cft

Six Web Scraping Hacks Used By Marketers

Let’s discuss more of these web scraping hacks below.


user

EFRAT VULFSONS

3 years ago | 3 min read

Have you learned how to web scrape? If you have, then good! You’ve already completed half the process of generating sales for your brand. The next thing you need to do is learn the different applications you can do with web scraping.

Some applications are about web scraping your brand. Other hacks involve scraping your competitors. There are also other hacks that require unorthodox measures such as scraping Reddit. Let’s discuss more of these web scraping hacks below.

1. Competitive Monitoring

Competitor analysis or competitive monitoring uses web scraping to figure out how your competitors increase sales. This hack also helps you figure out which of your competitor’s strategies don’t work.

One example is through auditing their SEO strategy. Here, you’ll know which keywords your competitors use to appear on Google. The keywords that aren’t working will give you an idea of what keywords you shouldn’t use.

By knowing which keywords work and don’t work, you can optimize for words to label your product that generates organic traffic, making you dominate the market. This isn’t the only strategy under web scraping for competitive monitoring. There others like:

  • Reviewing a competitor’s pay-per-click spend
  • Digging into their product pricing
  • Auditing their product line and categories
  • Collecting reviews and comments from 3rd-party sites
  • Dive into their social media strategies
  • Studying their funding

2. Lead Generation

If competitive monitoring is about learning to expose your brand to the market, lead generation is about you finding potential buyers and converting them to your customers. This is done by identifying sources, extracting source data, and choosing the right proxy to use.

Identifying sources is the part where you find where the potential buyers for your products usually go. It can be your competitor’s site. If your competitor’s customer data is available to the public, you can use that to your advantage by scraping their site.

By getting your competitor’s customer data, you’ll find that others are unsatisfied with your competitor’s services. You can study that and devise a strategy to attract your competitor’s clients into your brand.

Choosing the right proxy is for making your scraping activities more legit because other scraping software uses free proxies that are unreliable. This often leads to error in extracted data or being blocked from the site you are scraping.

One example is being blocked from scraping Google because Google’s system will consider you a bot if you use an unreliable proxy. Choose residential proxies or paid ones as they ensure a smooth web scraping experience.

3. Content Marketing

Web scraping addresses the difficulties of content marketing challenges in two common ways. It lets you know your audience and enrich content. Data scraping lets you know your target audience by showing you data of which demographic usually searches for and buys your product.

By knowing who your target market is, you’ll be able to make your product marketing easier because you’ll save money from ads by aiming your content into a specific demographic.

Web scraping as a content enricher shows you what content presentation attracts your niche’s views and reactions. These presentation styles can vary from meme-filled blogs to well-directed videos.

4. Brand Monitoring

The opposite of competitive monitoring is brand monitoring. Instead of extracting and analyzing data from your competitors, you’re going to that on yourself. This is to find out which of your strategies are working and which aren’t, what your customers want from you and what they don’t.

By studying the data, you’ll innovate and improve your ineffective marketing strategies and leave the working ones the way they are.

5. Blog Post Categories

You can scrape your blog posts categories to make content that will generate more traffic on your site. To do this, you need to export your top content report, scrape the blog posts based on categories, and then analyze the data on google sheets.

The category that gets more traffic, shares, and reactions should be the kind of topic you should focus on producing. And another thing, scraping manually may be a valuable technical experience, but using a web scraper will still always have the benefits of having an easier-to-manage user interface.

6. Forums

Reddit is a platform of discussion. People go there to argue their opinions, reviews, and requests all the time. This is an opportunity for you to learn what the market trends are. First, you must pick what subreddit your business relates to.

For example, if you sell cars, you should go to /r/Cars. Scrape the top 1000 posts of all time. Find what matters most to the Redditors in the subreddit. Use the words “function” or “reliability” when analyzing data. Whichever has the most mention, you’ll get a clear answer to what type of car sells better. It might be a Toyota sedan or a Ford truck.

Final Thoughts

Web scraping is an effective tool to use in learning which strategy works for dominating your market. That is why you need to find out which information category you need to utilize from the extracted data. Find out which product qualities are doing bad, what people are talking about, what they want, and what they don’t want.

Upvote


user
Created by

EFRAT VULFSONS

A colorful, agile, creative and sharp content strategist with an extraordinary passion for the written word. I obtained experience in a wide variety of niches as part of my SEO and Marketing experience, parallel to my opera singing career. During my time as a freelancer I have worked with dozens of


people
Post

Upvote

Downvote

Comment

Bookmark

Share


Related Articles