All You Need Is the Right Data Scraping Partner

Odds are your business needs web data scraping. Data scraping is the act of using software to harvest desired data from target websites. So, instead of you spending every second scouring the internet and copying and pasting from the screen, the software (called “spiders”) does it for you, saving you precious time and resources.

Departments across an organization will profit from data scraping practices.

Data scraping will save countless hours and headaches by doing the following:

• Monitoring competitors’ prices, locations and service offerings
• Harvesting directory and list data from the web, significantly improving your lead generation
• Acquiring customer and product marketing insight from forums, blogs and review sites
• Extracting website data for research and competitive analysis
• Social media scraping for trend and customer analysis
• Collecting regular or even real time updates of exchange rates, insurance rates, interest rates, mortgage rates, real estate, stock prices and travel prices

It is a no-brainer, really. Businesses of all sizes are integrating data scraping into their business initiatives. Make sure you stay ahead of the competition by effectively data scraping.

Now for the hard part

The “why should you data scrape?” is the easy part. The “how” gets a bit more difficult. Are you savvy in Python and HTML? What about JavaScript and AJAX? Do you know how to utilize a proxy server? As your data collection grows, do you have the cloud-based infrastructure in place to handle the load? If you or someone at your organization can answer yes to these questions, do they have the time to take on all the web data scraping tasks? More importantly, is it a cost-effective use of your valuable staffing resources for them to do this? With constantly changing websites, resulting in broken code and websites automatically blacklisting your attempts, it could be more of a resource drain than anticipated.

Instead of focusing on all the issues above, business users should be concerned with essential questions such as:

• What data do I need to grow my business?
• Can I get the data I need, when I want it and in a format I can use?
• Can the data be easily stored for future analysis?
• Can I maximize my staffing resources and get this data without any programming knowledge or IT assistance?
• Can I start now?
• Can I cost-effectively collect the data needed to grow my business?

A web data scraping partner is standing by to help you!

This is where purchasing innovative web scraping services can be a game changer. The right partner can harness the value of the web for you. They will go into the weeds so you can spend your precious time growing your business.

Hold on a second! Before you run off to purchase data scraping services, you need to make sure you are looking for the solution that best fits your organisational needs. Don’t get overwhelmed. We know that relinquishing control of a critical business asset can be a little nerve-wracking. To help, we have come up with our steps and best practices for choosing the right data scraping company for your organisation.

1) Know Your Priorities

We have brought this up before, but when going through a purchasing decision process we like to turn to Project Management 101: The Project Management Triangle. For this example, we think a Euler diagram version of the triangle fits best.

(Source: www.brighthubpm.com)

In this example, the constraints show up as Fast (time), Good (quality) and Cheap (cost). This diagram displays the interconnection of all three elements of the project. When using this diagram, you are only able to pick two priorities. Only two elements may change at the expense of the third:

• We can do the project quickly with high quality, but it will be costly
• We can do the project quickly at a reduced cost, but quality will suffer
• We can do a high-quality project at a reduced cost, but it will take much longer

Using this framework can help you shape your priorities and budget. This really, in turn, helps you search for and negotiate with a data scraping company.

2) Know your budget/resources.

This one is so important it is on here twice. Knowing your budget and staffing resources before reaching out to data scraping companies is key. This will make your search much more efficient and help you manage the entire process.

3) Have a plan going in.

Once again, you should know your priorities, budget, business objectives and have a high-level data scraping plan before choosing a data scraping company. Here are a few plan guidelines to get you started:

• Know what data points to collect: contact information, demographics, prices, dates, etc.
• Determine where the data points can most likely be found on the internet: your social media and review sites, your competitors’ sites, chambers of commerce and government sites, e-commerce sites your products/competitors’ products are sold, etc.
• What frequency do you need this data and what is the best way to receive it? Make sure you can get the data you need and in the correct format. Determine whether you can perform a full upload each time or just the changes from the previous dataset. Think about whether you want the data delivered via email, direct download or automatically to your Amazon S3 account.
• Who should have access to the data and how will it be stored once it is harvested?
• Finally, the plan should include what you are going to do with all this newly acquired data and who is receiving the final analysis. Knowing your intended audience will influence all steps of this plan … remember to keep this in mind.

4) Be willing to change your plan.

This one may seem counterintuitive after so much focus on having a game plan. However, remember to be flexible. The whole point of hiring experts is that they are the experts. A plan will make discussions much more productive, but the experts will probably offer insight you hadn’t thought of. Be willing to integrate their advice into your plan.

5) Have a list of questions ready for the company.

