What is Web Scraping? To keep it short, web scraping is the process of obtaining data from websites. All the job is carried out by a portion of code which is called a “scraper”. First, it sends a “GET” query to a particular website. Then, it parses an HTML document based on the obtained result. After it’s done, the scraper seeks for the data you need within the document, and, lastly, converts it into the specified format.
The data can be the following:
- product items
- images
- videos
- text
- contact information, e.g. emails, phone numbers, etc.
What Is Web Scraping Used For?
Web scraping is used for the following things:
- Separate services that run through an API or have a web interface (Embedly, DiffBot, etc.)
- Several open-source projects performed in different programming languages (Python: Goose, Scrapy; PHP: Goutte; Ruby: Readability, Morph, etc.).
Other than that, you can also try and make your own web scraping tool. Fortunately, there are loads of libraries available. For example, you can use the Nokogiri library to create a Ruby-based scraper.
10 Ways Businesses Can Benefit From Web Scraping in 2020
Web scraping is fabulous. It works on the main criteria for every business which is data retrieval. In 2020 data is everything and web scraping guarantees that you are getting a dose of all that in your business strategies. Web scraping can benefit your business in many ways. Some of them are:
1. Helps in Price Monitoring
Many businesses neglect their pricing strategies and fail to make them right. Pricing plays a significant role in any b2b business and your brand must set it right. But with so many opponents, how can you identify which pricing strategy will win over your prospect’s consideration? Here is when web scraping can benefit you.
With web scraping, you can effortlessly scrape through all the pricing information online from numerous competitors and get the information in your system to monitor. As you investigate them, it becomes more comfortable for you to set the price in which your prospects will return in a good response.
2. Enough Data to Analyse Solutions
The market will not be the same in the future. 5-10 years from now maybe the techniques or the solutions being offered now will be much more high-level. Therefore, it is essential to always keep track of what is happening in the market. But with such a limited data platform, how can a brand like yours be able to prep for the new development?
This is where web scraping can help you. With the data accessible online from researches or articles or even prospect information a brand like yours can utilize this as a great opportunity to collect the data which can help you to work on the formulation of a solution which your prospects will favor a few years from now.
You will also get an idea of how the market is changing and what the ideal image of the market is looking like from a prospect’s point of view or what will the future markets look like. This all can add to the wellbeing and growth of your business.
3. Helps in the Generation of Leads
One of the most crucial processes in any business is lead generation. With lead generation, a brand can tap leads and change them into a potential sales lead. Therefore, web scraping understands that this process is very important and has a solution that can make your sales agents happy.
You can scrape through all the list of your leads from the social media handles, competitor’s source of information and any other places where the lead activity is higher with the help of web scraping. This is amazing because not only are you receiving all the lead information such as their name, designation, email address and phone numbers but you are also speeding up the process of a lead generation for the business.
4. Competitive Monitoring
Web scraping helps you know what your competitors are doing, their events, product developments, pricing strategies, and marketing campaigns. Having knowledge about what your competitors are up to can help you stay ahead of the game and always be ready to fight back. You can always be a step ahead and this way you can lead in the market.
5. Manage Social Media Activities
Social media is the hub where a brand can easily draw leads. Making use of social media is an excellent way for brands like yours to obtain leads. These days everyone is on social media and if you intend to grow your lead count in a more organic manner, you need to look out for social media leads.
Social media is the place where you can easily interact with your customers. You can share relevant content, create ads that will gain attention, identify what suits your prospect interest, and a whole lot more. This is the key to lead generation via this platform. Web scraping helps you to handle this activity in a more hassle-free manner.
6. Market Research
with web scraping you can turn any data you find online into structured data and study them using any BI tools. Custom analysis can efficiently reflect public demand and behaviors that are essential for any business.
7. Helps You Identify Prospects Needs
If a brand spends its time and money targeting the wrong audience, it won’t be beneficial for the brand no matter what. Many businesses fail to understand what is the right audience for them. To manage efficient lead generation, you first need to identify which leads are you targeting?
Web scraping can assist you and make this process much simpler for you. With web scraping, you can scour through those leads which have shown interest in the business you are in.
8. Improvise For a Better Solution
Your solutions need to be constantly improved and worked upon so that your prospects only get the best from using it. The market is constantly changing, technology is growing and the preferences and trends fade away with the launch of new ones, so how can you improve your solution to meet the standards?
Web scraping can help you with this as well. By web-scraping, you can manage automated scraping activities regularly to keep up with the market changes, upcoming trends, prospect feedback, opinions shared about your type of business and the industry you’re working in. All of these will keep you updated and help you to improvise on a solution that will not just shine prospect’s expectations but also help you grow healthier in the long run.
9. Video Collection
With web scraping, you can obtain videos, including titles and subtitles from YouTube and other similar video hosting sites.
10. Machine Learning
With the help of web scraping, you can drag all the data you need, let it be data points, images, or files for training your bots from the largest repository of data, the web!
Image credit: Promptcloud