How Intermediary Servers Drive Digital Services

Everyone is doing digital marketing these days. Small and medium-sized businesses are competing directly with large corporations online. Digital marketing makes the playing field even for everyone, even those that have no real idea of how the internet works or what is a proxy. Large corporations may rely on their huge digital marketing budget to dominate the market, but SMEs can be more clever with their strategies and their use of data.

That last part is actually very important. How you use data to drive digital marketing campaigns can determine the success rate of those campaigns. More importantly, data allows for digital services and marketing campaigns to be automated to a certain degree. How can this help small and medium 

businesses compete with the big boys?

Eliminating Mundane Tasks

Automation is the way forward in digital marketing. Rather than doing everything manually, small and medium-sized businesses can work towards automating different parts of their marketing campaigns to achieve higher efficiency. Since mundane tasks – such as tracking users along the sales funnel – can be fully automated and marketers can focus on other, more important tasks.

Automation isn’t just a tool for streamlining campaigns either. Automation can be used to fire up other parts of the digital marketing campaign. For example, you can automate the growth of your Instagram or social media accounts using scripts that automatically engage users and search for active followers. Some businesses even go as far as creating an army of social media users – all fully automated – for the purpose of gaining traction and boosting exposure.

This leads to the introduction of digital services based solely on automation. With the right tools, there is nothing you cannot automate online. Even creating hundreds – thousands – of social media accounts for campaign purposes becomes easy when the whole process is automated. The task can be completed in a matter of hours as opposed to in several weeks.

Digital Services in the Cloud

The key to boosting your digital marketing capacity to the next level is cloud computing. Cloud computing has made a lot of things possible. Scripts designed to automate different parts of the campaign can now run in the cloud rather than from a desktop computer. You don’t have to keep your laptop on or monitor every detail of the campaign with automation tools running in the cloud.

There are additional cloud services that take this particular benefit even further. Digital services running in the cloud are not only more cost-efficient, but also more reliable in general. Bots that access social media sites from cloud computing clusters can remain connected for longer – and in a more reliable way – to help boost your social media posts.

Even the capacity gets increased. Cloud computing has gotten so affordable that you can now host more scripts without spending more than $10 a month on cloud servers. Of course, the cloud servers are only one part of the equation. You also need multiple IP addresses (usually a proxy network) and other measures to make sure that your operations run smoothly.

Data to the Rescue

There is another thing that you can now automate at a higher level, and that is data collection. Data-driven marketing and digital services become competitive advantages that SMEs cannot afford to miss. Data is as valuable as it gets right now; some say data is now more valuable than oil. Fortunately for smaller digital operations, collecting data on a large scale is also easier to do.

Web scraping is the go-to method for collecting information from the World Wide Web. Web scraping tools available today are more advanced than ever. They can be programmed to automatically identify lead-related information such as email addresses, job titles, and even phone numbers. You can automate data collected by your web scraping operation for digital marketing purposes; XML or CSV files generated by the scraping operation can be processed by tools like ActiveCampaign directly.

Data acquisition is so important than even larger corporations are starting to utilize web scraping for the same purpose. For smaller businesses, however, web scraping can be made flexible and contextual. You don’t have to wait until the entire process of scraping the web for information is completed before you start refining your scraping parameters.

Bridging the Gap with Intermediary Servers or Proxies

While web scraping isn’t illegal, sites like Google and Facebook don’t really like it when you collect large amounts of information from them. If you use your real IP address to scrape the web – or the IP address of your cloud server – you will get banned sooner than you can type your IP address without copying and pasting.

This is where proxies, acting as intermediary servers, act as the perfect bridge to the digital gap. Proxies and intermediary servers use dynamic IP addresses that get rolled frequently. You can take full advantage of web scraping without exposing your real IP address in the process. Creating a constant stream of data becomes easy with proxies acting as the final pieces of the puzzle.

Behind every marketing tool, data scraping application or data acquisition service, there is a robust and extensive proxy network to supply access and reliable data sourcing. And, as digital services continue to increasingly rely on data, the weight of these networks will become more and more apparent.