As we have accelerated into the online and digital age, finding ways to enhance activity in the digital space has become vital for businesses.
With over 5 billion people using the internet, this has built up a massive e-commerce space. With that comes a hyper-competitive business market, each organization clamoring for an edge.
Cybercrime is increasing, and businesses use nefarious methods to track their online data and history to leverage this information. Cybercrime and third-party activity create a dangerous combination that provides hackers and other bad actors with routes to track your online movement and then target you for hacking and viruses.
Thankfully, there are business tools that can give businesses many avenues to get ahead of competitors and enhance how they do things to increase their market share and performance. Those tools can include technologies like artificial intelligence and analytics, VPNs, and residential proxies.
What is a Residential Proxy?
By using a residential proxy, you use a proxy that works through an ISP (internet service provider) and hides the original user’s IP (internet protocol) address, giving them complete anonymity. The residential proxy is also better than other versions due to its legitimacy – it is far less likely to be banned or blacklisted by online applications and websites than ones like a data center proxy, for example.
Why Do Companies Use Residential Proxies?
Companies can get many benefits from using residential proxies within their organization. The employees within a business can protect their online identities. At the same time, they undertake web scraping, getting content from geo-restricted locations in the world or getting past firewalls. In addition to these benefits, critical business activities like pricing intelligence, market research, and online advertising campaigns can generate a profit using a residential proxy.
Here are the eight reasons why a residential proxy is a must-have tool for businesses:
- Get Past Firewalls – Many businesses utilize firewalls to keep their networks fully protected and healthy against external threats and dangers, like cybercriminals and hackers. The downside to this benefit can be that firewalls can block out websites that companies might need, as well as online applications and software that are required for business purposes. By using a residential proxy, a business can get around the firewall and get access to the content they need.
- No More Geographical Restrictions – One of the significant benefits of a residential proxy is that you can get past geo-restrictions because you can use an IP address. Sometimes for businesses that need to target a particular region, you will need to access websites and online services that you can’t usually get to. Thankfully, due to residential proxies, you can adjust your IP address to the country you want to target.
- Enhance Your Business Online Advertising Campaigns – If you are trying to break into different regions and markets with your business, you will need to run online ad campaigns in the relevant jurisdictions. By running a residential proxy alongside these ad campaigns, you can run tests in different locations and target different demographics.
- Add Online Protection – When a company runs web scraping activity or carries out market research online, its online identity can be at risk if they do not use a residential proxy to hide its IP address. Thanks to residential proxies, they can stop websites and online apps from blocking their IP address or putting them on a blacklist.
- Get More Data – When businesses undertake web scraping for data purposes, using a residential proxy gives them the best possible opportunity to maximize the quantity. Whether they are trying to grow their lead generation for sales or boost market research for ad campaigns, residential proxies allow for complete optimization.
- Better Price Learning – Part of business activity is going through your competitors and other operators in your market and doing pricing research. Residential proxies are crucial in going about this, allowing for deeper and more data scraping, which businesses and companies can use to optimize pricing strategies.
- Expand Social Media Marketing – When you grow your business, you will need to run social media marketing campaigns in more regions that could expand across the globe, depending on how big your business gets. Using your residential proxy, you can run social media accounts and put content in places you usually wouldn’t be able to, boosting your overall marketing strategy.
- Helps Prevent Fraud – Using residential proxies helps bring alerts to any dangerous activity or suspect behavior that comes from specific IP addresses. Business leaders can thwart any online fraud threats before they do serious harm.
Residential proxies are a must-have business tool, as the amount of data and content is growing online and the various business uses of them. Using a residential proxy for your business allows you to gain a competitive edge over other companies in your market and make more decisive business moves in the long run.