Having a list of questions ready for the data scraping company will help keep you in charge of the discussions and negotiations. Here are some points that you should know before choosing a data scraping partner:

• Can they start helping you immediately? Make sure they have the infrastructure and staff to get you off the ground in a matter of weeks, not months.
• Make sure you can access them via email and phone. Also make sure you have access to those actually performing the data scraping, not just a call center.
• Can they tailor their processes to fit with your requirements and organisational systems?
• Can they scrape more than plain text? Make sure they can harvest complex and dynamic sites with JavaScript and AJAX. If a website’s content can be viewed on a browser, they should be able to get it for you.
• Make sure they have monitoring systems in place that can detect changes, breakdowns, and quality issues. This will ensure you have access to a persistent and reliable flow of data, even when the targeted websites change formats.
• As your data grows, can they easily keep up? Make sure they have scalable solutions that could handle all that unstructured web data.
• Will they protect your company? Make sure they know discretion is important and that they will not advertise you as a client unless you give permission. Also, check to see how they disguise their scrapers so that the data harvesting cannot be traced back to your business.

6) Check their reviews.

Do a bit of your own manual data scraping to see what others business are saying about the companies you are researching.

7) Make sure the plan the company offers is cost-effective.

Here are a few questions to ask to make sure you get a full view of the costs and fees in the estimate:

• Is there a setup fee?
• What are the fixed costs associated with this project?
• What are the variable costs and how are they calculated?
• Are there any other taxes, fees or things that I could be charged for that are not listed on this quote?
• What are the payment terms?

It is no longer a secret: To best serve your customers, improve your decision making and beat your competition, you need data. On top of that, any old data won’t do: Businesses need recurring, up-to-date and high-quality data that is structured for easy analysis.

Here is a secret: The companies at the head of the pack are acquiring this data and gaining the competitive edge by capitalizing on web data scraping.

How to get the data you need to grow your business

Web data scraping, also known as web data extraction, web harvesting, and screen scraping, is a technology loved by startups and companies of all sizes and maturity. In simple words, it is an automation technique that extracts unorganized web data. The unstructured data is then converted into structured information to allow for analysis or storage in a centralized database.

Web data scraping solutions range from the ad-hoc, requiring a good amount of human effort, to fully automated systems that can transform entire websites into structured data. If you are looking for more information on web data scraping, check out our techniques for high-quality web crawling and data extraction. We also recommend checking out these 16 real life data scraping examples.

Web data scraping services are not deployed yet by all companies. The businesses taking advantage of these techniques have that extra edge over their competition. It’s time you joined the ranks.

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Now that you are sold on web data scraping, let’s explore the 4+ ways you can use web data scraping to your competitive advantage:

1. Optimize price AND competition

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Are your prices competitive? Are you offering the products your customers want and need? You can’t just go with your gut on these questions. You need to know the answers and to get there you need data. Web data scraping is the easiest way to acquire that information. Through web data scraping, you can frequently track the stock availability and prices of products across all your competition. You can also set up notifications for whenever there is a change in competitors’ prices or in the market.

This practice is essential, particularly for e-commerce. Retailers and marketplaces are harvesting the web to monitor their competitor prices. They are also using the data to improve their product attributes.

To stay on top of the market, the most competitive e-commerce sites are closely monitoring their counterparts. Let’s say Amazon needs to know how their products are performing against Walmart. They also need to know whether their product coverage is complete. To gain this knowledge, they can crawl Walmart’s product catalogs, which is provided on the web, to find gaps and compare the prices of similar products. They also can stay updated on upcoming and current promotions on any of the products or categories.

Just as you most likely don’t have just one competitor, Amazon’s only competitor isn’t Walmart. These sites are also scraping comparison shopping engines like Google Shopping to see how their products line up.

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This type of knowledge gives e-commerce sites such as Amazon an edge. Web data scraping provides these actionable insights that can be implemented in pricing and product decisions. Web scraping isn’t just about tracking prices and promotions; there are so many data points out there to scrape! Sites can pull a wide range of information related to their products that the other marketplaces and retailers are also selling. This includes shipping times, number of sellers, availability and related products.

The return on investment (ROI) on web data scraping is real and tangible. By including this practice in your price optimization management, you can improve gross profit margins by upwards of 10%. Selling products at a competitive rate is always crucial, no matter your business. It is especially imperative for e-commerce. Make sure you are using web data scraping to check your prices and products to stay ahead.

2. Enhance online reputation management AND public opinion research

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The online marketplace is becoming progressively more saturated and competitive. On top of brick and mortar locations, we can now easily shop on our phones, tablets and computers. With so many options at our fingertips, brand loyalty is increasingly less sticky. A good online reputation is imperative to stay in front of your competition.

To manage your online reputation, you need an online reputation management (ORM) strategy. Make sure this strategy includes scraped data. Scraped data can help you understand which audiences you hope to reach and what areas of liability can open your brand up to reputation damage.

Your ORM strategy should include social media and review monitoring. This can be achieved by scraping your company’s product review and social media sites. By doing so, you can monitor your online reputation, keep your customers happy and stay ahead of potential downfalls.

