client’s brand in a different market.

For instance, PureVPN has over 2000 servers located across more than 140 countries. You can simply pick a server located inside the country where you are targeting clients. That is how you get locally relevant marketing information from services like Google that give precedence to locally relevant content over international content.

2. Get the Local SEO right

Just like how switching server to a region of your target market is based gives you locally relevant social media content, so does SEO. A VPN technology will go a long way in upping your search engine optimization for your client’s website.

On this front, SEO helps by enabling you to get insight on local content from a foreign country, without you being physically present in the said market. For instance, you can run Google search your typical customer could run and get what kind of information appears at the top of the search engine.

Using that insight, you can tweak your customer’s website with such relevant content and thus improve their SEO rating in the given country, but without ever stepping foot in the foreign country.

3. Secure your Remote Working

Digital marketers are more likely to work from home, cafes, libraries, moving trains, or any other remote location. While that sounds super convenient, it comes with inherent security risks, especially if you will be using public Wi-Fi and poorly secured local networks.

If there is a hacker on the same network, they will be able to tap into data coming in and out of your device. That could lead to a serious security breach and financial losses if the hacker gets away with sensitive information such as banking account details.

PureVPN encrypts all data coming in and from your computer to any internet connection. So it will not matter if you are using a public Wi-Fi or poorly secured network. The hacker will not be able to get passed the VPN encryption of data flowing to and from your device. So you can work remotely and use whichever internet connection service available without worries.

4. Have a Bird’s Eye View on your Competition

Digital marketing is a fast-paced and cut-throat industry. You need to always be on your toes and ready to sprint to opportunities and away from losses. One way of identifying opportunities and losses is by keeping tabs on your competition.

However, there is a smart way of going about it, and a not-so-smart way. For instance, you don’t want to be visiting your competition’s site every day in the morning when you get down to work. If they wish to, they can determine who has been viewing them, and they see you among their visitors.

Instead, use a VPN service to view them without disclosing your identity. A VPN can mask you as a visitor from a completely different country while viewing your competition’s website.

5. Avoid ISP Bandwidth Throttling

ISPs stretched to capacity employ underhand tactics of throttling users’ connection speeds and bandwidth during peak hours. They choose to do so as it is less costly compared to buying extra infrastructure to handle the increased traffic during peak hours.

Unfortunately, as a digital marketer, these peak hours might be the times when you have crucial activities going on. When your bandwidth is throttled, activities such as video conferencing and sharing large files will be severely affected.

A VPN enables you to avoid ISP bandwidth throttling since your data is encrypted as it flows through a private network, a less congested one. Thus, you will not have to worry about bandwidth throttling.

6. Bypass Censorship and Access Geo-Restricted Materials

Governments around the world are increasingly censoring internet traffic within their borders, with China being the most notorious. As a digital marketer working in a country with such a regime, your choices of clients and content will be restricted to what just your government approves.

That could mean the government is locking you out from accessing certain markets outside your country. However, with a VPN, you can bypass such censorship and gain access to clients across the globe. Provided you are using a VPN service with servers spread out in as many countries as possible.

Wrapping up

The internet has designed the world to become a global village. A person working in a flat somewhere in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and telecommute to work every day to New York, USA. That is if the internet is left to work as it was intended to work without all these human-made (governments and corporations) borders.

VPN services like PureVPN are finding ways to break those borders and give you access to the world at the click of a button. Head on to their website to download PureVPN now, and break down all the artificial barriers on the internet.

Another formidable VPN we would recommend is NordVPN. It also checks off on all the points mentioned above, and furthermore, NordVPN works well in Canada, the US, Australia, China, and Russia among other countries with heavy geo-fencing policy. You might also want to read up on this exhaustive comparison between NordVPN and ExpressVPN.