The internet is a massive ocean of information and data, some of which is relevant and useful to your company. But in this ocean of information, how can you get straight to the kind you’re looking for? And how can you do it at a fast enough rate that any small changes to the data are automatically detected and stored in your database? The answer to both of those questions is automated web scraping.
Web scraping is a data-gathering technique that involves the extraction of mass volumes of targeted public data. The process of web scraping is, at its core, a simple one. If you know what data you’re looking for and where to get it from, all you have to do is scan through the relevant websites, page by page, and extract the information. As you can imagine, doing this manually is an unwieldy and onerous task that would require you to investigate hundreds, even thousands of web pages, sift through its code, and copy the bits and pieces that you need. For this reason, businesses use automated web scraping tools that can do all this work at a speed impossible for even a team of 20 people.
With the right data – and a sufficient volume of it – you can generate valuable insights for your business. The insights you can generate from scraped data range from pricing intelligence to market demographic research, sentiment analysis, and identification of product development opportunities.
Gathering pricing intelligence with web scraping
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In business, it’s important to monitor what your competition is doing so you can ensure your own activities and policies remain competitive. A common use for web scraping is to gather insights about market prices and product or service offerings from competitors. In fact, 30% of retailers employ some form of competitive price monitoring. With this knowledge, a business can adjust their own prices or policies to attract the interest of price-sensitive customers. Automated web scraping lets you keep tabs on this information round the clock; the scraping tools can be programmed to work non-stop, updating your database of competitor prices as changes are made.
Sentiment analysis with web scraping
Social media platforms and online forums are hotspots for discussion and conversation about your brand and products. Marketing teams always have their eyes and ears open for how their campaigns and advertising affect market sentiment – how people feel about the product or brand that they’re promoting. Through the use of web scraping, they can look through forum posts and online discussions and gain insights on how the market feels about their products, what aspects they like and dislike, and how receptive their target is to a campaign’s message. Automated web scraping tools let them do this in markets both local and abroad, allowing them to craft relevant and specific campaigns for each market. Mostly it is using for Instagram. More information you can found about it in the https://proxyway.com/best-instagram-proxy article.
Lead generation with web scraping
The point of marketing is to attract as wide an audience as possible to your brand or product with the goal of gaining new customers. However, not every person on the internet is going to be interested in the products you sell. For instance, your delicious meat products are never going to attract vegans and vegetarians. Web scraping tools let you gain important information about users online so that you can target the people that are likely to purchase your product. One way of doing this is by looking at the users that like, follow, or are active on the pages of businesses similar to your own. These are people that have expressed a clear interest in a product similar to the kind you offer, and knowing who they are and how to engage with them is an important step in building and maintaining an online presence.
Conclusion
As you’ve seen from the examples above, web scraping is a useful technique for gaining insights that you can use to attract new clients, get a better understanding of the business landscape with regards to potential target demographics and competitors status and pricing, and understand the wants and needs of your customers to better serve them. Of course, even the most advanced web scraping tools in the world are useless in the hands of a team that doesn’t know how to use them. You’ll still need to have an understanding of who you’re marketing to and where they are talking about your product so you can get to the relevant data in the first place.
Proactive business policy-making and marketing activities are becoming increasingly reliant on up-to-date data. The ocean of information that is on the internet is constantly growing, but the information and data that you need to generate insights that could give you an advantage over your competition are out there if you’re willing to invest the time and effort to finding it. Only those businesses who can creatively utilize web scraping tools can gain and maintain a competitive advantage.