How You Can Use Web Scraping for Market Research?

If You want to stand out in your business, you must build a strong marketing strategy backed by immaculate market research. 

Why Web Scraping for Market Research?

The Internet has a lot of data about everything. It is increasing in size with every passing year. 

That’s where Web Scraping for market research steps in. It means that you collect data from the websites. Many Web Scraping tools are available on the market to make your work quick and easy.

It all depends on your budget if you want to build a web scraping tool from scratch or want to acquire a tool that is already there in the market. 

So, if you are opening a new product or service in the market, it is not sufficient that your business excels only from a technical standpoint.

You must know what is market scraping to run qualitative research in order to find;

• Market trend analysis for Product/service Demand
• Target Audience
• Run an effective ad campaign
• Select an appropriate channel to reach the target audience through the campaign
• Determine the competitor’s strategy
• Price monitoring
• Hold the target audience and build a strong relationship
• Research and development

How To Scrap Data From the Internet For Market Research

There are two ways to scrap data from web pages. 

Manually:

You can manually collect the information from other websites and write their names, emails, contact information, and location. 

But in the modern age, people do not Scrap data manually because it’s a hectic and time-consuming, and tedious method.

Although this method was used for a pretty long time

Web scraping tools, Web Crawlers 

Intelligent data scraping tools and web crawlers automatically collect necessary information from the internet. Web scraping tools make HTTP requests to certain URLs.

The request is returned from the web server in HTML format.

Then you collect certain information from that page.

Example: If you want to collect data from a certain region about a particular business. Let’s say you want to make a List of Spas in a specific city. 

You will enter the city and business name in the scraping tool. It will bring on the list of all the spa businesses in certain areas. 

That list will have a name, email, contact info, location, etc.

You can shift it on an excel sheet and keep the information you want and discard the rest.

If you want a custom web scraping or data extraction solution for market research, Alnusoft is currently offering Discounts. 

<<Click here to get a free quote today>>

Is Web Scraping Legal for Market Research purposes?

If you are accessing publically available data on certain web pages. Then it is legal.

If you are accessing confidential and private information through data mining and Web scraping. Then it is illegal. 

Web Scraping for market research is legal.

It is always good to go through the Terms and Conditions section of a website to know if you are allowed to access data or not.

Let’s face it, people do not care about terms and regulations.

Read more: Is Web Scraping Legal in 2022?

How Is Web Scraping Used In Marketing Research

There are 5 use cases of web scraping for market research. 

Analyze Product Demand:

Web scraper and crawler are very effective in analyzing product demand. Sometimes misleading information about a certain product leads to its low demand.

Even without any misinformation, people change their opinion about certain products and that happens when we are surrounded by many brands of a single product.

You need to devise a scalable solution to maintain a steady demand in the market. 

That’s where web scraping tools step in to increase market demand.

Web scraper makes a hole in your pocket with their high prices. But these are stated as a Gold Field for product research.

This is very effective in assessing consumer behavior in the “Real” world.

It will detect any loop-hole in your marketing strategy, and give you a certain numerical analysis so that you can make your marketing decision on that basis

Demand Forecast Through Social Platforms

Now web scraper asses demand from social platforms online.

Small E.commerce websites use to scrape data from more giant platforms like Amazon to know the real reviews and ratings of a certain product.

There is a number of review websites, that put on expert reviews on their webpage and allow honest consumer reviews on their page in 4-star or 5-star format. They also leave reviews in writing. 

In order to collect all the information for research, manual data collection can be a lot of work.

Web scraper tools for market research collect all the information that is publicly accessible and bring it to your excel sheet. ( or else).

This will allow market researchers to devise a working strategy to increase their product demand and influence the target audience.

Winning Competition By Competitor Analysis

For an effective marketing campaign, you cannot sleep on your competitors marketing moves. 

There are many companies working on traditional non-data-driven marketing strategies to compete with their competitors and meet customers’ demands

That’s how competitors exploit your lacking. It is effective to adopt web scraping for market research early on to monitor competitors’ product lists, pricing, revenue, product reviews, growth, and funding.

This market research strategy also allows you to monitor the SEO of your competitors.

Web scrapers use data from competitors’ pages, analyze it and bring a list of certain keywords that can help you outrank their website.

Market Price Monitoring 

With the launch of new products/services in a competitive environment, building profitable pricing is crucial for vertical growth. 

With Web Scraping tools, you can monitor the profitability of your product. With quick data scraping services, you will be able to monitor the target audience’s income.

The general data collection about age, gender, and income will help you make a better pricing plan. 

Web scraping for market research will tell you how many people are looking for the product right now. 

In the hotelling industry, the data-driven price monitoring through the Web scraping tool helps hotel owners set a higher price during the holiday season and lower on regular days.

This qualitative data monitoring will eventually lead to optimizing your pricing strategy.