According to eMarketer and Statista, online retail sales will reach $6.51 trillion by 2023, with eCommerce websites accounting for 22.3% of total retail sales.
It is no longer news that online marketing has mostly taken over the traditional brick-and-mortar marketing method. Most consumers find it more accessible and prefer to shop online or hire services from the comfort of their rooms rather than taking a trip to the next physical store.
However, while technological advancement comes with many untapped opportunities, it’s also brought along some significant concerns. Many brands and businesses that have gone online face various cyber threats, including brand abuse, counterfeiting, trademark infringement, social media impersonation, and patent fraud.
For instance, it’s been estimated that an attack occurs every 39 seconds, so businesses must continually take measures against cyber attacks. These threats pose a significant risk to organizational reputation and long-term viability, which is where brand protection comes in.
You’ll need proxies to effect adequate brand protection for your business. However, before we go into that, let’s take a brief look at what brand protection really entails.
What Is Brand Protection?
Brand protection is a procedure that protects your company’s intellectual property. It encompasses all preventative measures used to avoid trademark infringement, such as phishing, malware, counterfeiting, and intellectual property infringement.
Building a reputation takes time, effort, and dedication. While most businesses follow the procedure, some choose to take a shortcut known as brand abuse.
Standard methods of brand abuse include counterfeiting, copyright infringement, patent theft, social media impersonation, and so on.
Some brands detect fraudulent activity early on, while others realize it is too late—a lack of awareness and action results in an endless legal battle and high costs.
When a company wants to safeguard its trade secrets and brand, it establishes a set of rules and practices that include a checklist of things to do to protect its intellectual property and keep it from being misused. This is accomplished through the use of brand protection.
Cyberattacks can severely damage your brand’s reputation; therefore, defending it rather than cleaning it up after a hack is preferable. You can protect your brand’s identity using design marks, patents, trade and color markings, and anything else associated with it.
Using home proxies to scour the internet and monitor every mention of your brand is one method of brand protection. As a result, you will be able to respond quickly to any negative action taken against your brand.
How Brand Protection Using Proxy Works
Brand protection is typically divided into four stages or processes: detection, validation, enforcement, and reporting.
Detection
In the detection process, your brand protection service provider will provide your brand with proxies that will crawl the internet to check for any form of brand abuse.
Users can use proxy servers to hide their activities and avoid detection by website trackers and security measures.
Web scrapers and crawlers use a rolling poll of residential proxies to ensure that you cannot distinguish their behavior from that of a human user. These trademark abuse detectors can also access geo-blocked content, which means they can access restricted content from websites located anywhere in the world.
Validation
The next step is to confirm that the offenses listed are, in fact, violations. This validation step ensures that legitimate businesses are not penalized by mistake.
Enforcement
In this step, your service providers will delete the online infractions once they have authenticated them.
For instance, they will close the fraudulent website, delete the imposter’s social media accounts, and take the offending goods down from the online shop.
Reporting
This is the final step in the brand protection process. The service provider notifies regulatory organizations and your brand of the infringement, letting you know how the work is progressing.
On this level, providers also supply you with actionable and helpful information that assists your company in protecting its brand and ensuring the security of its intellectual property.
Benefits of Brand Protection
Prevent Revenue Loss
People who acquire fake products by mistake will not return for more, especially if the imitation item does not work as well as the real deal. It may also make customers less likely to purchase from the genuine brand in the future.
Brand security is critical to maintaining consistency in your business, products, and services and establishing a solid online presence.
Whether you’re a new or established business, protecting your brand is critical to avoid legal issues that could harm your brand’s value and prevent your firm from growing.
Destroys counterfeiters
Protecting a brand is very important as it makes your brand impenetrable to robbers and attackers. This results in a significant decrease in the number of counterfeiters.
It does not change the fact that someone determined to commit such a heinous crime will continue to try. Businesses usually implement brand protection and employ a multilayered strategy to protect their brand.
Customer Protection
Businesses can protect their customers from potentially dangerous counterfeit goods by implementing a comprehensive brand protection strategy.
Numerous dangerous counterfeits have been found to contain toxins, explode and start fires, fake phone chargers, and grass-based brake pads for automobiles, to name a few.
