The size of the Internet has doubled every year since 2012. How does that affect us? Yeah, a lot of data. You could do a lot with these data if you know what to do with them. Now the question is how to get them?
Navigation from site to site, choosing the information you want, and copying it and pasting it to another file would be way too time consuming and tedious although it’s been the only choice for a long time before automatic web crawlers came around. Most people aren’t technical enough to build a crawler from scratch, nor do they have the budget to purchase data, so using a web scraping tool like ProxyCrawl for data scraping is the best choice for anyone who wants to mine the web for more insight.
Why Do Data-Driven Marketing?
Marketers who use data-driven marketing analyze huge amounts of data about all business processes, mostly about consumers. Marketers now spend over $6 billion a year to build data management platforms and demand-side platforms. Big data is used by more than 60% of companies to:
- Monitor the sales funnel’s success factor
- Research commercials and marketing campaigns
- Keep your audience’s attention
- Appropriate allocation of the advertising budget
- Pick the best advertising channels
There’s nothing complicated about data-driven principles: you make decisions based on numbers. Intuition and experience don’t matter. It’s all about making hypotheses and interpreting data. Additionally, you should think about how you’ll mine, store, and visualize those numbers. Meters, analytics, and AI will be needed for this: machine learning, predictive analysis, and artificial intelligence. Using data-driven marketing helps:
- Identifying an accurate portrait of the target audience, followed by segmentation
- To track traffic-attracting channels
- Testing advertising channels and finding the most profitable ones
- Expanding the customer base
- Providing better customer service
- Creating customized campaigns
- Create offers that are relevant to the audience
- Collecting and analyzing feedback, recommendations, and evaluations from clients
- Predicting the audience’s reaction to advertising
It is possible to create models of audience behavior, predict sales, and set KPIs by collecting statistics over time which are then systematized somehow.
How Do Companies Get Their Data?
Many companies collect data from all over the internet. One method is highly technical, and the other is more deductive. You can buy or collect information.
You can buy compilations from some data vendors, but they may not contain the values you need. And with compilations, you can’t add or augment values.
The data you collect yourself or with a third party is always more accurate and up-to-date. Depending on your needs and business requests, you can aggregate it independently. Companies collect data in different ways:
- Scraping websites
- Form for feedback
- Newsletter Subscription Form
- Personal account registration and creation form
- Loyalty program participation questionnaire for the
- Order Fulfillment Form
- Social network-based registration
- Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, and cookies.
A company that maximizes data collection and understands how to use it can run almost all of its operations: marketing, sales, staffing, updates, and improvements. Data collection will give them more information about their users, and more importantly, they will understand the context in which they operate.
Web scraping: What Is It?
Scraping is when bots extract data from certain sites based on rules. A bot is a program in any programming language that’s designed to retrieve data from websites.
Basically, the bot looks for information it’s interested in on web pages by grabbing their HTML code. When scrapers get the code, they analyze it and extract all the data. The bot then opens all the possible site pages and grabs all the info.
You can use web scraping to collect any type of data that is relevant to your business, whether it is information about users, products, competitors, and so on. Scraping lets you get everything we talked about in data-driven marketing and will talk about it below.
Scraping The Web: Is It Legal?
The real question is how you’re going to use the data. Data collection for public consumption and analysis is legal in a lot of countries. It’s always illegal to collect confidential info for sale or to use the material without identifying the source.
On every site, there are “Terms of Use” and copyright information that state how data can be used and how to get to their site. Before scraping any website, make sure you read the terms of service.
Scrapping also falls under several laws. They’re Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and Copyright Infringement.
Scraping blog content
Marketing in the modern age is also heavily reliant on content. Good evergreen content is a great way to generate constant low-cost traffic to your website. Your business can be found on the first page of Google with blog posts, which can drive constant traffic and conversions.
As a result, it’s important to know what your competitors have done in the past when planning your content strategy. Using a web scraper, you could create a simple project to scrape your competitor’s blog titles, URLs, Meta Tags, and more. By doing so, you will have a valuable database of keywords and topics to work with immediately. Get scraping and start writing!
Building Your Email List
Over the past few decades, email has maintained its dominance as a marketing channel.
A good email list that converts and is responsive is priceless. Because of this, marketers everywhere are focusing on building high-quality email lists.
Building an email list can be automated and substantially sped up with web scraping.
Twitter Scraping
Twitter’s big. Some people tweet too much. Despite that, the data in their tweets is still valuable. Social media scraping is as old and valuable as social media itself.
What are your industry’s influencers tweeting about? How did your competitors tweet? What did they tweet about?
By scraping tweets from Twitter with a web scraper you can discover all of this.
Scraping Reddit
Would it be possible to gain insights from entire communities rather than from individuals? Subreddits exist for everything, thankfully. You can quickly identify the topics that your target market is interested in with web scraping.
It’s just a matter of finding the right subreddit for the community you’re trying to reach.
- Upvotes often occur on what topics?
- What subreddits are your competitors active in?
- Is there a topic that gets downvoted a lot or is not that popular?
A web scraper can be used to scrape Reddit data to uncover these valuable insights.
Market Analysis
Analyzing the market is the process of gathering and analyzing information about the environment in which an enterprise will operate or is already operating. This activity is often undertaken to reduce entrepreneurial risks. Obtaining these results allows for making management decisions, which are always fraught with risk due to constant market changes and uncertainty in customer and competitor behavior. You should do this when you:
- Need to make business decisions
- Need to launch a new product or service
- Need to decide on an exit strategy from a crisis.
- Want to know how your company is doing
This information affects the final results and stability of the company. It is important for:
- Keeping track of trends
- Optimizing prices
- Generation of leads
- Monitor your competitors
- The investment decision-making process
- Maintaining your reputation.
Conclusion
The existence of a company today would not be possible without a deep understanding of the basic forces that drive the market. A marketing strategy can help a company adapt goods for new target segments or markets, adjust prices according to the prices of competitors, and promote sales. Researching the market thoroughly increases management awareness, reduces entrepreneurial risk, and improves the validity of management decisions.
You can do almost anything with web scraping, which may sound cheesy. What matters is what kind of data you scrape and how you implement it. It’s time to scrape with ProxyCrawl’s Scraper API, fellow marketer!
