Web scraping isn’t a new way to gather consumer information, but it’s an often overlooked method because it’s not well known. To put it simply, web scraping is the process of collecting data by coding or through a computer program to convert data into a language marketers can use to promote their product or service further.
If you’re still on the fence with using web scraping, consider these examples on how it can help your business.
Better Understand Your Customers
New businesses have a lot of competition from older companies who have built trust in their customers. To create a good marketing strategy, you need to study both your customers and competitors. Web scrapers don’t even need programming skills to do this; they can use programs to examine their competitors’ products, trends, price limits, and demands.
Web scraping can help streamline the process of analyzing reviews, making predictive analysis on trends, and understanding customer demands. Since consumer trends change quickly, its best to stay on top of them by scraping browsing data and their likes and dislikes. This method will effectively keep you ahead of your competitors.
Faster Lead Generation
Lead generation is an effective way of turning new customers into loyal subscribers. If you have used an opt-in form or email newsletter to entice users into buying a product, you’re already conducting productive lead generation. However, it can be challenging to use lead generation correctly if you’re a new business as you don’t really know what your subscribers may want.
Web scraping can help cut that research down significantly because it identifies valuable attributes relevant to your customer bases like education, age, location, and job position. Once you define these targets, you can scrape social media websites to access contact info (like an email) to send out information like invitations and newsletters in bulk.
Find Trustworthy Business Partners
It’s difficult to find people you can trust, especially in a business partnership. Although we hope our business partners will keep our best interests at heart, you can never truly know a person until you work with them. One of the benefits of web scraping is retrieving information about criminal records, resume discrepancies, education, reputation, and recommendations.
Although having positive reformation of a potential business partner doesn’t guarantee they’re trustworthy, it can help screen them as well as contractors and employees. Many web scraping apps will generate a ‘reputation rating’ out of 10 or 100%. You won’t just get their contact info, but you can also see recommendations from previous customers.
Easily Compare Prices
Contemplating the reasons to raise or lower product prices is a juggling act because you’re always unsure how your customers will respond. However, you can’t earn more profit without raising your prices. Web scraping can help you increase your profit margin by giving you information on your competitor’s prices while also tracking your promotions.
With this information, you won’t have to guess how to adjust your prices based on the market level because your competitors are usually keeping up with said markets. You can also use this data to analyze something your competitors are missing so you can stand out from the crowd, or offer better prices, more payment methods, or delivery service.
web scraping concept illustration -DepositPhotos
