The benefits of web scraping for business marketing are impressive, providing data about price levels, market capacity, and competitor strategies to inform each element of your promotions.
If you’re interested in learning how to hire a web scraping freelancer to level up your marketing approach, we’ll explain some of the primary applications here.
Web Scraping for Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
The core benefit of web scraping is that it provides data and insights into customer behaviors that you can use to improve your marketing plan. Data analysis can be as straightforward or complex as you need, but example applications include:
- tracking the success rates of each sales funnel
- investigating competing offers or promotions
- choosing optimal platforms to invest your ad budget into
- understanding customer characteristics
Web scraping extracts potentially vast volumes of data from publically available websites and databases and identifies specific pieces of information relevant to your business. The key is to use the available data to inform your decisions and create a solid framework of evidence about the best business opportunities.
Next, we’ll look at a few real-world examples of web scraping uses within marketing.
Generating New Customer Leads
A responsive contact list with high conversion metrics is priceless, and building that list is considerably easier with web scraping. Finding prospects and genuine sales leads is one of the toughest parts of marketing—after all, your sales are limited by the size of your audience, but you don’t want to invest in promotions aimed at people who are never going to buy!
Web scraping extracts email addresses and basic information sourced from public databases and can be automated to continue adding to your contact lists periodically.
Online Content Scraping
Web scraping is a useful way to plan a content marketing strategy that delivers. There is such a vast amount of digital content that it would be impossible to manually research, extract appropriate data, and use that information to develop your content. Evergreen assets such as blogs, guides, and videos are an excellent way to drive web traffic without the expense and help with conversion levels.
A web scraper helps in a few ways—you can assess competitor blog topics, for example, and see which have performed best or attracted the most traffic. You might use a web scraper to collate meta tags, titles, and URLs. Although you cannot replicate scraped data, you can certainly use it as inspiration.
Having a database of high-value keywords can make a difference to your online content engagement through knowing what your competitors are doing and how well it’s working.
Social Media Web Scraping
Social media platforms and networking hubs such as Twitter and Reddit are a gold mine of information if you know where to look. Marketing functions backed by scraped data include:
- sentiment analysis—seeing how customers perceive a brand, product, or company, and drilling down to uncover information about pain points and appetite for price rises
- trend research—finding out what the biggest influencers in your industry are posting about and which keywords or hashtags they’re using
- competitor monitoring—looking into posts, promotions, or tweets published by competitors
Reddit data can be useful for oversight of whole community groups rather than specific individuals. For example, you could identify hot topics your target customer base is engaged in, see where competitors are active, or choose between promotion topics based on upvotes and downvotes.
Market Research
Data scraping can be used at a macro or micro level—it all depends on the insights and which data is most valuable and relates to individual competitors, whole user bases, or the overall industry. Scraping is used extensively in eCommerce, particularly for challenger businesses who need information to set prices and select new products to develop.
Amazon is a great example—you can scrape an entire catalog to build a database of:
- product details
- review scores
- pricing information
- delivery services
Accessing that information is a quick way to evaluate customer preferences, establish the ideal price position, and compete with products by adjusting shipping cost or speed. The reality is that web scraping is useful in every facet of marketing–the trick is deciding which details you need to know, then using that data to its full potential.
