The meaning of web scraping
In all companies, the marketing departments accomplish a lot of tasks and tend to establish excellent promotional strategies. It is necessary for a marketer to get closer to his/her clients and listen to them carefully to find the solutions to their problems. It's essential for him/her to know the position of his/her company on the net and scrape data from different web pages carefully.
The typical ways to use web scraping tools for marketing decisions:
We scraping, also known as data extraction and web harvesting, is a process of extracting information from websites and blogs. Social media marketers and digital marketers use different web scraping tools to accomplish their tasks, and these tools access the internet through a web browser or via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Web scraping can be done manually, but the marketers have short of time to scrape data from a large number of pages. So, they opt for different tools to accomplish their tasks and collect data from a large number of pages using these tools.
There are nearly one billion web pages and numerous articles on the internet. How can you use a web scraping tool? Most people lack technical knowledge and don't know about programming languages; so, they opt for popular data extractors or web crawlers to accomplish their tasks. As a marketer, you can use web scraping tools in the following ways.
1. Lead generation
Marketers must know about the tactics they could try to generate leads depending on the nature of their businesses. For instance, you can use social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+) to target a large number of customers, join communities like Quora, or opt for guest posting and paid ads. In essence, leads can be generated only when you have the contact details or phone and fax numbers of your customers. A web scraping tool (such as Import.io) can help you scrape data from different websites. It will automatically collect any useful information: names, locations, cities, zip codes, website URLs and phone numbers.
2. Market Research
It's safe to mention that market research is an integral part of a marketer's life. You would have to extract necessary information from the internet to plan your marketing strategies. You will be required to structure the data and have to collect it from online market firms, news sites, industry blogs or directories.
With all these things, it is not possible for you to promote your products and services properly. The data can be collected from the internet only when you use a reliable web scraping service (such as Kimono Labs or Mozenda).
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to promote your services, you would have to set up a site and get more traffic from the search engines. There are numerous ways to boost your site organic search: direct traffic, referral traffic, social media traffic or paid traffic.
When your data is scraped properly, and the content of your site is free from grammatical errors, you will automatically see good results and will be able to boost the organic search traffic. Octoparse makes it easy for you to scrape data from the net. This web scraping tool allows you to automate the data extraction process and helps index your web pages.
