Brand Intelligence – 3 Ways To Make More Informed Marketing Decisions With Web Scraping

Although the term ‘web scraping’ sounds both painful and oddly dubious, it is a commonly performed process which is highly-valuable to businesses and organizations. Used correctly, it can save your business money, time and help to create more effective marketing campaigns.

Image via thinkstockphotos.com.au

Using an array of programs and codes, web scraping solutions can automatically search for and document the information and data you require from a website (or a set of websites) making it easier for you and your business to accrue information.

The following are 3 ways you can use web scraping to help you make more informed marketing decisions for your business:

Find Your Market

It’s not always easy to find a ready made source of customers, especially if you’re a part of a niche industry or service. With web scraping, things could get a whole lot easier for your business.

Target your intended demographic by setting up regular scraping of relevant sources. For example, if you are a web design and hosting business wishing to target new business owners, it might be a good idea to employ the use of web scraping to find out about new businesses via the business register.

A web scraping program could frequently scan any relevant sites for new businesses, and harvest the related contact details, making it much easy to create tangible leads.

Once this data has been extracted, you can able target your selected demographic, with a greater chance of converting these leads into sales. Web scraping makes easy work of what used to be hours of manual trawling and checking websites, for a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee.

Understand Your Competition

Another common use for web scraping is to extract precious data and marketing collateral such as keywords, metadata, and pricing information from your competitors. Finding information from hidden text and code becomes simple, and it’s presented to you in an easy-to-read form.

Rather than trying to blindly predict and outsmart your competition, beat them at their own game. Web scraping allows you to understand their marketing tactics and offers you the opportunity to react accordingly. If your competitor has seen a rise in sales or has a particularly successful product, web scraping can allow you to examine the reasons why this might be the case, and give you the time to plan a response or mirror the tactic.

Gain Insight Into Pattern Recognition

Web scraping can also be used to help form a better picture of how a business of a trend is tracking over time. When used in this way, web scraping becomes a powerful predictive tool.

Through the use of data gleaned from multiple sources, an overall picture of your industry over a period of time can be formed. Set up periodic, automatic scraping to be able to create an effective timeline of information, with a focus on keywords, numbers, or phrases.

If you are able to find a pattern emerging, it can be used to create a marketing campaign targeted specifically for this emerging pattern, meaning that you’re able to harness the information proactively, rather than reactively. Marketing using this technique may mean that you’re a few steps ahead of your competition at all times, and give you a much-needed edge in a competitive market or industry.

Web scraping services provide businesses with an ideal opportunity to gain insights from competitors and their collateral so that they may create more effective and ideal marketing material. Through the regular use of data extraction, trend forecasting, and planning, your business can grow and adapt to its market.