How can owners using data collection & analysts complete the highly daunting task of information collection? The information can range from competition, latest trends, and emerging markets which are crucial to the prospect of staying relevant in today’s market. With the amount of data available online, it is very possible to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new information that you have to collect and process.
So, where do you even begin?
For starters with web scrapping.
Nowadays, businesses and big corporations alike use web scraping as the go-to technology for fast and efficient data collection and analysis. It collects large volumes of data from the Internet, so decision-makers can plan their strategies accordingly to the quantitative findings. This data scraping technology brings in a variety of benefits for big and small businesses alike. Here are the top four:
1. Faster, more accurate data
Companies compete against time – who can launch a product first or who will be the first one to offer a new service. Timing, on the other hand, is linked to whether a business effort will succeed or fail, that is why it’s important to get the right kind of data as quickly as possible. This helps companies become more efficient in their market planning. At times it’s not only time that’s critical to business decisions, but also the accuracy.
Because data extraction is completely automated, there is less chance of human error affecting the data sets, which guarantees accurate data for your company. The automation also ensures that data is acquired much faster than traditional methods.
2. Efficiency
Businesses can easily manage a large quantity of information with the help of web scraping techniques. It can be trillions of bytes of information, from social media to transactions to demographics – you can get it easily in a proper format. The scraping technology can track keywords, online sources emerging trends on a daily, weekly and even a monthly basis. It can be customized so that you get the data you need. Thus there is no need for you to waste time sorting through the incredible amounts of data. They can, instead, focus more on utilizing the data to improve your business operations.
3. Centralized data
Manually collecting data from different websites and putting them together can take a lot of time and effort for employees. It is also prone to errors, which compromises the quality of the data presented. The great thing about web scraping technology is that it automatically converts raw data from different online sources into a usable form. You can extract a large set of data from a variety of online sources, and customize it to your specific data needs. Moreover, you can save everything in one central location, so that data can be accessed on the web or on mobile devices on the go. Web scraping technology is a reliable service for businesses who want to gain industry knowledge quickly without compromising data quality and accuracy.
4. Easy Lead Generation
One of the major aspects of business success is the ability to generate more leads. Leads can be either direct customers or influencers who will help you represent your brand. You can search for leads by yourself, looking through websites and social media. But just imagine how much time and effort it will take if you do it manually! So it is better to delegate it to machines and focus on strategic tasks.
Web scraping is the cutting-edge technology that is aimed to gather your leads’ contact information from millions of web pages within the shortest time. You need to identify the valuable attributes for a relevant search like age, education, job position, etc.
Once you have set attributes of your target, you can scrape among websites, publications, Facebook and professional social media (like LinkedIn). The program will collect the contact info and save it in your database, CSV files or CRM where it can be accessed by your managers and sales representatives. Having a database of email addresses of your target audience, you can send out information, newsletters, invitations for an event or advertisement campaigns in bulk.
5. Market Research
Take a look at what Wiki has to say:
“Market research provides important information to identify and analyze the market need, market size and competition.”As you can see the underlined words, you can carry out effective market research if you have important information which you can analyze to understand the market need, market size and competition.
Since the market evolves almost on a daily basis, it is always prudent to stay one step ahead of the competition by keeping pace with the fluctuating customer requirements.In this area, web scraping can help by gathering customer preferences by analysing data from different clusters or in other words- industries. The data gathered can help in making a consensus on making good business decisions These aggressive ways of market research are essential to meet the new expectations and keep up with this highly dynamic market. Internet market research has its perks like the accuracy of results, ease of execution and improved effectiveness.
6. Price Intelligence
Again, here’s what Wiki has to say:
“Price Intelligence (or Competitive Price Monitoring) refers to the awareness of market-level pricing intricacies and the impact on business, typically using modern data mining techniques.”
For example, if eBay is selling a leather jacket at 10% less or more than Amazon, it can formulate the data into a coherent strategy which helps you to decide what can be the ideal price to sell the same item at the desired price. This helps in getting ahead of your competition with precision and ease.
This is an obvious strategy in the golden age of e-commerce. In the contemporary scenario, e-commerce companies effectively leverage price intelligence to formulate their strategies. Web scraping is the tool that is at the base of this “awareness” regarding the pricing trends in the market.
7. Competitor Analysis
In continuation with the e-commerce context, it is easy to guess where we are headed next. What your competitors are doing is a potential of the source of information for you that can enable you to devise your own strategies. Web scraping can make this easily and smoothly available to you. You can scrape the data and monitor the competitors of your business and get the proverbial 'jump' or the first-mover advantage over your competition. In other words, web scraping can enable you to succeed where your competition can possibly fail by helping you in making those business decisions that they should have made in the first place.
8. Sentiment Analysis
As mentioned earlier, in a world that gone virtual, the interaction with the customer is now the thing of the past. However, it is still crucial to understand how your customers think and feel. This is where the sentiment analysis comes in. Web scraping enables you with a lot of new insights gleaned from sentiment analysis which you can use to chalk out your future strategies to boost your business.
9. Better SEO and Lead Generation
In the competitive business environment, your online presence and SEO are vital for the growth of your business. You can find out the higher ranked websites of your kind and extract data from the same. Once you extract data from those competitor websites, you can study the data and use those insights to improve your SEO.
Lead generation is not a new concept. Businesses have been using lead generation techniques for ages. However, once businesses have gone online and all the data such as email IDs, phone numbers have become available online, lead generation has been completely transformed. A lot of credit goes to web scraping because it can scrape the email IDs, phone numbers or any such data that can power your lead generation. Once you have the lead
Now that you have your leads, it is only up to you to convert them into clients. We at Designfort have the state-of-the-art web scrapping tools to make information extraction a quick and an accurate affair.
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