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Marketing is all about getting your clients or customers interested in the product that you are selling or the services that you are offering. We can do marketing in various ways, such as advertisements in the print media, or marketing campaigns to promote your product while connecting to the target customer base. Rather than spending an enormous amount of money in putting up signboards or getting your advertisement on the first page of every newspaper, trying to reach your customers through unconventional means can not only help you save money but also understand your customers better. This is where web scraping comes into the picture. This technology has started sending ripples across the tech industry as businesses small and big are now heavily dependent on it for a host of applications. Let’s see how web scraping in marketing can be helpful to marketers.
Ways in which Marketing Industry can Utilize Web Scraping
1. Scrape what your competitors are using for marketing
In today’s world, making your product the absolute best alone will not help sell it. You must market it better than all your competitors. So beating the competition is all about knowing what efforts they are putting in, what they are doing, and then doing better, and beating them at their own game. So you can make a list of your competitors and their websites and crawl data from the websites pertaining to the promotions or other marketing campaigns they are running. Once you have this information, you can discard the irrelevant information and use your findings to boost your own marketing campaigns by trying out tricks your competitors are trying, while improving them, to make yours stand out. This a great marketing hack that you can implement using a web scraping setup and it delivers excellent results, almost instantaneously.
2. Check which marketing campaigns caused sales/stocks to rise/plummet
A wrong PR campaign can cause your stocks and/or your sales to plummet to half their values within a matter of hours. The millennial generation might recognize a grand gesture from your company, and the word might spread like wildfire, and you might suddenly see yourself in the first position in your line of business. Things can go both ways in this game. But it is not completely unpredictable, unlike life and death. You can actually use data gathered from the internet to find out which weird and surprising marketing stunts actually made companies famous and which ones took them down. Understanding from these failures and successes and putting that wisdom into your own campaigns is another ball game, but then at least you have data to back you up and tip the scales in your favour, even if slightly.
3. Scrape data about demographics to determine which PR campaign will work and where
Setting up posters of your new burger truck in an area comprising mainly middle-aged and old people might not be a good idea. No product or service can appeal to a universal audience. Even if the product is the same, you might need to market it differently in different countries. If you are selling a burger, you need to make sure that it contains the meat that a country prefers, and that is how it is advertised. But this was a very simplified example. What if you have made an action movie and you need to market it to countries on different continents? You will have to find out more about the crowd of every country, their customs and traditions, what they find as interesting or grand and somehow market the movie in a manner as if it was made while keeping the people (the audience of that country) in mind. Where do you get the data for all this? Web scraping is probably the best answer.
4. Scrape the most popular and innovative marketing videos to get some out of the box ideas
Every time I open Facebook, I see people who do not have an MBA degree, or even a college degree, using their amazing marketing and advertising schemes to sell their wares and services. Once they have the attention of the people, they find it much easier to sell their products or offer them some simple services. You could crawl such content of the internet to curate ideas and use some learning from them to advance your own marketing efforts.
5. Find your audience by scraping people-info
Bridging the gap between the seller and the customer is one of the most arduous tasks that marketing folks face. Scraping data from social media and review platforms can actually help you target a smaller audience comprising people for whom your product will be more relevant. A smaller target group with a higher conversion rate will mean less marketing expenditure and more focus at the same time.
6. Market Research
A great product might be of no use unless you have done proper market research to price it properly, get the fanciest packaging, the most accessible dealers in the city to stock it, and put up posters in the places where people will notice them the most. All this might sound simple enough, but getting all the factors right takes more than just intuition – it needs data. So for every factor, there must a be a specific type of data that you need or a specific website that you need to crawl information from. For all of that, web scraping would come in really handy and help you avoid the “I told you so!” looks from your employees, since you will be basing your decisions on data collected from real sources.
7. Brand Monitoring
You are marketing your products and services at full go, but then people are spreading rumours on social media to undermine your company. How do you handle it? Or say you are providing amazing services but a single unhappy customer is venting his anger by writing about you on every online review website possible! How do you handle such a situation? Well, the answer is very simple. You can monitor your brand mentions in social media using web scraping to take care of disgruntled employees or customers to keep your average ratings high enough so that you have a positive public outlook. Brand monitoring can also keep track of how the public perceives you as compared to your closest competitors.
Bottom line
Marketing is essential for any business that wants to reach a wider audience, and traditional marketing techniques must take the help of recent online marvels, like web scraping in order to rise above the competition. Building a data scraping team might not be workable for small companies or for businesses that are not tech-oriented. In these cases, taking the help of web scraping service providers like PromptCloud can help you get your work done at a fraction of the price and effort. You mention what you need for your marketing efforts and we serve it in the data format you need.