Just as you may be wary of a restaurant with a bad Yelp review, consumers will be evaluating your business’s reviews and related online chatter. A business with the best online reputation has the advantage. You need to continually gather public opinion about your company and products to quickly identify which of your product features are desirable, what your customers like/dislike and how they would like your products/services to be improved. By doing this, you can fine-tune your products to match who your customers are and what they value.

You won’t be pulling just your ratings. Your web crawler can pull data on opinion leaders, trending topics and demographic factors such as gender, age group, geographic location and sentiment. That data can then be transformed into an easily analyzed format. By understanding these areas of vulnerability and potential, you can use them to your greatest advantage.

3. Keep a leg up on your competitors by staying informed

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Are you up-to-date on what people are saying about your competitor’s products and services? An important aspect of staying ahead in the game is knowing what your competitors are up to. To do this, you should be monitoring your competition’s website, social media sites and reviews just as closely and just as often as you are monitoring your own.

Your #1 monitoring tool should be web data scraping. Web data scraping your competitors’ sites allows you to quickly recognize which of their product features are desirable, what their customers like/dislike and how their customers would like their products/services to be improved. You can, and should, capitalize on this crucial data by analyzing and addressing market gaps. By doing so, you can provide a more desirable product, at the right price, to the target market.

Having the information about your competitors at your fingertips, which they have already made available to the world, is smart. Even better, not everyone is taking advantage of this data. If you do, you are already ahead of the game.

4. Get more leads: use web data scraping to grow your business

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It is not a secret. Lead generation is crucial for the sales-driven organization. A data-driven sales team armed with web data scraping techniques can easily scrape quality leads from directories such as Yellow Pages, True Local, Google Places, Manta and Yelp. These processes can deliver a wealth of information: address, email, phone, products/services, working hours, geocodes, etc.

The data can then be extracted to the desired format. Without data scraping, this information would have to be manually pulled. Often this ends up being a lot of copying and pasting, making for a lengthy, tedious and human error-prone task. Even worse, once you finally get and organize the data, it is often out of date!

Another antiquated practice is buying or renting contacts from a list provider. If you have done this before, you know what a costly and painful process this can be. These lists are expensive and often low-quality. Data scraping for contacts is usually 10-20% of the cost compared to acquiring these lists, making it a cost-effective alternative. Even better, a well-formatted and scrapped dataset can easily be loaded into a mail merge or any CRM software.

This is a no-brainer. With scraped data in hand and time and resources saved, your happy sales teams can get to what they do best: generating leads and making business!

Don’t get left behind.

Web data scraping will help you optimize your price and competition, enhance your online reputation management and public opinion research, keep a leg up on your competitors by staying informed and generate quality leads. We know resources are tight and this may appear overwhelming. Have no fear. There are experts who can pull the data AND analyze it for you!

Odds are you want (and need) to grow your business. To do this, you need leads. Let’s chat about leads for a second. In its simplest form a lead is:

“A person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape or form”

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Leads represent the first stage of the sales process. A quality lead can easily become a prospect, which can lead to business. Lead generation is a necessary task for all sales-driven organizations. Even the best-known companies continually need to monitor and build their sales pipeline to generate growth.

There are many methods you can use to generate leads. To create an actionable lead, you need information on that person or entity. The more data the better. To convert a lead to a prospect and then to business, you at least need the information found on a business card: name, associated company, phone, location, email and other contact details.

There are a couple of different ways to gather this information. Lead generation methods include buying or renting databases of telephone numbers, email addresses or mailing addresses. These lists are immense, delivering a high quantity of leads, but the quality is notoriously deficient. The customer service and support can also be poor. Even worse, these lists are expensive.

Attending trade shows and industry events to make contacts is another lead generation practice, as is combing social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for your target market and influencers. You then manually collect the contact information from sites and reach out to these potential leads. Leads generated using the methods above can be high-quality, but they also have a high associated time-cost. Investing so much time in these methods limits the quantity of leads you will be able to generate.

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Don’t waste time on antiquated and expensive lead methods. Make sure you are maximizing your limited resources: time, money, and sales and marketing teams. How do you do this? Make sure your sales strategy includes web data scraping.

If you need more information on web data scraping basics, check out this article. Then explore why you should be investing in data scraping.

Web data scraping will save you time and money. Remember that tedious list purchasing practice we mentioned? Data scraping for contacts is usually 10-20% of the cost compared to acquiring these lists, making it not only the more efficient but also the most cost-effective alternative!

Now that you are ready to throw those lists to the wind, let’s talk about how you can you use web data scraping to grow your business. To do this, let’s go over two basic use cases. However, keep in mind that data scraping for leads is fantastic for any sales-driven organization.

