How to Protect Your Brand Using Web Scraping

Valentina Dumitrescu on May 08 2021

When considering a brand’s prosperity, it goes without saying that research is vital for understanding the market panorama and revealing its authentic qualities, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Even though for some it is intuitively obvious that acting or relying entirely on assumptions is a lousy way to make business decisions, many organizations are still skipping or superficially handling this crucial step. The question is why.

Simply put, the most influential enemies of a job well done are, in a great majority of cases, time and budget constraints. And this is precisely where web scrapers come into the picture.

This article will cover the whys and how web scraping can monitor, manage and help your brand generate a competitive advantage.

Important things to know about web scraping

Imagine you need a list of your business competitors, which must include items like names, prices, and customer reviews.

If you are like any other human being, you will probably start by opening a considerable amount of tabs in your browser, a new page for each competitor.

Next, the natural thing to do is start centralizing the data gathered using a table of some kind. You will manually visit each link, searching for the desired information. And this is ok.

But what if your business had thousands of competitors? Copy and paste is undoubtedly not the most effective and quick way to obtain large amounts of data.

A web scraper is basically the digital intern assigned to quickly and accurately help you extract a massive amount of information available on the Internet. Scraping converts disorganized data into organized and manageable data that can be stored and analyzed.

If there are still some questions unanswered, check out this article about All You Need to Know About Web Scraping. And a Little More.

Use cases for web scraping

Due to its cost-efficient advantage, multiple industries could benefit from using web scraping to grow wealthier businesses. Let’s look briefly at common uses that usually require most of our attention:

Market Research: Through web scraping, businesses can reach precious and insightful web data that can be a significant turning point in business decisions.

Price and Product Intelligence: Assembling information about competitors’ prices is a popular practice to secure business growth and continuity.

Lead Generation: Businesses use web scraping for finding websites with multiple contacts because possessing access to a potential customer list is a great competitive advantage.

Competitor Analysis: Because of the high number of competitors that offer slightly different services, with different prices and approaches, keeping a digital eye on them is a life changer.

Brand Monitoring: We will discuss this in more detail below.

Real Estate: To name a few benefits, web scrapers can help with evaluating property value, observing vacancy rates, assessing rental yields, forecasting market direction

Financing and Investing: When discussing financial data, a web scraper helps you extract insights from SEC filings, estimate company fundamentals, overview public sentiment, and monitor the trends.

Brand monitoring through data extraction

To stimulate user loyalty and differentiate from competitors, brands strive now more than ever to accurately deliver what customers expect and even more. Therefore, every step a brand should make in the business world begins with a solid foundation of research.

Data forms the core of market research.

Brand monitoring is a fundamental check-up routine that secures whether the product or service fits your target market’s needs. The process can be broadly automated.

Because a web scraper collects information much faster, it’s much easier to gather and calculate public opinion, compare it with past reports, identify trends, and have a holistic view of customers, opinions, tastes, and preferences.

How to use the power of web scraping to grow your brand

Scrape for reviews

Collect customer feedback to identify the brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Thanks to the Internet, we have access to platforms where people willingly share their experiences. Some examples could be social media and forums.

Monitor competition

Get actionable-insights from the competition to identify and analyze both ups and downs of their strategies. Now, you can learn from their failures and blunders and explore areas of growth for your brand.

Detection of fraudulent reviews

Customers’ reviews are the core of a business’s survival and maturity. Unluckily, receiving fake reviews is not uncommon. It’s something many companies have encountered one way or another. Nonetheless, dealing with them should wear the priority badge.

Check competitor prices and offers

Web scraping helps you understand where your brand stands in the market among competitors. Determining an optimal pricing strategy is essential to set an offer price that can maximize revenue and deliver solid profit.

Track online presence

We live in a digital era. And users surely know how to take advantage of it by researching a brand’s values and products before deciding on a purchase. Therefore, it is vital for modern companies to get a crystal clear image of their online presence.

Social media analytics

Deep insights about your brand’s popularity can be obtained from current customer expressions on social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

A short and to the point recommendation

When it comes to web scraping, the options available on the market are so numerous that you would probably need a scraper to find the perfect scraper that meets your needs.

For those who want to get rid of the classic and challenging process of collecting data, WebScrapingAPI offers a reliable, customizable, and easy-to-use solution by simply creating a free account.

Learn more about our product and start your journey with 1000 free API calls!

Let's review!

To sum up, you need to gather valuable data in order to develop new strategies for your brand to shine. All of this falls back to two matters: financial resources and time.

By using a web scraper, one can efficiently collect all the information required for comprehensive brand monitoring in order to:

• Discover the tangible brand potential
• Expand brand coverage
• Customize and increase market penetration
• Examine the scope and opportunities
• Design insightful brand strategies

This was just one example of how web scraping can help businesses get a leg up and achieve better results. Up for another example? Check out how data extraction can be used to research your competitors.