The COVID-19 pandemic was a litmus test for businesses worldwide – small, big, or medium. According to a local economic impact report by Yelp.com, about 97,966 businesses have shut down due to the pandemic. While business owners struggle with finding a silver lining, there is much you can learn about the marketplace and your business too.
Companies at all levels- big or small can make a significant difference for their customers by leveraging data. Web scraping can help you understand how your products fare in a certain market and point at areas requiring improvement. It is a time-effective and smart method to revamp their business for small retailers and help them reach new heights.
Global business has become a leveled field for small and medium businesses. Therefore, you must arm yourself well and seize this opportunity.
At such times, what can be an ace up your sleeve?
This blog will discuss how web scraping helps in Product intelligence and demand analysis, price Intelligence, SEO monitoring, designing targeted Ad campaigns, campaign monitoring, MAP compliance, lead generation, content marketing, market research, and brand monitoring.
Web scraping: post-pandemic recovery for small businesses
Retail businesses can stay afloat only when they use technology for most of their daily operations. From things like brand monitoring to content monitoring and lead generation to competitive pricing, web scraping offers the right mix of data. You can leverage it in almost all your daily operations. Let us see how.
1. Product intelligence and demand analysis
Small retailers have many products in their brick-and-mortar or online stores. But a good retailer knows which are their top-performing products and keeps leveraging them for profit.
Web scraping automates this process by including categories and products. It can thus give you insights into the performance of each product. Therefore, you can adapt your marketing strategies for targeted performance boosting of the top-performing products. Moreover, product intelligence data also helps you in product assortment and category management.
When it comes to demand, your top-performing products might not be the most demanded. Understanding what your customers want will give you ways of achieving customer satisfaction. Additionally, it will also help you in making changes to your marketing campaigns.
2. Price Intelligence
A tremendous amount of similar products swarm the marketplace. In such circumstances, consumer decision-making happens within seconds. Therefore, you only have those few seconds to make your offer so ludicrous that they accept it without much thought.
With web scraping, small retailers can get data from various relevant sources. This data can show you how your competitors are pricing similar products and the profit they generate. Additionally, you can learn the optimal price for your products, thus retaining your customers even with slightly elevated prices. This decision is a thin line to walk on, and web scraping helps you keep your balance.
Furthermore, retailers nowadays price products dynamically, i.e., keep changing product prices within seconds to stay ahead in the marketplace. With web scraping, you can adopt the same tactics and beat them in their own game.
3. SEO monitoring
SEO is one of the most fundamental areas to perfect when looking forward to establishing an online presence. Things as small as the tags and keywords you use, along with the structure and your website link, play a very critical role. With this in mind, it is essential to monitor your SEO ranking and that of your competitor’s.
With web scraping, small retailers can get detailed data about their competitor’s tags and target keywords. This step will help you understand factors driving traffic to their website and are engaging their audiences. Therefore, with the right changes to your SEO projects, you can take the lead in your competitive marketplace.
4. Designing targetted Ad campaigns
Small retailers desire visibility. Since your potential consumers are getting back into the marketplace, too, now is the right time to get back in the game. Web scraping is an excellent method to know consumer behavior through sentiment analytics. It can also tell you the applications and social media platforms most used by your target audience. Along with this, it also gives you insights to drive focused results with a well-curated ad campaign.
Therefore, with the right choice of ads in the right places, you can generate leads and attract buyers to your retail outlets.
5. Campaign monitoring
Small retailers depend highly on creating the right presence among their audiences. In today’s marketplace, businesses take off or close down in just a blink. That is why keeping up and adapting to the dynamic environment is essential.
Now companies use many social media platforms such as Instagram and youtube for their marketing campaigns. But just as lead generation is essential, so is the conversion rate. This point is where one needs to understand how successful is one’s campaign. So, how do we do that? In such times, web scraping can give you your answer by studying factors like click-through-rate, bounce rate, and cost per acquisition, to name a few.
6. MAP compliance
When you are looking to expand to other countries through their online stores, product pricing becomes a tricky affair. With web scraping, small retailers can monitor product pricing data and thus spot MAP violations.
7. Lead generation
When it’s about making a sale, your sales team is always looking for new leads to pitch a new product or service. In such circumstances where the pandemic hasn’t passed us yet, you can leverage web scraping to make a fresh and powerpack start to discover new leads.
Datahut can fetch data from various directories and convert it to a functional dataset. Your employees can then easily leverage this data to approach new leads.
8. Content marketing
There is no limit to creativity, and hence there is no limit to products and services you can offer to your customers. As a small retailer, you must come up with unique content every now and then. With web scraping, you can skim through your competitor’s content and, therefore, understand what your customers want. Thus, you can come up with new content that appeals to your customer.
Web scraping gives you a time-effective analysis of competitor’s content, thus making sure you don’t miss out on new ideas.
9. Market research
Many of you might be looking for avenues to enter a niche. At such times, web scraping enables you to understand what drives a certain set of consumers. Furthermore, it will help you predict how your products will fare in a new marketplace.
Therefore, you can develop an all-round analysis of the pros and cons of entering a new marketplace. This will help you realize the might of data-driven decision-making.
10. Brand monitoring
Many of you might be looking for a chance to rewrite your brand image. The right opportunity has finally come your way. The tedious job of going through reviews and studying the datasets on online channels becomes an easy job when web scraping comes in.
It can fetch data on both positive and negative reviews and help you decide what your next step can be.
Also Read: 11 Competitor KPIs Every Brand Should Track
Try Datahut for web scraping services!
In a post-pandemic world, there will be several new areas to explore. With the right insight into how to make the right impact on the right audience, you can leverage this unprecedented calamity into something favorable, not just for yourself but also for your customer.
At Datahut, we deal with several forms of data and present them to you in a user-friendly format. Thus ensuring that you make the best use of it. To know more about you can reach the heights you want with web scraping, contact Datahut!