E-commerce is one technological advancement life would just be worse without. Everyone is buying through their mobile devices, desktops, and laptops nowadays. You could make the argument that it is one of the greatest conveniences achieved by information technologies.
Selling your goods online is the most cost-effective way to trade. Firstly, a business doesn’t need to own a physical store, saving potentially vast sums of money on the infrastructure itself, as well as the upkeep and staff costs. In the same vein, buying online is also the most efficient way to trade, saving valuable time and travel costs.
For businesses, trading online means accessing a global customer base. Of course, there are downsides, too. If you own a physical store locally, chances are the competition is way smaller than when trading online. That’s why companies employ a variety of clever tactics, often with the help of anonymity tools, such as residential proxies. By using these services, businesses can unlock an array of strategies that provide a better understanding of the market, the competition, and a greatly enhanced social media presence. Whether you are a business representative looking to gain an edge or an individual interested in strategies to bolster e-commerce sales, this article is for You.
Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts
Let’s start this chapter by exploring the more technical side of multi-accounting. Social media platforms don’t like a single user having multiple accounts. So, they discourage it by detecting these accounts and then flagging, suspending, or banning them. Such an approach is limiting the legitimate use cases. That’s why anonymity tools, such as residential proxies, are used to bypass restrictions. These services assign the user with a legitimate IP address, which comes from an internet service provider and has an authentic home address associated with it. Residential proxies allow multiple accounts to appear unique to the website despite being managed by the same entity, thus avoiding restrictions.
Marketing Different Product Lines
Let’s explore how this can be hugely beneficial for ventures that promote their products directly through social media accounts they own or by sponsoring influencers.
A company producing various items might have different target audiences. Say a fashion producer is making men’s and women’s clothes. In this case, it is impractical to market both product lines through the same channels. This is when multi-accounting is employed to advertise different product lines to distinct audiences, ensuring that each only sees relevant content.
Expanding Audience Reach
A great way of fostering sales is audience engagement. Diversifying content across multiple social media accounts enables precise audience targeting for tailored brand messaging. It’s a way of ensuring every significant demographic can be catered to and experience tailored content. For example, a travel influencer promotes various traveling services using multiple accounts: one for luxury and another for budget travel. By catering to each audience separately, the influencer ensures their audience stays more engaged and is always excited about new content rather than disappointed by a post that isn’t for them.
Facilitating cross-promotion
Sometimes, an opportunity might arise when diversifying content for your audiences rather than keeping it streamlined is beneficial. For example, a fitness influencer who manages one account meant for healthy cooking and another for workout routines can find clever ways of cross-promoting their channels, bolstering the engagement of both simultaneously.
Market Research
To businesses trading online, market research is invaluable for determining marketing and informing about further product development. Several market research strategies rely on residential proxies, especially when analyzing markets of a foreign region.
Accessing Region-Locked Content
Certain content is unavailable to users from different regions because of direct region-blocking or various mechanisms, such as algorithms, that won’t show the user content it thinks will be relevant to them. This information is highly relevant to businesses trading globally, as appealing to region-specific trends and creating culturally relevant content is important for driving user engagement. To bypass various forms of region-locking companies, and influencers can use residential proxies, making the user appear as if browsing from a specific region.
Competitor analysis
When collecting vast amounts of data about competitors’ pricing strategies, product offerings, and market positioning, a few things must be considered. Firstly, a lot of traffic will be generated if the data is gathered autonomously using web scrapers. If all that traffic comes from a single address, it appears highly suspicious, often resulting in the IP address being banned from accessing the website. Secondly, it is perhaps better if the competition doesn’t know who is doing the snooping around. By employing various proxies, companies hide their identity, enabling anonymous large-scale data collection that ensures they stay competitive in terms of price and product offerings.
Ad verification
A high-quality ad campaign can be costly. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure they are being displayed correctly. Ad verification often employs some proxy server. Advertisers can check how their ads appear as they would to a user from a different region. Ad verification can be performed regularly and autonomously to ensure commitment to agreements, such as ads being displayed long enough and at the correct times. However, doing this requires the user to check the website continuously, if it’s done from the same IP address, it can run into issues of being banned.
Conclusion
Residential proxies and other anonymity services are pivotal for e-commerce businesses, enabling enhanced market research, broader social media engagement, and operational efficiency. They also provide essential anonymity and bolster security, protecting against potential security threats.
Andrej Fedek is the creator and the one-person owner of two blogs: InterCool Studio and CareersMomentum. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers with White Hat SEO techniques. Besides being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.