How to Apply Web Scraping in Marketing

From ads in traditional media to online marketing campaigns to promote products and services, there are numerous ways to get in touch with your target audience and potential customers. Instead of investing in traditional marketing methods (billboards, TV, and newspaper ads), many marketing departments and agencies turn to other, less conventional means of advertising to reach new customers and understand them better.

4 Ways Digital Marketers Can Leverage Web Scraping

One of these methods is web scraping, also known as web crawling, data mining, and data extraction. The internet has drastically changed the way we look at marketing in recent years. Thanks to this tremendous transformation, both large and small businesses rely more and more on web crawling to boost their marketing efforts. Here are four ways how web scraping can help marketers.

1. Generating New Leads

The most critical task for a marketer is to locate the right audience for a specific product or service. If you're selling video game consoles, you need to look for gamers. If you're selling motorcycles, you need to find a way to reach wealthy bike enthusiasts.

This is where web crawling comes into play. Using data integration, you can point your crawler to social media and find your potential new clients. You don't have to stop at social media - you can scrape forums and all other places where like-minded people gather.

Once you've gathered and filtered through all this data, you can build a database with names and other information that you can feed into your sales funnel and start reaching out to them via outbound marketing. As long as you're aiming for a specific group of people, properly utilizing web scraping will help you find the ones you're most likely to convert into new customers.

2. Unrestricted Market Research

Keeping a close eye on the trends in your industry and the socioeconomic environment is crucial for effective marketing because it informs businesses on what kind of content they should produce to engage their audience. Market research can tell you about the hottest products, the issues consumers face, and most importantly, where the next big opportunity lies.

Gathering all this data manually requires expertise, human resources, and time you may not have. Thanks to web crawling, you can automate this process and gather accurate insights like pricing and sales numbers.

Most international companies use different pricing strategies in foreign markets, which can be a massive challenge if you're looking to expand to a new market. If two people visit the same website from different countries, they'll most likely see different products and different prices. Web scraping quickly solves this by utilizing proxy servers. If your business is based in the EU and you're looking to expand to the USA, all you need is a data-gathering solution that utilizes a USA proxy. This enables you to gather accurate data and develop an effective business strategy.

3. Search Engine Optimization

The most efficient way to generate traffic to your website is by using effective search engine optimization (SEO). It's a crucial part of your inbound marketing strategy because it involves finding visitors interested and getting them to your content.

However, SEO can get very complex very fast. It's not enough to just focus on the keywords that work, you constantly have to evaluate and update your SEO efforts for the best results. Web scraping can make this a lot easier because you can use it to find out which keywords generate the highest quality traffic for your own and your competitors' websites.

4. Demographics Insights

If you're trying to sell a product or a service, it is crucial to understand your targeted demographics. Tastes and preferences differ depending on a specific location. On top of that, it's important to keep an eye on the education level, age, gender, and other socioeconomic factors. Trying to sell luxury motorbikes in an area with low economic activity doesn't make a lot of sense, just like selling video game consoles in a region with a large percentage of senior citizens. 

Web scraping can provide all the key information you need to know for a specific area. You can use this information to tailor your marketing strategy and focus on the areas with the highest potential while avoiding those that probably won't yield the desired results.

In a Nutshell

Online data scraping is an excellent option for collecting large amounts of information, including contact details, social media data, etc. Marketers can use this data to analyze different markets and the competition, which helps focus marketing and promotion efforts for the best results.