Scraping Use Case #1

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Health Technology Company Looking to Expand Sales Territories

• Scenario: You are the VP of marketing at a health technology company. Your technology is widely used in your region, but your company wants to expand to other regions. To help spread awareness of your technology, you need to connect with influencers, medical professionals and health care system professionals in the new regions.
• Deliverable: You need a list of influencers, medical professionals and professionals within the health care systems that have purchasing power or influence. This list needs to at least contain the name, organization, phone, email and location. Further information on role, title, company name and category (influencer, medical professional, health system professional, etc.) adds quality to the lead. The more data available, the easier it is to accurately contact your leads and turn them into prospects. Through data scraping health technology blogs and forums, medical professional ranking sites (like ZocDoc), health care system websites and health care conference sites (to find influencers), you can easily obtain this list!

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Large Construction Management Conference Needs to Maximize Attendance

• Scenario: Your event management company has been hired to organize a large construction management conference. You need to make sure you have contacted all the relevant local businesses and organizations. You also would like to draw attendance from throughout the country. Additionally, you are responsible for finding speakers and you need to reach out to top influencers to request they attend and speak.
• Deliverable: You require a list of construction companies and contacts in those companies. You also need a list of influencers. With web scraping, this isn’t a problem. Bots can scour your local chamber of commerce website. You can also set up bots to crawl construction blogs, websites, forums and message boards. Crawling ranking sites such as Yelp will you identify the top companies. Past conference sites and construction blogs also will help you build your speaker list. You could even scrape local news sources to acquire information on large construction projects. Through these practices, you will collect a targeted list of local and regional organizations. A data scraping partner or software can even provide this data in a text or Excel file. Now you can easily upload the contacts into your customer relationship management (CRM) software and get to contacting them!

Now, let’s go over the basics for any organization that needs to generate leads. The basic process of generating good leads through web data scraping includes the following:

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Know who are trying to reach

Who is your target market? Knowing the answer to this question will help you focus your data scraping and lead generation. Still honing in on your target market? You can scrape your competitors’ sites for their customer demographics. Their target market may be your target market.

Find out where your potential users are “live” on the web

Once you have determined your target market, research the websites where your ideal users can be found. A data scraping partner can help you find these sites.

Use web data scraping to get their contact information

Now start gathering contact information! To data scrape this information you can:

• Write your own code
• Use data scraping software
• Partner with third parties specializing in creating custom solutions to give you data specific to your needs.

No matter the acquired method, web bots scour your targeted sites and pull all the actionable information you need! Just think about how long some of your lead generation usually takes. With web data scraping, you can have thousands of focused, organized, quality leads in minutes.

Format, upload and analyze your data

Make sure your data is organized and formatted correctly. Hopefully, the data scraping method you choose provides your data in a format that is easy to upload and analyze. The easiest format is a text or spreadsheet file. A data scraping partner will specialize in customizing your data and can help you work through any issues. They even can perform a wide range of analyses for you.

Once you have the list, you can use a mail merge tool to reach out to the leads or load the information into a CRM software such as Salesforce.

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Start reaching out!

Now you can get to work. Data scraping isn’t going to remove your job! Sure, a lot of the work has already been done for you, but you still need to come up with a personal initial outreach message and perhaps follow-up language as well. Here is a great email template from close.io to get you started.

Hi [first name],

My name is [my name] and I head up business development efforts with [my company]. We recently launched a new platform that [one sentence pitch]. I am taking an educated stab in the dark here, however, based on your online profile, you appear to be an appropriate person to connect with … or might at least point me in the right direction. I’d like to speak with someone from [company] who is responsible for [handling something that’s relevant to my product].

If that’s you, are you open to a 15-minute call on _________ [time and date] to discuss ways the [company name] platform can specifically help your business? If not you, can you please put me in touch with the right person? I appreciate the help!

Best,

[your name]

One word of advice. Make sure you don’t reach out to the entire list at once. Your personal analysis or data scraping partner analysis may have segmented your leads into quality buckets based on demographics and other scrapped information: weak lead, medium lead, strong lead. Focus first on the strong leads for a sustainable lead generation rollout. Always make sure you can handle the ensuing responses. Nothing turns off potential customers more than a poor initial interaction. Sales teams don’t want to spend time building and cleaning up contact lists. They want to be converting prospects into business. Web data scraping is an effective, time-saving and cost-efficient way to build your business through lead generation. With all that time saved, you can focus on the important (and fun!) stuff.

Big Data. This term is getting a lot of buzz these days. You know you probably need it, but what is big data? Is it complicated? Is it expensive? What teams need access to data? How do you get it to them? Once you have the data, what do you do with it?!

What is big data?

