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How Web Scraping Can Aid Business Intelligence

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Data is at the heart of many modern industries and organizations. We now have access to vast amounts of data at our fingertips thanks to the internet. And as we have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques for extracting that data, we have been able to truly harness its powers. Web scraping is one of these techniques, and it is arguably the most powerful of them all.

Web scrapers have been around in some form or another since the earliest days of the internet, but the scraping tools that exist today are considerably more complex than those that have come before. As you would expect these more complex tools enable for much more sophisticated scraping action on the part of the user.

By deploying data scrapers, businesses can gain unprecedented and powerful insights into their market and their competitors. Investing in business intelligence enables businesses to improve operational efficiency at all levels. Anyone with experience in using web scrapers and analyzing data who is looking for a new career opportunity should consider studying for a business intelligence MBA online at an institution like Suffolk University; see the link for more information at – https://online.suffolk.edu/programs/mba/business-intelligence.

Below are some of the ways that web scraping can help your business intelligence to improve.

Content Aggregation

Business Intelligence Source
Business Intelligence Source

For many businesses and websites, access to up-to-the-minute information is vital to their survival. For example, any website that reports on the news, whether generally or within a specific industry, needs to be responsive in reporting on stories as they occur. In order to achieve this, many of them will scrape data from around the internet to monitor other sources, especially competitors, for relevant breaking news.

By aggregating all this content and bringing it together in a single place, web scraping makes it much easier for a human to then look through it and decide how to respond.

There are numerous other scenarios in which content aggregation can be useful for businesses. For example, a business development group can monitor the web for evidence of their competitor’s expansion and relocation plans and bring that data together and react accordingly.

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Competitor Monitoring

Business Intelligence Trading
Business Intelligence Trading

In the fast-moving world of e-commerce, failing to anticipate your competitors’ moves can be fatal to a business. Only those e-commerce businesses that manage to keep up with all of the latest trends will be able to flourish or even survive in the long term. Data scraping is one of the easiest ways of monitoring online sources for information about your competitors. In many industries, there will be online industry-specific sources who will often publish rumors and speculation regarding the biggest players in the industry.

These industry publications can be a very fruitful source of data about competitors, as well as the direction of your industry as a whole.

There are also numerous online sources that will provide you with useful sales data, and other indirect measures of your competitor’s current successes. You can use this data to assess what they are doing right and wrong and decide whether you should adjust your own strategies accordingly.

Sentiment Analysis

Business Intelligence 2020
Business Intelligence 2020

Social media is the most important battleground for brand reputations today. It is on social media that the fortunes of businesses and brands are now decided. If the general buzz around your business is positive, then that will translate into more sales and an easier time marketing yourself. On the other hand, if the social media crowd is not reacting well to your brand, then you need to take corrective action as soon as possible.

Scraping social media platforms in order to find any mentions of your brand and product enables you to keep tabs on current sentiment regarding your business in a way that has never been possible before. You can also compare this with information about sentiment regarding your competitors in order to ascertain who is currently ahead in terms of capturing your target audience.

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Market Research

The more a business knows about their target market, the easier they will find it to craft focused marketing messages that resonate. Data scraping makes it possible to gain unprecedented insights into audiences by drawing on a variety of different data sources to build a complete picture. There are numerous online sources that are useful for market research.

We have already mentioned social media platforms which are among the most important online platforms for marketers today. Scraping social media platforms can enable for market research in unprecedented detail. By combining this data with the data that social media platforms already provide to businesses who market on them, you can dramatically improve the efficiency of your online marketing.

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Lead Generation

data-driven

Lead generation is a vital component of digital marketing, and every business needs to be generating leads in order to survive and grow. Some businesses will work with a relatively small roster of clients over a prolonged period of time, but many are dependent upon regular new clients in order to sustain their operations.

There are lots of lead generation tactics out there, and web scraping has only been relatively recently added to the roster. Whether you are selling to businesses or to consumers directly, you can use web scraping in order to identify potential leaves who are ideally suited to your products and services.

In fact, web scraping makes it possible to generate leads that consist entirely of people who conform perfectly to your ideal audience. Many business intelligence services, for example, utilize data scraped from LinkedIn in order to identify potential gaps in employers’ current staff while also helping workers to find opportunities. You can use similar methods to find the details of people who match closest to your ideal audience profile.

Business intelligence enables businesses to monitor the current state of their industry and their competitors while also providing them with a valuable window into how their own audience and customers are perceiving them. This information can then be used to produce a more informed strategy and greatly improve a business’s performance. Businesses who aren’t adopting a data-driven approach simply look outdated in today’s climate.