3 Ways to Use Web Scraping for Market Research

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So, here is the thing:

The practice of marketing is an ancient application. The term “marketing” dates back to the beginning of the second millennia. However, systematical workings on marketing started around a hundred years ago. While studies about marketing took their first baby steps, the technology kept getting more complex and dragged marketing after itself. And, as marketers realized that by gathering pieces of information together, they could reach out some valuable insights. With that discovery, the origin story of web scraping has started. The exercise of actually digging into tons of databases and collecting publicly available data was always a pain.

This is the part where web scraping enters the scene.

Web scraping does the hard work for the data collectors, extracting and collecting data from the websites. Let’s get into web scraping in detail.

Marketers know that by gathering pieces of information together, they could reach out to some valuable insights. The market research method collects and gathers data related to customers, firms, or the market itself. And then analyzing outcomes to have a greater understanding of the market and the customers. Market research data is a helping hand for the firms. With market research data, businesses locate the gap in the market, what customers actually need. Therefore, thanks to efficient market research data, firms do sell their products without selling and promoting effort as they already study their lessons and fill the gap in the market.

What Is Web Scraping – And Why Web Scraping Is Important For Market Research Data

Web scraping is automated operations of scanning websites, extracting and storing publicly available data from these websites. People also know this process as web data extraction. Web scraping is mainly used for price monitoring, sentiment analysis, and marketing research. Web scraping is frequently used by competent firms that realize immeasurable publicly available data and want to make the most of it.

In daily life, people often do what web scraping does. Copying and sending the cool YouTube video link or a funny comment about a Twitter post is the same method that web scraping uses. As well as doing so, web scraping software automates the process. Web scrapers scan and extract millions or even billions of publicly available data in a concise time.

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Importance Of Web Scraping For Market Research Data

Market research data is a must for every successful firm in the market. It provides the knowledge that the firm needs for future strategic planning. Required data from social media, blogs, research sites, and news will be mined rapidly via web scraper and serve information in a structured format. With web scraper, firms gain core competitive advantages over rival firms. Because web scraper method provides firms with efficient usage of market research data, which eventually leads to a better understanding of customers, customer needs, and varying market trends. For instance, a car dealer can use scraped prices, services, customer data to be ahead of the market trends and outperform competitors.

Moreover, businesses often fail due to the failure of their products. Firms generate new ideas and innovations, and they fully believe in these products. Without doing the market research, these super-hyped firms invest most of their resources in the new Project. Few lucky ones survive this disaster of a blind shot experience. Eventually, the products fail on the market, don’t get the necessary attention. Because consumers have never demanded products, and companies haven’t done the mandatory research.  Firms fail due to the lack of market knowledge and information. Web scraping and market research combined, we, digital experts, genuinely understand clients’ needs and wants.

Why You Need To Use Web Scraping For Market Research Data – Advantages Of Using Web Scraping

Smart firms look for ways and means to enhance their core competencies continuously. Hire business development experts to determine and discover potential competencies. Besides, sometimes firms seek to engage with consumers to gain insights from their user experience. You can see all of these are for knowledge. Knowledge is power. And web scraping takes all of these actions in a shorter time, more affordable, and more convenient way. Let’s get into the details.

Economic Advantages

Instead of hiring many marketing researchers or a group of software engineers to obtain the data, web scraping services are often more popular. Because using web scraping services is more convenient than gathering a group of people, and it is also a more affordable way.

Pro Time-Management Advantages

Doing the extraction of publicly available data manually is time-consuming. If the amount of data is vast, it might become impossible to extract. Web scraping is entirely automated, saves time for users. Sofware digs into the web and mine publicly available data for the user. Therefore, customers can focus on other necessary tasks as they have lots and lots of time in their hands.

Easy To Do And Handy

Compared to manual action, web scraping services save users tons of hard work. Besides that, individually, users may not be able to copy the data from the website. Moreover, unlike web scrapers, humans make mistakes. Reading enormous data for a long time could weaken awareness and attention. So, users could miss out on some valuable data due to human failure.

Is It Illegal To Use Web Scrapped Data For Research? – Some Misunderstandings And Challenges About Web Scraping

Like any other newly introduced innovation, web scraping also has lots of misunderstandings and rumors related to its legal condition, application, price, or limits. We would like to inform you about any misconceptions.

Is Web Scraping Illegal?

It seems like it is similar to the question of “are axes illegal?". Using axes is legal. Using axes to harm someone is illegal. So, it is not about the tool. It is about the intents. That is also the case for the web scraping’s legality. Web scraping is legal as long as users apply the technique ethically.

In this article, we, scrape.do experts, always try to address the term “publicly available.” Because it is illegal to extract if the data is not publicly available or is non-public. These data are often protected by a log-in system. Only insiders are welcome.

Actually, most famous search engines also use web scraping as a tool, such as Yahoo, Google, and Yandex. These search motors scan throughout the web and extract data site by site. Since it is a mutual win-to-win condition, nobody complains about one another. So, it is not about web scraping. It is about what you do with all that data.

How Does Web Coding work? - Is Coding Skill Necessary?

If you are going to do it manually, of course, you need to know advanced-level coding. Manually, the followings are the steps of conducting web scraping;

• Make your research and plan before starting.
• Determine the website(s) to be scrapped.
• Gather the links (URLs) of the websites where you want to extract data from.
• Send the request to the links and access the HTML. If you have advanced coding skills, you can access to CSS, JavaScript codes of the targeted website.
• When you are inside, use locators to find laying data behind the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Finally, extract and save the publicly available data in an Excell Spreadsheet, CSV, JSON, etc., structured format.

So, you can outsource web scraping services. Use scrape.do to use your coding skills for doing web scraping just like experts.

Specific Areas To Use Web Scraping For Market Research

Using web scraping for market research is just a king move. But in which steps? Here are some recommendations for you:

Lead Generation Topic

Potential customers for firms spread all over the web. Scanning across the internet, marketers can reach potential customers’ e-mail addresses, phone numbers, social media accounts, or personal and business blogs. Reaching out to the customer in every possible way makes sense. Yet, it is super-time consuming and a pain in the neck for marketers. So, marketers use web scraping tools as it is more time-saver, more price efficient than the other methods. Besides all of these, web scraping tools allow users to filter their leads based on their segmentation strategy. So, the probability of product-consumer match tends to be more significant.

Restaurant-Specific Scraping

Restaurants are kept strictly competing with each other. Their market type is monopolistic competitive markets. To fit in a unique position in the market, restaurants do web scraping to reach data of other restaurants’ prices, campaigns, menus, customer segments, and even music lists, etc. Websites like Zomato, TripAdvisor are good tools to understand the basis of this comparison technique. This kind of suggestion application has many filtering options based on places’ locations, price, style, and concepts.

Creating Competitive Advantage via Web Scraping

Most of today’s competitive environment seems like a stressful chess game, or sometimes the Mexican stalemate. Firms crave to know their competitor’s actions to take reactions based on their strategy. To have a competitive advantage, firms use web scraping to have vast competitor data in hand. These data give information about rivals’ relations with customers, their language, changing branding image, etc. And, firms use this information to forecast competitors’ moves and strategies, eventually to check-mate competitors in this chess game.

As firms keep interacting with these data, they have a chance to step aside and reshape their overall business and marketing strategy. With all those benefits, talented marketing strategists can build road-maps to pierce the market.

You can apply all these strategies by using the coolest web scraping tool on the internet, scrape.do.

Want to learn more about scraping? See what rotating proxies are.