Let’s start with: What is it? Big data encompasses so many practices contributing to it being a somewhat ambiguous term. While there isn’t just one way to define “big data,” we like one of Technology Review’s curated definitions from Microsoft:

“Big data is the term increasingly used to describe the process of applying serious computing power—the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence—to seriously massive and often highly complex sets of information.”

Why does all of this matter? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier’s Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think offers a comprehensive and highly readable overview of big data’s benefits and risks. They define the benefits as:

“The ability of society to harness information in novel ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value.” and “…things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value.”

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Why does all of this matter to you….

Why does your company need big data?

Data does a lot. This includes giving companies the competitive advantage and generating growth. There are a wealth of resources available to continue to expand your knowledge of big data, including this well-curated list of top 14 big data books. We highly encourage learning more. However, now we want to illustrate how you can use data to “produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value (Source)“ for your business.

Let’s return to our initial list of questions:

• Is it complicated? Big data can be complicated to obtain, transform and manage; however, there are various simple methods you can employ.
• Is it expensive? Big data can be expensive although there are cost effective methods that easily generate ROI.
• What teams need access to it? Every department can benefit from more data, but there are some teams, especially marketing, that will see an immediate benefit.
• How do you get it to them? There are numerous ways to access, extract, transform and store data and there are rather easy processes that teams can start utilizing immediately.
• Once you get the data, what do you do with it?! The list on what to do with big data is endless. For starters, analyze it to grow your business. Does it seem like we are hinting at something?

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How can marketing use data scraping to boost growth?

Data is everywhere; however, it’s often just trapped inside web pages. One of the most effective ways of extracting large web data and transforming it into a digestible format is web data scraping. There are a lot of ways to use data scraping in business. We’re going to focus on how your marketing team can capitalize on web data to boost growth.

Your marketing team may (and should!) be already using data scraping to generate valuable leads. Lead generation is necessary to grow a sales-driven organization; however, it isn’t the only growth variable that can be increased through web data scraping. Here are other ways data scraping can boost growth.

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Content analysis

The Content Marketing Institute, an online resource for information on all things content marketing related, defines content marketing as:

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Your company’s blog, social media sites and online dialogue are all significant parts of your content marketing. By growing your blog and online presence, in turn, you will grow your business.

To gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns, you must constantly monitor and analyze your content. Monitoring and analyzing related content on the web is vital. This includes analyzing industry influencers, your competition and industry news. In essence, you need data scraping.

There is more … when planning future campaigns, you need to be making data-driven decisions based on past campaigns and the current market. Once again, your best tool is web data scraping.

Here are several ways you can use scraping to analyze content and how this can be applied toward your marketing campaigns, blog development and business growth.

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Content analysis, your company’s material

Marketing campaigns require multiple resources and should be generating ROI. A marketing department should be able to provide the results of each campaign. They need to know what is working, what isn’t and what needs to be done moving forward. Data scraping can collect the right data and help support these analyses.

First, you need the basics. Make sure you scrape your basic website information: titles, authors, categories, dates. These data points are great reference points and provide ways to segment and trend your data. You also need to collect social statistics for each post: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. Gather counts of likes, comments, shares and whatever other metrics you can glean. Ensure you’re collecting all available data on your audience: age, gender, location, etc., then analyze to uncover interesting correlations that will help grow your blog and business faster.

Data scraping will help you better define your audience. The more you know about your online community, the more personal your messaging becomes.

Content analysis, external data

There is no need to recreate the wheel. Through data scraping, you can gather external data to determine what is working for other content generators. Emulation isn’t the only reason to gather external data. Content marketing is about generating a conversation that engages your target market resulting in business growth. Without knowing what industry influencers and market are saying, you can’t be a leading voice in the online discussion. This leaves room for your competition to take charge.

Here are various data points you can easily scrape:

• Collect blogs for top authors
• Find extra details around page authors
• Gather the follower counts across social networks
• Obtain page titles
• Extract the date/time each post was published

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

All this content generation should be bringing customers to your online doorstep. However, you shouldn’t make assumptions about your website traffic. Just as you need data on your content marketing campaigns, you need search engine optimization data. You need to know what is driving website traffic for you and your competitors. What exactly is SEO though?

“Refers to the process of improving traffic to a given website by increasing the site’s visibility in search engine results. Websites improve search engine optimization by improving content, making sure that the pages are able to be indexed correctly, and ensuring that the content is unique. Going through the search engine optimization process typically leads to more traffic for the site because the site will appear higher in search results for information that pertains to the site’s offerings.”

Let me be honest, data scraping isn’t going to make or break your SEO. That said, anything helps. You can determine:

• What keywords are driving traffic to your website
• Which content categories are attracting links and user engagement
• What kind of resources will it take to rank your site

There are several more manual ways you can scrape SEO data. A data scraping partner can also be a great resource for getting on the right path and ensuring your algorithms stay relative.

