How to Use Web Scraping for Content Marketing

Anda Miuțescu on May 25 2021

Since the Internet is continually generating new content, finding a way to make your website and company stand out is more critical than ever. The web is home to the most bizarre stuff, from news about the mental dexterity of cats to a quiz to determine which Office character I am.

The advantages of these vast piles of data for creating a marketing strategy are immeasurable. From proper budgeting to peeking over the fence and into your competitors’ backyard, collecting data in bulk is the secret to proper research implementation.

Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Needs Web Scraping

Many websites' data can only be accessed by a web browser. They won't let you save or copy this information for personal, enterprise, or private use. The only alternative left is to manually copy and paste the information. Many businesses even have apps to prevent this. Even if you are able to obtain the results, it is a time-consuming task that can take several hours or even days to complete. Web scraping is a technique for automating this operation, so that instead of manually copying data from websites, we use technology to extract the data we need.

Marketers use a variety of techniques to collect information and evaluate marketing methods in order to better appreciate the results of their businesses and their resulting success or loss. Market analytics allows for greater productivity and cuts down on wasted time and resources.

What Does Web Scraping Do?

The procedure begins with the scraper receiving a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which it then loads. The scraper downloads all of the HTML code for that page. Advanced web scrapers can extract any of the site's features, including JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) elements.

The web scraper's final move is to output the gathered data in a format that the end user can understand. This may be in the form of a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet. Some of the more sophisticated web scrapers can emit data in other formats, such as JSON, which can be used in programming interfaces (APIs).

Ok, now you know how web scrapers work, now let’s look at how they can supercharge your content marketing plan:

Scrape the Trends

Data from social media can be very useful in determining customer attitudes. A company can get a big picture of how its brand is seen by customers by using social media scraping. This can go a long way and this amount of feedback can help you easily address problems with your business and service that were previously ignored.

You will boost the brand's popularity with consumers by addressing them. Sentiment analysis would allow you to turn your company into the way your customers want it to be. The best way to get access to this consumer sentiment data is by social media data collection, which will help you refine your company for consumers.

Since social media data is so valuable to companies, it's only natural to search for more effective ways to collect and use it. It makes no sense to manually scroll through millions of tweets, which is why you can use social media scraping to collect the data you need for your company.

Scrape for Brand Ideas

Most likely, your first thought upon beginning to contour your strategy is what content to use. A daunting task if your research is manual. Now, we are not about to delve into imitation theories, however, it’s already common knowledge that knowing what worked for others in the industry is also going to help you.

If you're in a highly competitive business like eCommerce, where the market is fierce, this will help a lot. You could quickly get left behind in this fast-paced business scene if you don't use site scraping technologies to keep an eye on your competition.

Furthermore, site scraping tools make it simple to process large volumes of data. Web scraping is the only flexible approach worth pursuing because the scale of data is enormous when it comes to business-related requirements.

Scrape for Visual Content

Have you ever wondered why you are so effortlessly attracted to blog entries or videos with creative visualizations and impactful messages? Among the numerous visual aids, it is colorful infographics, short animations, diagrams, and maps that capture our interest the most.

You can retrieve data directly from press releases, accounting records, marketplace audits, and online reviews through data scraping so that you can utilize said info in any visual material you might be creating down the line. Then, you can begin generating persuasive media content based on real, consistent data. This is valuable information to hold onto and observe the progression and success of your entries in the years to come.

A reliable scraping tool should be simple to use so that even those who are less tech-savvy can quickly use a scraper to retrieve web data. As a result, it is a valuable resource for aggregating big data and the foundation for data processing for content marketers everywhere.

Scrape Competition

You could scrape entire websites and their data and get all of the product stats, user feedback, and blog material. You might now believe that you should simply go to your competitor's website and look around. But what if you're up against a slew of adversaries, each with hundreds, if not thousands, of web pages? Web scraping will help you collect a large amount of data in the blink of an eye.

Web scraping can be used to see how the rivals are doing, building on the previous point of competitor tracking. This way, your content can always stay fresh and on top of it all.

Data is in the Strategy of the Beholder

Blog this, film that, ba da bing ba da boom. At the very core of every content marketing strategy lies piles over mountains of data. This guide is meant to help you focus on meticulously coming up with a plan and save you time spent on weeks of research.

The data is on us, with 1000 free API calls from the get-go.

Get the info. Make the plan. Profit.