According to estimates, the size of the Internet has doubled every year since 2012. How does this translate to our daily lives? Well, there is a lot of data out there. You can use these data to your advantage if you know how to make use of them in the right way. This leaves the question of how you are going to collect the data in the first place.
If you had to just browse from site to site, searching for the information you wanted and then copying and pasting it into another file, it would take a long time and be a tedious task even though it had been the only choice for a long time before automatic web crawlers became available. There are many people who are not tech-savvy enough to build a crawler from scratch and they also do not have enough budgets to buy the data. Therefore, using web scraping tools such as ProxyCrawl for data scraping is a perfect option for anyone looking to mine the Internet for more information.

How Does Data-Driven Marketing Work?

Data-driven marketing involves the analysis of large amounts of information about all business processes, primarily regarding consumers. To get their message across to users today, marketers are spending well over $6 billion a year on data management platforms and demand-side platforms to create solutions. In fact, more than 60% of companies are actively utilizing big data to do the following:
  • Monitor the viability of the sales funnel
  • Ensure that the advertising budget is allocated properly.
  • Conduct research into commercial offers and marketing campaigns
  • Make sure the target audience’s attention is held
  • Select the best advertising channels for your business
The principles of data-driven decision-making are simple: you make decisions based on the analysis of numbers. Personal experience and intuition are the last things on your mind. Professionals need to be able to interpret data and formulate hypotheses based upon that data. As well as that, you should consider how you will mine, store, and visualize those numbers.
Both meters and analytics services and technology will be needed to accomplish this: machine learning, predictive analysis, and artificial intelligence. A traditional data-driven marketing approach helps in the following ways:
  • Create a profile of the target audience, which will then be segmented based on that profile
  • Identify the channels that can be used to attract traffic
  • Offers that are relevant to the audience should be developed.
  • Develop campaigns that are tailored to each client’s needs
  • Test advertising channels and determine the most profitable ones
  • Increase the number of customers
  • Work with clients by collecting and analyzing feedback, recommendations, and evaluations from them
  • Provide a better customer experience
  • Make a prediction about how the audience will react to an advertisement
In collecting statistics over a period of time, which you will need to systemize in some way, you will find correlations and develop models of audience behavior, predict sales, and establish key performance indicators.

What Are Companies Doing to Gather Data?

There are many different ways in which companies collect data from almost every corner of the internet. While some methods use technical methods, some make use of deductive methods. In addition, you can either collect information or buy it from a business.
In some cases, data vendors offer to compile packages that are ready to use, but they may not contain the values you are looking for. If that is the case, there is no way to collect or augment those values.
It is often more accurate and always up-to-date to collect your own data or use the help of a third party to do so. Depending on your needs and the needs of your business, you will be able to aggregate it independently and work with it in any way you see fit. Companies collect data in different ways using different tools.
  • Scraping the web
  • Form for feedback
  • Contact Form for order placement
  • Form for receiving newsletters via email
  • Registration form for a personal account
  • Participation questionnaire for the loyalty program
  • Keyword planner, Google Analytics, and cookies.
  • registration through social networks
It is those companies that are able to maximize data collection and know how to use it to run almost every aspect of their business: marketing, sales, staffing, updates and enhancements, and deliveries. The more data they collect, the more information they will have about their users, and more importantly, they will be able to understand what their users are doing better.

Web Scraping

It is an automated process of extracting data from certain pages of a website according to a set of rules using bots to scrape them. The term bot refers to a program whose logic of operation is designed to retrieve data from websites by using any programming language.
The bot’s task is to retrieve HTML code from web pages that contain information it is interested in obtaining. The scraper analyzes the code after receiving it, extracting all necessary information. This way, the scraper is able to access all possible pages on the site and get all the information it needs.
Web scraping can be used to gather any information useful for businesses, whether it’s information about users, products, competitors, and so on. Almost everything that we have discussed in data-driven marketing and that will be discussed below can be obtained by scraping.