Start determining your market share

The ultimate goal of all this focus on content marketing and SEO: increase your overall market share. You want to be growing quicker than your competition and the overall market growth. You need to be able to measure and analyze this growth. Market share analyses are complicated and would require at least a couple of blog posts! There are a few data scraping tricks you can start using to help you gauge your market share.

Referral Saasquatch has provided a good example of how data scraping can help measure market share of a public-facing widget like an e-commerce tool. In this method, simple data scraping provides a count of the amount of installed public-facing javascript widgets for your market. Scraping this data on a continuous basis can offer a valuable sense of how you and your competitors are growing their products’ installation base.

The real estate market can also benefit from data scraping. Let’s say you own a mortgage brokerage firm. To know your potential market share, you need to know how many houses are on the market. To do this, you simply need to scrape sites like Zillow.com to see how many homes are available on the market. You can segment this data with specifics such as: my location, size and price. You can further scrape user data on these sites to determine what your potential looks like based on: age, income, first-time buyer status.

Data scraping grows your business. Make sure you’re using these processes to drive your content marketing campaigns, generate SEO and measure market share.

What are your online customers saying about your products and services? What exactly do they like? What do they not like? What do they REALLY not like? When someone hears your company name, what comes to mind? Do these answers differ between your various customer segments?

Don’t get caught off-guard by online brand and reputation issues. If you can’t answer these questions with certainty, you need to re-evaluate your brand management strategy and boost your public opinion research.

Let’s talk about your brand first. Your brand matters. Odds are you’ve worked hard to build your brand. Your brand represents who your company is and what it stands for. It is how you distinguish yourself from the competition. With your brand, you’re developing a promise to your consumers, expressing the message of this promise and then maintaining that promise.

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Brand and reputation management

Brand management is the science of crafting and sustaining your brand. It is….

“The process of maintaining, improving, and upholding a brand so that the name is associated with positive results. Brand management involves a number of important aspects such as cost, customer satisfaction, in-store presentation, and competition. Brand management is built on a marketing foundation but focuses directly on the brand and how that brand can remain favorable to customers. Proper brand management can result in higher sales of not only one product, but on other products associated with that brand. For example, if a customer loves Pillsbury biscuits and trusts the brand, he or she is more likely to try other products offered by the company such as chocolate chip cookies.” (Source)

A strong brand management strategy is crucial to maintaining your brand. A mandatory aspect of this strategy is your online brand management and reputation plan.

“Today’s consumers are increasingly likely to first encounter your brand online than off, and even those who get their first impression of your brand in print often follow up with a Google search,” said Susan Jacobs, director of marketing and client services at law office supply and service provider, All-State Legal. “That means your company will need to make sure potential clients get a favorable first impression and that the material they find online bolsters it.” (Source)

We know, you’ve already dedicated a significant amount of work toward your brand. Unfortunately, this isn’t a one-time task. You don’t send your brand on its merry way and hope for the best. Your brand and reputation require constant monitoring and control. Your online reputation, in particular, needs constant monitoring.

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The internet and social media along with easy, constant mobile access have created a fickle consumer. We can easily research all of our options with a couple of clicks. Comment sections and review sites add to consumer’s mercurial patterns. User perception and preferences can change in a flash. Negative perception can easily gain momentum, quickly becoming a runaway train you no longer have control over. Vigilant brand and reputation monitoring is essential. It ensures that your strategies are working. This allows you to remain proactive and not reactive.

Web data scraping

This brings us to our favorite topic: data. To properly manage your brand and best satisfy your customers, you need data. You need to know who your customers are, what they are saying, what issues they are having and what they need. A quarterly data pull just won’t do. Your data needs to be as close to real time as possible.

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Overwhelmed by the thought of constantly monitoring all your social media and product review sites? This could easily become a resource drain when not efficiently handled.

Have no fear! You don’t need to hire an army of interns to stare at all of your sites 24/7. There’s an easy way to monitor your brand online and continue to satisfy customers: web data scraping. Data scraping is a robust and invaluable business practice that your marketing and account management teams should utilize.

If you need more information on web data scraping basics, check out this article. Then find out why you should be investing in data scraping and these 16 real-life examples of data scraping for business.

We already mentioned how web data scraping product review and social media sites is one of our favorite ways to gain the edge over your competition. Now, let’s go a bit deeper on how to use data scraping to improve and monitor your brand and better satisfy customers.

Web data scraping for brand management and customer satisfaction

It’s most likely that your brand is being talked about in multiple ways on various platforms, such as:

1. Social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram
2. Expert forums: What are influencers saying about your brand? What are people revealing in the comment sections?
3. Product review sites: Manta, Yelp, Yellow Pages, TrueLocal, Google Places
4. Your website and blog comment sections … also, if you use YouTube, there are comments there as well.
5. Competitors’ and industry social media sites, blogs, forums, review sites, websites

That is quite the list. Manually checking all these resources, on a consistent basis, is unsustainable and impractical. This is where data scraping comes into play. In essence, web data scraping extracts the unorganized data across the web and orders it into manageable and easily analyzed formats.