Rather than removing individual listings or accounts on the fly, which results in only temporary inconveniences rather than long-term consequences, effective brand protection entails identifying large-scale networks working against your brand and taking enforcement action against them.
By doing so, you are being proactive, responsible, and prioritizing the security and well-being of the customers.
What Is a Proxy Network?
A proxy network is a server that mediates requests for particular services or requests for specific resources between a client and a particular server. They help you keep your anonymity by concealing your connection. They also give you the ability to do business as usual.
Using proxies rather than clearing your history is a much safer way to hide your online activities. Anybody can look into recovering deleted history in Chrome or another browser. However, you have a competitive advantage thanks to proxy servers.
Proxy servers’ primary function is to protect the direct connection between Internet clients and Internet resources. Proxy servers act as a gateway between your device and the internet. They change your IP address and make your connection untraceable, making it impossible for hackers to determine the source of your connection.
It is necessary because your device requests access whenever you connect to the internet and want to open a webpage or engage in virtual activities. As a result, entry is dependent on your permission.
Importance of Proxy Servers for Your Brand
Web Traffic Regulation
You must have continuous uptime if you don’t want your customer satisfaction ratings to drop. When you fail to handle web traffic correctly, it clogs your system and prevents consumers and potential customers from accessing your website. When these important visitors cannot access your website quickly or have intermittent access, they switch to one of the many alternatives available to meet their needs.
Ideally, your website’s entire database should reside on a web server. With the addition of a proxy server, the same load is distributed across multiple servers worldwide. With this approach, your website can handle massive client requests, increasing its capacity to meet demand.
A proxy server acts as a single point of access for all servers, distributing requests evenly so that no server is overburdened.
Increased Network Speeds and Bandwidth
As previously stated, proxies distribute data across multiple servers and manage consumer requests more efficiently.
Proxy servers speed up your network by compressing data, caching web pages, blocking advertisements from appearing on websites, and preventing server crashes. This frees up a significant amount of bandwidth, allowing everyone on your network to enjoy fast Internet speeds.
This is an essential feature because a faster network speed correlates to a more user-friendly website. Customers today expect websites to load faster; failing to do so will direct them to a competitor’s site.
Anonymous Activities
Using a proxy server to avoid detection is one of the many advantages of this technology. The use of a masked IP address extends beyond the ability to access Netflix content from other countries. It is a necessary resource for any business.
A company’s operations must frequently be conducted in private. These activities could range from safeguarding sensitive client and investor information to shielding the most recent product development from prying competitors.
It is also helpful in conducting research, particularly when it involves competitor analysis, financial reviews and analysis, and the development of new strategies for the target market.
Limit Employees’ Internet Usage
No business organization desires that its employees use company networks to access unsafe or inappropriate websites. Proxy servers are used to manage many internal networks as a result.
When the network is accessed through a proxy, network administrators can control which devices can connect to it and which websites they can visit. You can restrict access to websites and content you do not want your employees to view or use on company time.
Network administrators can also monitor the date and time of content access. Many security officers use this to watch for illegal activity or security breaches.
Secured IP Address
Because thieves may look for your IP address for a variety of reasons, securing your IP address is a top priority for all network users. To communicate data to another device, your online devices require a virtual address, which functions similarly to your physical address.
It may appear inconsequential, but cyber attackers or unauthorized hackers can launch attacks against you if they have access to your IP address. As a result, cybercriminals can use your virtual identity to carry out illegal cyber operations.
Because many commercial and research activities rely on various online data-securing services, protecting the information provided in the virtual world is critical. Understanding your personal and professional weaknesses and how to protect them is crucial for professional development. Cyber security is required to protect your organization, whether a small startup or a large, established corporation.
Hackers can use your IP address to download illicit content, identify your geographical location, and gain easier access to a system for a large-scale attack in a cyber-illiterate region, disrupting your online activity. They can also target your private network in various ways, including a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service). This enables them to disrupt your online services, disable your Internet connection, and prevent you from accessing virtual resources.
