If you are working in a digital marketing sphere, most of your work is done online, from managing social media channels to monitoring adverts and rankings of your website. Being online is your everyday lifestyle. A wise thing to do for all the marketers is to include a VPN in their toolkit. VPN is useful for few reasons: security online, Geo-spoofing & SERP rankings, working remotely, competitors matching and link building.

Before diving into the specific cases when a VPN is useful for marketing, I want to outline what is a virtual private network and which one I personally recommend.

Virtual Private Network

A VPN is a software that encrypts traffic of your data, in simple words it makes you secure and anonymous online. It also lets you bypass any geo-restrictions by letting you change your IP, with which you can appear in any corner of the world (depends on how many servers and countries does your VPN provider support).

VPN not only will keep you and your business safe from hackers and any other cyber attacks, but it will also help you monitor your competitors activities and view genuine search engine results from the country you need.

My personal recommendations and what I personally use for marketing activities is Surfshark. It’s a really easy to use, user-friendly and comparably cheap software, with high number of servers and rapid speeds. I will use Surfshark as an example how you can use a VPN for your marketing activities.

Also they are offering a great deal right now (82% discount for a 2-year plan) with a coupon code “BESTSHARK” so do not hesitate and get the deal while it is out there. You can also just use this link to get it: https://surfshark.com/offer/BESTSHARK

Now let’s dive in into the good stuff

VPN for your security

When you are working in digital marketing you collect a lot of sensitive information that you share or use. This includes your business sensitive data and both customers and competitors data. It is crucial to keep it secure and encrypted that nobody from outside could access it and steal it. A VPN will ensure that ISPs, competitors, government, hackers or any other third party member will not snoop around what you are up to online and get your data.

Also a VPN will secure you from data leaks, which could ruin your business. Just look at Facebook, how much did their market share has drop when their data was leaked. A lot. And if your business encounters similar cyber attacks this could happen to your business.

While Surfshark VPN will ensure your protection online (they use industry leading encryption) you should add an extra layer of security by choosing a strong password and using two-factor authentication. You can always get password manager tools like LastPass to keep all your password secure in one place.

Geo-spoofing and SERP rankings

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is an inseparable part of all marketing activities, however with the rise of cookies, it’s getting harder to access geo-restricted content and get untainted search engine result pages.

Using incognito mode is an option, but is often not enough to reach all the information you need. Using a VPN will help you much more. With a help of VPN you will be able to easily change your IP address and see SERPs from any location. Using a VPN will allow you to see how your site compares with other international competitors and lets you see keywords that are popular in a specific location.

For this you will need a VPN that has many servers in different countries worldwide. Surfshark VPN has more than 800 servers in more than 50 countries. Not shabby at all.

Monitoring competitors activities

Keeping an eye on your competitors actions is very important in digital marketing. Doing it makes sure you are ahead or see why are you far away from your competitors marketing activities. But you sure do not want them to know what you are up to and this is where VPN helps. With a VPN competitors will have no clue that you are watching them by masking your IP address. Also some competitors might not want you to look at their activities and ban your office IPs, this is when VPNs comes in very handy.

Link building and forums

If you are in need of link building or maybe want to promote your own business on competitors websites. Or maybe just want people to notice your product on specific forums you will encounter some blocking issues. Some websites may track your IP address and see that different accounts have the same IP and ban you. Again VPN as an IP address changer comes in handy in this situation, just change your IP for different accounts and you are good to go.

Remote work

Nowadays freelancing jobs are a thing and a very popular one. Especially in marketing sphere. But with the rise of remote work, the rise of cyber threats increases and your companies data can be easily stolen. The same idea goes here as in the security section. VPN will prevent all third party members snooping around, stealing your precious data by encrypting your traffic. This is especially useful while working remotely, since freelancers love to work from coffee shops or similar spaces where they connect to public wifi. Public wifi is one of the major risks that lay outside the office, since it is super easy to access another computer for hackers if the freelancers are connected to public wifi.

Conclusion

VPN is a great additional tool for your digital marketing toolkit. It will not only absolutely secure your data, keep you anonymous but will also let you travel wherever you want in the world and see stats and data you need that is only available while being in the specific geo region. Also no competitors will see that you are snooping around their business and trying to keep up or overdo them.

Again — my personal recommendations Surfshark VPN. Of course there are many more good ones out there just need to research all of them a little bit.