Whether through a data scraping partner or through your own coding knowledge, a scraping tool algorithm scours all of your targeted sites. The web bots then fetch all data containing references about your brand. It is a quick, easy and painless task.

Web data scraping and your brand

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Let’s review various ways you should be using data scraping.

You need to be scraping your company’s social media sites. Social media data is invaluable. These sites most likely include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. By scraping the comment sections on these platforms, you can look for trends and complaints. Consistent data scraping allows you to immediately address customers’ issues. This is also a great way to uncover positive feedback. Having this data allows you to immediately spotlight these positive comments.

It isn’t just about Facebook

Your customers and potential customers aren’t only interacting with the previously mentioned four sites. You should be aggregating textual data from as many social sources as possible.

“Go back to blogs, comments and user reviews . They are better sources of emotive data than Twitter and Facebook. They allow brand and product managers to analyze consumer attitudes and the consumer lexicon. Twitter doesn’t do that and nor does Facebook activity, or so the BrandMixer CPG experts claim. By examining what people are saying in blogs, comments, and reviews, three old sources, marketers stand a better chance of tuning in the lexicon that consumers use around and about a product or brand. That means they can market in the language of the customer.” (Source)

User feedback is an obvious resource for brand and customer satisfaction data. Make sure your web data scraping also includes any site where your products and services can be reviewed: Manta, Yelp, Yellow Pages, TrueLocal and Google Places.

Up-to-date data, at your fingertips

Constant access to this data allows you to make quick changes to improve your brand and satisfy customers. Being able to spin on a dime with real-time data gives you the competitive edge. It also allows you to be proactive and cut potential losses.

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Through careful monitoring of social media channels, Expedia was able to quickly nip growing complaints about a marketing campaign in the bud. In 2014, they released a commercial that depicted a father being tormented by his daughter’s violin practice. The commercial did not resonate well with audiences and they quickly took to Twitter to complain. Expedia’s lead creative agency, Grip Limited, quickly responded to the feedback by creating “Violin” that was a sequel showing the dad tossing the offending instrument out the door. This alteration had great results, further proving that consistent online brand and reputation management is imperative.

Stay ahead of the pack

Web data scraping ensures you are going above and beyond the competition. Your competition’s customers are also your customers or potential customers. You should be scraping your competition’s sites like your own. By monitoring your competitor’s reviews and social media sites, you determine what they’re not offering and what complaints they’re receiving. You should be capitalizing on this data.

Stay proactive with careful analysis

Now that you have all of this great data, make sure you do something with it. Don’t find yourself reacting. Proactively scrape your sites to find trends. Scrape demographic data so you can segment trends to better inform your decision making. Set up flags for certain trends. For example, are you seeing an uptick in negative reviews from the 18-24 age group? Is it worse in the southern regions? This knowledge will save you time and money.

Keep your competitive edge by monitoring your online reputation and staying ahead of potential downfalls. Maintenance and preventive measures are generally less expensive than trying to repair an online reputational problem after it’s happened. To do this best, we recommend finding a data scraping partner that also provides analytics and brand monitoring services!

Grab a piece of paper and pencil….

Now, make a list of three things you could do that would make the biggest impact on growing your business.

Do you have your list? Is investing in data one of your items?

If not, it should be.

Data is increasingly becoming an integral part of doing business–those who’ve had more information, have historically performed better than those who haven’t. Even Olympic teams are starting to utilize data as a means to engage in more targeted training, ultimately improving performance.

The main reason certain businesses are reluctant to invest in data is because they aren’t quite sure how to source it. However, there’s good news for you … accessing the data you need to grow your business is easier than ever.

How to get the data you need to grow your business

In order to gain a significant amount of valuable information, in the past, you had to go out and do original research, such as conducting surveys, doing interviews, holding focus groups, or conducting experiments and analyzing the results.. Those days are long gone.

Currently, there’s a tremendous amount of secondary data, information that has been collected and aggregated by someone else, that’s already available for you to capture and utilize. However, it requires investing substantial time to seek and collect, organize and analyze it yourself. That’s a major barrier as well.

The good news is you don’t have to perform all the data capture yourself, and you don’t have to spend a large amount of money to do it.

Now there are numerous resources offering an abundance of information you can use to power your business; however, there is one approach that businesses are turning to with increasing frequency: data scraping.

Here’s how it works: Once you identify what data you need for your business, you then determine what websites or type of online sources have that information available.

Next, code is written creating spiders that go to your target web sites and harvest the data. Finally the data is cleaned up, checked to make sure it is high quality and then delivered to you.

