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For the success of any business, one of the most important and crucial factors is the gathering, storage and use of relevant business intelligence. To make a visible difference in the market, a business needs to display some prominent characteristics
- Have clear strategies,
- Possess in-depth knowledge of the target market,
- Have deep insight about their own business processes, and
- Know a specific direction towards which they can structure their efforts.
Typically, these efforts require ready access to large volumes of relevant and timely data, which needs to be collected, structured and accessible for later use. Such core data is what builds business intelligence. Web scraping for business intelligence is a recent breakthrough in big data technology that can provide a company with the relevant, actionable data that they need, with minimum hassle. This helps them to make their path to success a lot smoother.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence consists of understanding the innate and crucial processes of a business or business area and all the important data associated with them. Also referred to as business performance management, this involves the customization and use of a particular set of technologies that make possible, the collection and analysis of targeted and precise data. Use of Big Data for business intelligence has already been a rewarding process for many businesses. It can be safely expected that in coming days, more and more companies would invest in customized data aggregators to collect and process business intelligence.
With relevant and accurate business intelligence, you can make a difference for your business by gathering and organizing important, useful and actionable data. This data can then help you analyze, transform and fine-tune your business process and strategies for rewarding success. The steps involved in such an effort can be –
- Data Collection – Creating and storing relevant data from multiple web sources that can be used to achieve better understanding of underlying business processes and conditions. At this stage, the data is gathered and stored based on a few criteria to start off with, and not analyzed in depth.
- Creating Information – You then process to convert the data collected into business information. This is done by thorough analysis of raw, neutral data and taking out parts that are useful for a part or whole of your business.
- Creating Knowledge – Delivering actionable information to the right people in your company can help create knowledge. The right allocation of information in a personalized manner helps your personnel make detailed plans and strategies for going forward.
- Creating Action – Based on the knowledge base that you have now built, you can take action to reach business goals, fine-tune processes and strategies and identify opportunities for further improvement.
Therefore, business intelligence and data mining go hand in hand. Only when you collect enough relevant data for business intelligence and analytics, can you create noticeable change and push forward in the right direction.
The Importance of Web Scraping for Business Intelligence
All kinds of businesses are driven by data and the insights the business industry presents. Most of the data available to businesses tends to be unstructured and raw, and needs to be collected, stored and analyzed in great detail before it can be used constructively in a business context. Doing this manually is difficult, and this is where the efficacy of web scraping comes in extremely handy.
Being an automated process, web scraping is a great way to gather the required data for analysis, post which it can be used to make critical business decisions. Here are a few things that you can achieve with automated web scraping
- Collect important data for business intelligence
- Carry out market research in your chosen domain
- Survey competition in real time
- Collect customer behavior data
- Make your services relevant with targeted content
Apart from these important advantages, there is a lot more that can be achieved with web scraping in the content of developing business intelligence. Data mining is at the heart of an effective, analytics-driven approach to gather business intelligence, and the positives resulting from such efforts can be many and varied.
Advantages
For insightful decision making in your business, you require large volumes of data which can be processed and turned into valuable information. This information can then be used to bolster your business in many ways. With business intelligence, you can be in a perfect position to harness the power of data, use it emphatically to improve business process, build strategies and monitor their implementation in real time.
You can also gain comprehension about the position of your business in the competitive spectrum, and take measures to enhance that position and elevate your company. Web scraping for business intelligence allows you to achieve all this and much more. Here are some of the advantages that you can acquire through this method –
Competition Mapping
Having a clear idea about your competition is crucial if you want to make a difference in your chosen niche and emerge as a market leader. Scraping your competitors’ websites can provide you with a wealth of information including pricing strategies, marketing efforts, product and service versatility, and market share percentages. Such critical intelligence can be used to clearly demarcate your position in the market. Once your position is known, you can then take steps to ensure that you remain sustainable, offer better value to your customers, and emerge on top of your game in the long run.
ROI Mapping
To ensure that your efforts in marketing, operations and sales are bearing fruit, you need to have sound ROI analysis for all your business processes. Once you implement your strategies, the positives and negatives can very easily transform into various tangible and intangible variables, making sense of which can be a tough ask without a methodical approach. With web scraping, you can have a clear direction while carrying out ROI analysis and stay on the right path.
For example, business intelligence in e-commerce includes factors like product and service reception, general opinions, user reviews and ratings, discussions and recommendations. With your business, you can crawl relevant section of the internet and gather data that accurately indicates whether your investments are on their way to show positive returns or not. Using this information, you can either let things progress or make changes in your strategy to maximize ROI and bring success to your business.
Demand Mapping
A crucial part of taking your business forward is to have a clear idea about the amount, nature, distribution and characteristics of the demand in the market for the products and services you offer. To fully understand this, you need concrete information indicative of this demand. You can then scour the information and measure in specific terms the volume of demand, and construct your plans and strategies accordingly.
Taking advantage of product intelligence services and automated web scraping provides you with a large data bank which is indicative of demand volumes in your target market. Crawling the web with a group of specific, targeted keywords can help you determine public interest in a particular business domain and the need for particular products and services. You can then cross-reference the information with your own service volumes and make informed decisions going forward.
Diversifying and Exploring
For all businesses, there are always new opportunities waiting to be tapped into. In your chosen niche, there might be hundreds of important unaddressed markets that you can leverage to expand and enhance your business. With web scraping, getting information about the various branches and potential possibilities in your niche is a cakewalk. Analyzing data collected from scraping can help you find unexplored, untapped parts of your niche and you can diversify your products and services to include those areas. This is beneficial in many ways. Not only does this bring in new customers and more revenue, but it also broadens the horizons of your business and improves the authority, integrity, trust and reliability that your brand name commands in the market.
Trend Mapping
Nowadays, businesses must be able to accurately forecast and expect particular trends in customer behavior. Moreover, businesses must also be ready to meet those trends head-on with targeted plans and strategies. Researching past trends and studying them in-depth can give you some direction, but it is nowhere near enough nowadays to be able to accurately predict future trends and be ready for them. Web scraping for business intelligence becomes useful in this regard, as it allows you to tap into vast reserves of social data.
Social networks are the perfect place for potential customers to leave traces of their tastes, preferences, opinions, views, and purchasing and decision-making behavior. Scraping particular social networks with targeted sets of parameters can help you accurately gauge public perception, learn about characteristic tastes and preferences and predict the status of ongoing trends and the possibility of future trends related to your niche. This crucial business intelligence, if used innovatively, can skyrocket your business to the top in a short period of time and prove to be the difference maker in the competitive market.
Using Big Data for business intelligence has its rewards. Many companies that have made an effort to leverage the potential of web scraping for business intelligence are sure to attest to the fact that the returns received have gone on to make a positive difference on their business. For this day and age, it is a great way to provide unmatched customer satisfaction and help achieve your long-term business goals.
