Technology is changing the business world’s face and making critical marketing tactics and business information easily accessible. One such tactic that has been making the rounds for quality lead generation is web scraping.
Web scraping is nothing but collecting valuable information from web pages and putting all of them together for future use. If you have ever copied word content from a website and later used it for your purpose, you, too, have used the process of web scraping, although for a minuscule level. This article speaks in detail about the process of web scraping and its impact on the generation of high-value qualifying leads.
Introduction to Web Scraping
Basics of Web Scraping
The basic flow of Web Scraping Processes
What is it?
Web scraping, also known as Web Harvesting and Web Data Extraction, is the process of extracting or copying specific data or valuable information from websites and depositing it into a central database or spreadsheet for research, analysis, or a lead generation later on. While web scraping can be done manually as well, businesses are increasingly using bots or web crawlers to implement an automated process.
#Tip: Yellow Pages is one of the largest business directories on the web, especially in the USA. It is the best destination for contact scrapings like names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails for lead generation.
Processes of Web Scraping
Web Scraping is an extremely simple process and involves just two components- a web crawler and a web scraper. And thanks to the technology ninja, these are done by AI bots with minimum to no manual intervention. While the crawler, usually called a “spider,” browses multiple web pages to index and search for content by following links, the scraper quickly extracts the exact information.
The process starts when the crawler accesses the World Wide Web directly through a browser and fetches the pages by downloading them. The second process includes extraction where the web scraper copies the data into a spreadsheet and formats it into unable segments for further processing.
The design and usage of the web scrapers vary widely, depending on the project and its purpose.
Industries Benefited by Web Scraping
- HR Recruitment
- E-commerce
- Retail Industry
- Entertainment
- Beauty and Lifestyle
- Real Estate
- Data Science
- Finance
Fashion retailers inform designers about upcoming trends based on scraped insights, investors time their stock positions, and marketing teams overwhelm the competition with in-depth insights. A pervasive example of web scraping is to extract names, phone numbers, locations, and email IDs from job posting sites by HR Recruiters.
#Tip: Post-COVID 19, data generation in the healthcare sector has multiplied exponentially, owing to which web scraping in the healthcare and related pharmaceutical industries has increased by 57%. Companies are analyzing data to design new policies, develop vaccines, offer better public health solutions, etc. to transform business opportunities.
Web Scraping and Lead Generation
#Fact: 79% of marketers see web scraping as a very beneficial source of lead generation.
Data analysts and business experts unanimously agree on the fact that utilizing Web Scraping by applying residential proxies (residential proxies allow you to choose a specific location and surf the web as a real-user in that area) is one of the most beneficial ways to generate sales qualified leads for your business. Designing a unique lead scraper to generate leads can be a lot more cost and time-efficient to quickly generate quality leads.
Web scraping plays a significant role in lead generation by two steps:
Identify sources
The first step for every business in the lead generation is to streamline the process. What sources are you going to use? Who is your target audience? What geographical location are you going to target? What is your marketing budget? What are the goals of your brand? What image do you want to establish through your brand? What type of marketing do you want to follow? Who are your competitors?
Decoding the answer to such pivotal questions and designing a scraper bot specifically to meet your requirements will lead you to extract and access high-quality relative information.
Tip: If your competitors’ customer information is publicly available, you could scrape their websites for their demographics. This would give you a good visualization of who your potential customers are and what they are currently offering.
Extract data
After figuring out the pivotal questions to run a successful business, your next step is to extract the most relevant, real-time, actionable, and high-yielding data to design strategic marketing campaigns for maximum benefit. However, there are two possible ways to do it-
A) Opting for a lead generation tool
One of the most common B2B data providers, DataCaptive, offers lead generation service and other marketing solutions to provide unparalleled support to your business and boost ROI by 4X.
B) Using scraping tools
Octoparse is one of the most prominent scrapping tool providers that provides you with valuable information to maximize the lead generation process. Our flexibility and scalability of web scraping ensure to meet your project parameters with ease.
Our three-step process of web scraping includes-
- In the first step, we customize scrapers that are unique and compliment your project’s requirement to target and extract exact data that will give the most beneficial results. You can also enlist the website or web pages that you specifically want to scrape.
- The scrapers retrieve the data in HTML format. We then eliminate the nice surrounding the data and parse it to extract the data that you want. The data can either be simple or complex, depending upon the project and its demand.
- In the third and final process, the data is formatted as per the exact demand of the project and stored accordingly.
Other benefits of Web Scraping
- Price Comparison
Having access to the fresh and real-time price of related services offered by your competitors can revolutionize your day to day business proceedings and increase your brand’s visibility. Web scraping is the one-step solution for determining automatic pricing solutions and analyzing profitable insights.
- Analyze sentiment/Buyer-psychology
Sentiment analysis or buyer-persona helps brands understand their clientele by analyzing their purchase behavior, browsing history, and online engagement. Web scraped data plays a vital role in eradicating biased interpretations by collecting and analyzing relevant and insightful buyer data.
- Marketing- Content, Social Media, and other Digital Mediums
Web scraping is the ultimate solution for monitoring, aggregating, and parsing the most critical stories from your industry and generating content around it for most impactful responses.
- Business Investment
Web data explicitly tailored for investors to estimate company and government fundamentals and analyze insights from SEC filings and understand the market scenarios to make sound investing decisions.
- Market research
Web scraping is making the process of market research and business intelligence even more critical across the globe by delivering high quality, high volume, and highly insightful data of every shape and size.
Conclusions
Web scraping is the process of screening web pages for relevant content and downloading them into a spreadsheet for further use with a web crawler and a web scraper.
The most prominent industries to practice web scraping for lead generating and boosting sales are data science, real estate, digital marketing, entertainment, education, retail, HR Recruitment, and Beauty and Lifestyle, amongst many others.
After the COVD 19 pandemic, the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry has witnessed a significant rise in its web scraping percentage due to its continuous and exponential rise in data generation.
Apart from lead generation, web scraping is also beneficial for market research, content creation, investment planning, competitor analysis, etc.
Some of the best and most used web scraping tools or tool providers are Octoparse, ScraperAPI, ScrapeSimple, Parsehub, Scrapy, Diffbot, and Cheerio.