In a very short amount of time you can have more data than you ever thought possible that is relevant to your business, and you can obtain it on a regular basis.

Some companies write the code to create the spiders themselves. Others use data scraping software, while others partner with third parties who specialize in creating custom solutions to give you data that is specific to your needs.

There are a number of benefits to utilizing data scraping for your business. Here are five reasons why you should start investing in it now.

1. Become more effective

You’ve heard the saying, “hindsight is 20/20.” People are often able to look at a situation and ponder what they should have done, because they’ve received new information that would have changed their course of action.

While that may be acceptable in certain circumstances in life, there can be far greater consequences when you have insufficient information in your company.

Have you ever felt as if you needed to make an educated guess for key strategic decisions in your business? If so, know that doesn’t need to be your norm.

By investing in data scraping, essential information is at your fingertips, and you can have it on a regular basis.

For instance, some companies utilize data to help their customers make better pricing decisions. With information about what their competitors are charging for similar products, they can make adjustments, as needed, to their own pricing strategies, rather than building their plan around assumptions.

Here’s another example. One retail company scrapes pricing data from their competitors, and uses it to reverse engineer the costs they are paying their suppliers. With these valuable insights, they are then able to better prepare for their own supplier negotiations to procure more favorable pricing.

2. Improve productivity

Have you ever searched for contact information of people you wanted to cold call? Or visited a target customer, only to realize too late, that the information you had was no longer correct?

If you had extracted data of targeted leads sent to you on a regular basis, problems like these would be a challenge of the past.

Here’s another scenario. Are there people on your team who spend a good chunk of their time researching other websites to find relevant information? Maybe they are analyzing competitor pricing, or other forms of competitive intelligence.

While having information such as this at your fingertips may be useful, it may not be the best use of your team’s time to do all that data capture manually.

With a data set delivered to your business, you and your teams could have the information necessary to do your jobs much more efficiently. And with that saved time of not having to find and verify all the information you capture yourself, you could focus your energy on things that are a much more productive use of your time. Things like actually calling customers or nurturing the relationship with the ones you already have.

3. Establish a competitive advantage

Each day there are more businesses vying for your customers’ attention in some way. As a result of the innovations increased competition brings, the bar gets raised in terms of the value each company needs to deliver to customers if they want to earn and keep their business.

Increasingly, one of the ways many smart companies are positioning themselves to stand out, is by utilizing data. Specifically, they are sourcing a large number of data from multiple sources across the web, and then strategically organizing it in a way that enables them to serve their customers like none other.

And if you’re able to be the pioneer with presenting and utilizing data in a novel way, other businesses in your industry will have to invest heavily to compete with you. An added bonus for you, is that you’ll be first to market in using it, so if you stay nimble, you can maintain a first-mover advantage.

Symphony analytics utilized data they captured to create a competitive advantage for their customers. By analyzing the data they had, they were able to develop predictive models that tailored medication dosages for specific patient populations.

In order for other companies in their field to be able to compete with them in this arena, they’d have to invest in data at a significant level as well.

4. Serve your clients better

One of the great benefits of big data is that it can be sliced and diced in numerous different ways. And when data is analyzed and presented in a unique way, it can provide a multitude of brand new insights that previously wouldn’t have been uncovered.

That’s why books from popular authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant are so popular. They do deep dives into mountains of data to uncover valuable insights their readers use to impact their behavior.

When you have access to a massive amount of data for your business, you can organize it in such a way that it provides a great deal of value for your clients.

Pars.ly is a digital agency that scours the web to get insights on behalf of their clients. Once they have the data in hand, they analyze it to advise their clients on what times of day they should publish their content. They are also able to make recommendations about what type of content their audience is most likely to respond to best.

5. Increase credibility

Have you ever talked to someone who had zero data to back their claims? While what they are saying may be true, when no concrete information is presented as evidence, the credibility of the argument can lie in question.

While politicians may be able to get away with making bold claims without the facts to support it, it isn’t necessarily true in business.

That’s because there’s more competition than ever, and we’re also in an age where we have more data that we’ve ever had before. In fact, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, noted that as of 2010, we create more data in two days than from the beginning of time all the way up until 2003.

That’s a mind-blowing statistic. So, with such an abundance of data readily available to businesses, there’s no reason to not utilize it to your advantage in your business.

A number of businesses utilize web scraping to determine what customers are actually saying about them on social media and review sites.

When they’ve received a number of positive testimonials, they can then lift the nice things their customers say about them in public channels, as a means to provide social proof to their customers that they are, indeed, a good company to work with.

Start using data to grow your business

There’s no need to wait.

There’s more data than ever. There are more vendors than ever to help you source it. And as technology continues to advance, it’s cheaper than ever. There are multiple ways you can use data to grow your business. So, don’t miss out on this prime opportunity to invest, the time is now.