How to deploy web scraping to your advantage.
Web scraping is a process which allows businesses from a variety of backgrounds to harvest data from third party sites and harness it to extract significant insights.
Here is a look at the varied ways in which organizations across a number of industries can deploy web scraping to their advantage at the moment.
Car manufacturers face a cavalcade of challenges when it comes to tapping into consumer behaviors, tracking customer preferences and assessing sales performance on a national and international scale. They cannot rely solely on the data they generate from their own operations to achieve this, which is where web scraping comes into play.
By using services found on this free proxy list, automakers can safely and anonymously capture publically available data from lots of sources. This might mean looking into the trends and market pressures that are shaping demand, analyzing part sales to stay on top of maintenance requirements and keeping tabs on competitor pricing to remain one step ahead of rivals.
In the digital era, marketers are more attuned to the necessity of leveraging data to forge successful campaigns for clients than ever before. Web scraping can assist them in their endeavors, especially when it comes to scouring social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook for pertinent info on prospective customers and clients that can then be analyzed in full.
Digital marketers can use scraped data to help improve their own performance on social media, to pinpoint emerging trends that are expanding their influence at the moment and highlight any inadequacies in their current strategies which would otherwise be impossible to detect.
Data has been the life blood of retail for decades, but once again the rise of web scraping tools has revolutionized the way businesses are able to assess customer wants and respond to them.
From making it simpler to trace the customer journey from first research to final purchase, to seeing how e-commerce sites are shared and proliferated online amongst particular demographics, web scraping is a versatile solution to the obstacles that modern retailers face.
It is not just relevant for pure play web-based outlets, but also for businesses with a bricks and mortar presence, since plenty of in-store purchases originate from online searches.
Businesses operating in the manufacturing of IT hardware as well as the development of software solutions, cloud platforms and other related services can be seen as especially well suited to the use of web scraping.
The development of products in these industries is often costly, time consuming and fraught with uncertainties, all of which can stifle innovation and create a host of other conundrums that need to be encompassed efficiently. The only way to do so is with access to data that can dictate whether or not a particular product is likely to succeed, or even nudge professionals towards currently untapped niches that they could fill.
As with the other industries mentioned so far, web scraping empowers organizations with the data they need to act decisively and appropriately in markets which may be volatile.
Magen Buterbaugh is the President & CEO at Greene Tweed. Listen to her insights on her ambition to be a lawyer and how her math teacher suggested she consider chemical engineering. Now with several accolades to her name including being honored as one of the 2020 Most Outstanding Engineering Alumnus of Penn State and a Board Member of National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) she has never looked back.