Today, more than ever, web scraping is becoming increasingly popular in this digital area. Having access to data on competitors can help any organization grow and provide a competitive advantage in the niche field. For instance, brands use this to predict future demands, adjust their strategies, and find out the industry’s best practices.
It comes as no surprise why data analytics has become a crucial necessity for digital marketers. For marketers, the eCommerce space is full of potentially useful data that can be used to generate a competitive advantage if analysed correctly. The trickiest part is to find an effective way to leverage this data and grow your brand.
Data scraping, also known as web scraping, is the technique that can meet your business needs for data on the market and competitors, and this article will explain exactly how you can use it to boost your conversions and outperform your competitors.
1. Competitive Monitoring
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In order to keep up with various developments and changes to the business landscape, it’s imperative that brands have a competitive monitoring strategy. Though this strategy covers different avenues, it’s particularly fundamental to get to know your competitor’s latest product developments and business.
In a society where competition is an inherent and innate part of a business, it makes sense that every business should have an effective monitoring strategy.
A competitive monitoring strategy is central to data scraping as you need to learn what your competition already knows and then some more. It will better prepare your business for any unwelcome surprises.
Having preliminary knowledge of any upcoming surprises from your competitors, such as promotional campaigns or new products, allows you to better prepare and introduce a counter strategy.
Competitive monitoring will also help you avoid or at least reduce potential losses. As you’re constantly monitoring your competition, you can gain from assessing their strategies or investments, which failed and resulted in a loss.
2. Build a Data Analysis Strategy With Web Scraping
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Web scraping remains the most effective process of collecting publicly available data from websites around the world. Yet when this data is placed inside of the website’s code, it is even more difficult to access and collect. That’s where web scraping intervenes. Advanced scraping bots can parse through a page’s HTML to identify the data you need, for instance: all prices for a product on eBay, gather that data, and then put it into a structured, readable format like Excel.
Why does it matter? Well, since the data is available to the public, anyone can visit Instagram, or Amazon, scroll through pages and manually record the relevant data they found.
But suppose you want to scrap hundreds, thousands, or millions of pages. In that case, you probably don’t need to mention that manually scraping data would take eons when you could have been spending your time analyzing what you find and building a better, sturdier data-based strategy.
This strategy helps make sure that data is accessible to everyone, not just giant brands with massive budgets for big data. With the right scraping tools and IPRoyal, any business or individual can scrape the data that will help you grow toward achieving your goals.
3. Generate Leads and Improve Audience Engagement
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For instance, if you feel like your audience could use a refresh or still working on building your audience – social media scraping will help you build this part of your data strategy.
With Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter scrapers, you will gather information about your audience and discover opportunities to boost that following. You can learn things like who your audience follows and why and how you can reach more followers in need of the services, products, and other solutions you have to offer.
Implement Customer Sentiment Analysis
One of the most important parts of your building strategies is customer analysis. When you scrap the right websites, you can better understand what the audience says about your business by analyzing data on comments, ratings, and other customer sentiment data. In doing so, you will get a deeper understanding of how your audience feels about you and your competitors.
As we’ve previously mentioned, this information can help you develop a smarter strategy, as it uses data to demonstrate where your company is exceeding expectations and where it is lacking. When you decide to boost our decision-making processes, we consider the data first. Scraping relevant websites like Yellow Pages and Indeed can help you make the same thing happen for your business or brand.
Recruit Better Talent
Source: analyticsindiamag.com
While web scraping’s main purpose is to develop a better strategy, you can also scrape the same websites to hire better talent for your company.
You can scrape data about wages, reviews, and compensation information of certain companies to find out how to make your recruitment strategies stand out and engage the best talent. When you have the best team working for you, you can rely on them to develop, build, and implement your data strategy.
What’s more, you can also use scraping to compete more efficiently with other similar businesses and brands. For instance, using tools like Yellowpages scraper and Google Places scraper, you can generate leads in your region, such as similar brands that might be willing to associate with you and help distribute your message. Say you want to find how many animal stores in your area are looking for you. To find out, it will take some time to do research and ask the right questions. Yet just because it takes some effort and time doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Making changes in your business needs is both fun and impactful, so buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Building the right data strategy doesn’t have to be expensive nor difficult, especially when you’re using the right tools. If you need to get started developing or improving your strategy, make sure you’re armed with a talented team, patience, and the latest scraping tools.