What Are The Legal Aspects Of Web Scraping?

In the end, the question is about how you intend to make use of the extracted data. It is legal in many countries to collect data for public consumption and to use it for various purposes, such as analysis. Even so, it is always illegal to collect confidential information and to sell it. It is also illegal to use the material as your own without identifying where it came from.
Some websites have their own “Terms of Use” and copyright information, which they display on their homepage, and which describe how their data can be used and how to access their website, etc. Prior to beginning any scraping project, make sure you check the terms of use of the website.
Scrapping also falls under several laws. Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and copyright infringement.

Content Scraping From Blogs

One of the most important pillars of modern marketing is content. There are very few things that can drive constant low-cost traffic to your website as much as good evergreen content. A blog post can perform many functions, ranging from how-to articles to support guides, which will put your business on Google’s first page and drive constant traffic and conversions for your business.
In this regard, it is important to know what your competitors have done in the past when you are planning your content strategy. It would be very simple to develop a simple project using a web scraper in order to scrape all of the competitor’s blog titles, URLs, Meta Tags, and so on. By doing this, you can already have a valuable database of keywords and topics to work with right from the start. So start scraping and start writing!

Making Your Email List Grow

It can be said that email has maintained its dominance as a marketing channel for almost a decade now. The value of a good email list that converts is undeniable, and a list that is responsive is priceless. It is for this reason that the creation of high-quality email lists is a priority for all marketers.
By using web scraping, you can automate and speed up the process of building an email list, or mailing list.

Data Scraped From Reddit

What if you wanted to learn about entire communities instead of individuals?
You can find a subreddit for anything on Reddit.
Using web scraping, you can quickly find out what topics your target market is interested in.
It’s just a matter of finding the right subreddit for the community you’re trying to reach.
  • Which topics often get a high number of upvotes?
  • What topics are not popular or often downvoted?
  • Do your competitors post to these subreddits?
Reddit data can be scraped using a web scraper to reveal these valuable insights.

Data Scraping on Twitter

Twitter is used a lot by people these days. People have a tendency to tweet too much at times. In any case, the value of the data contained within their tweets remains the same.
As old and valuable as social media itself is the practice of scraping social media for sentiment analysis or market analysis. Do you know what influencers in your industry are tweeting about?
What are some of your competitor’s most successful tweets? If so, what was the topic of the tweets?
By using a web scraper, you are able to unlock all of these valuable insights by scraping tweets from Twitter.

Analysis of the market

A market analysis is the process in which data is collected and processed in order to provide insights into the environment in which an enterprise operates, or will operate, in the future. The purpose of this process is to reduce the risks associated with entrepreneurial activity. The results obtained allow for making management decisions which are always accompanied by risk due to the constant changes in the market as well as uncertainty regarding the behavior of consumers and competitors. A market analysis should always be conducted when:
  • The performance of your company needs to be evaluated objectively
  • Business development decisions need to be made to enable your business to grow
  • There is a need for you to launch a new line of products or services
  • The company’s exit strategy from a crisis is something that needs to be considered.
The final results of the work and the stability of the company depend on this information. Market analysis is necessary for the following reasons:
  • Optimizing the price of a product
  • The generation of new leads
  • Reputation management
  • Monitoring of trends
  • Monitoring the competition
  • Making decisions about investments

Conclusion

Today, it is unthinkable for a company to exist without knowing what drives the market. Based on marketing analysis, a variety of measures can be developed, including adapting products for new target segments or markets, adjusting prices according to competitors, and promoting sales. Effective market research increases managerial awareness, reduces entrepreneurial risks, and enhances the validity of management decisions.
It may sound cheesy, but there are almost no limits to what you can accomplish with web scraping.
It all depends on what data you decide to scrape and how you decide to implement it.
Let’s get scraping with ProxyCrawl’s Scraper API, fellow marketer!