3 Ways In Which Web Scraping Can Improve Your Business And Save You Time.

Nowadays, with increasing digitalisation, where new technologies are constantly arising and computational power is available almost to everyone, the necessity for data has escalated drastically. 

Data extraction/web harvesting/screen scraping, mostly known as “web scraping” is a developed software tool that has become very popular amongst startups, smaller and bigger companies. Web scraping allows the user to collect data from the World Wide Web. Nowadays, data being one of the most important aspects of every business - web scraping eases the process of gathering data manually, and saves tons and tons of time that can be further invested in analysis, research, and executing data usage strategies. There are many ways of applying web scraping for business purposes; however, in this blog, we are going to explore the three most commonly used approaches. 

Lead Generation.

For any sales organisation, leads are a key component for business development. With web scraping, the process of gathering potential leads becomes effortless. In only a few minutes, a web scraping tool is able to gather a list of potential customers, filling the sales funnel, and allowing sales representatives to easily detect whom to contact and try to sell. With lead generation using web scraping - email list management, phone number, and contact detail extraction from various websites becomes effortless, not to mention, saves lots of time that can be invested in more deliberate client pursuing. 

Price Optimization.

As many might say - pricing is king. One of the primary competitive advantages to create is based on the price you and your competitors are selling at. With web scraping, it is possible to monitor competitor prices and create price optimisations that can be leveraged. Creating an automated web scraping job, price monitoring becomes effortless, allowing you to follow the market and competitor prices constantly, never having to be in a blind spot of how the market is changing.

Product Optimization.

For any business, it is important to know what your customers like and want. Customer reviews can immensely determine customers' buying decisions; therefore, it is crucial for the company to understand how the customer views their product and analyse their buying decisions in order to keep up with their expectations. The most popular way of determining it is by using sentiment analysis - gathering reviews, opinions from various review websites about your product, and deriving the sentiment of the customer written reports. This requires a lot of data. Web scraping is a key time-saver - the most useful tool for such work. 

As mentioned before, web scraping is a very versatile method of gathering data that, when applied to business strategies and needs, can bring huge insights into the market, product, and customers, and lead to competitive advantages.