7 Tips for Using a Proxy Network To Protect Your Brand
Targeted Research
You understand that conducting thorough research on your target market is critical to your success as a business owner. However, conducting thorough research can take a long time and cost a lot of money. This is when data scraping can come in handy.
A proxy can help you scrape data quickly and effectively, allowing you to focus on your business goals. With Proxy, you can access any website and rapidly obtain the required information.
Increasing Social Media Engagements
Using a proxy server for social media marketing could benefit your company. Your company can increase sales by determining which activities work best on which social media networks.
According to research, Twitter is more effective than Facebook at generating leads. When Facebook is blocked, your organization can use a proxy server to access Twitter and vice versa. This will assist you in determining which platform is most effective for your company so that you can direct your marketing efforts accordingly.
Furthermore, using a proxy server allows you to bypass country-specific restrictions on social media websites. For example, if you attempt to contact clients in the United Kingdom but the United Kingdom government blocks you, a proxy server will allow you to access United Kingdom’s social networking sites easily.
Sales Growth
Your company’s sales potential can be increased with the aid of a proxy server. You can gain access to information that can aid sales representatives in closing deals more effectively by using a proxy server.
A proxy server can access data like client contact details, pricing details, and other market intelligence. By hiding your IP address, a proxy server can also help you keep the confidentiality of your sales process. When competing with other companies for contract awards, this could be crucial.
Anti-Malware Screening
Malware assaults can result in data loss and significant harm to your organization or industry. Utilizing methods such as phishing, hackers send emails or URLs that are harmful to your computer.
These links and emails can result in data loss and harm to your computer’s operating system if you click on them. Phishing allows attackers to get email addresses and passwords and access sensitive data.
Organizations and individuals utilize residential proxies to filter incoming emails. A proxy server can identify malicious emails or attachments and block them from accessing your devices.
Out-of-Office Device Protection
Currently, many employees frequently work from home or from anywhere else. Executives do not spend their entire day at work; they attend meetings, travel for business, and so on. In such cases, executives and staff would undoubtedly use business data outside the workplace. Proxies are helpful in this case.
It is impossible to determine whether or not a public WiFi network is secure when connecting to it in a hotel, restaurant, or other location.
Because most public routers lack software upgrades and security, hackers can easily breach the network. Once inside, they can access any devices currently connected to an unsecured router. Criminals will be unable to locate you if you use proxies.
Back-Up Analysis of Competitors
Most e-commerce sites work because they are built to compete with each other. How much traffic you get depends on your rank on search engine results pages. So, to make money from conversions, you should look at what your competitors are doing.
You have to scrape the web a lot to do a competitor study. It will take time to get all the facts and figures together. Most of the time, these well-known sites use sneaky ways to hide this information.
Proxy servers are helpful because they allow you to get around firewalls that are too strict in data centers. If you use many different identities, it’s less likely that you’ll get blocked.
Rotating proxy servers keep your online identity secret because they hide your IP address. You can also scrape the web and get to the content that isn’t available by using reliable, often-updated rotating proxies.
Since no one will know who you are, you can ask questions about the other competitors and learn more about them. One way to get around geo-restricted content is to “scrape” a site. You can find useful information that will help you stay ahead of the curve and keep your identity secret using proxies.
Brand Reputation Preservation
The theft of a company’s brand is a severe problem for most businesses. In addition to financial losses, the brand’s reputation suffers. As a result, it risks alienating both current and prospective customers.
The primary obligation of brand owners and managers is to keep the brand’s positive reputation. A proxy server is a viable option for meeting this need.
You can monitor where your brand is sold on the Internet using proxy servers. Unblock websites based on your location to bypass geo-restrictions and gain access to content you would not otherwise be able to access. You can protect your company’s reputation by using data center proxies.
In Conclusion
Digitization has a lot of pros, but it also has a lot of cons. When using data and devices online, it is important to keep up with changes in cybersecurity.
Your brand is what sets you apart from other businesses in the market. Because of this, you must go to great lengths to protect your business and your ideas.
Using a proxy for brand protection is one way to go. Proxy servers are dynamic and can be used by both individuals and businesses. It’s a security measure that keeps your digital devices safe and stops data from being stolen. It improves your online time and gives your business the privacy it needs to grow.