In this blog post, we will discuss why your small business should use a web scraper, scenarios in which you could use a web scraper, and how ParseHub can help with your web scraping.
As a small business, you may be wondering if web scraping is something that can help your business succeed. The answer is yes! There are many situations where web scraping can be incredibly useful for small businesses. We will discuss five of those situations below:
- Lead Generation
- Market Research
- Competitor Research
- Data Entry
- Data Migration
Lead Generation
Web scraping leads from directories and websites can help small businesses by automatically creating large lists of prospects to contact. Manually gathering leads online is a tedious and tiresome task. With a Free Web Scraper, such as ParseHub, you can easily scrape websites without any coding knowledge.
Unfortunately, most web scrapers are designed for developers and can be difficult to use. That’s where ParseHub helps you succeed; our Free Web Scraping Service takes the hassle out of generating leads from the web. To learn more about lead generation, check out our blog post: Web Scraping for Lead Generation and Sales.
Market Research
Web scraping can help you collect data about your target market, customers, and competition. This data can give you insights into trends, prices, forecasting, and more. Data can also be used to analyze sentiment in a particular industry. Web scraping can be done manually or with the help of a tool, such as ParseHub. If you decide to do it manually, you will need to write code to extract the data you want from websites. This can be time-consuming and difficult if you're not a programmer.
Moreover, if you are looking at data and analyzing it manually, it can take years to conduct a market study. Many enterprise businesses automate their data research using developers and data scientists. As a small business you might not have those resources, so a web scraper is the most cost-effective and viable option. In fact, many enterprise and small business clients use ParseHub to automate their market research, regardless of their size.
Competitor Research
Similar to web scraping for market research, your small business can scrape data from competitors to see where they’re doing better and where they can improve. Competitor research is a process of gathering information about your competitors and their business. This can be done in many ways, but web scraping provides an efficient and effective method to collect data.
For example, if you're an e-commerce company, you might want to scrape all your competitors' websites and their products to decide how to price your own or you want to see what kind of sales your competitors are running. Whatever your goal is, ParseHub is the best option for scraping e-commerce websites.
Data Entry
Data entry is a time and labour intensive job that often requires employees or outsourcing. In fact there are thousands of data entry jobs on Freelancer.com. The average salary of a data entry clerk is $39,000+ in North America. Instead of hiring an employee or freelancer, you can automate your data entry with an easy to use web scraper such as ParseHub. ParseHub is completely free and allows you to grab data from any web source, including your own website, and save it as a CSV for Excel/Google Sheets, or JSON/API for apps. With a web scraper, you will no longer have to manually type in data from one source into another with the high likeliness of human-error. Below is a video on how to extract data from any website to excel!
Data Migration
The process of moving data from one location, spreadsheet or website to another is known as data migration. Data migration is usually undertaken when there is a new system or location to store the information. Web scraping can be used to migrate data from one site to another, or from a website to a database.
For example, a small business with an e-commerce store might want to update their website, database or server. In order to migrate data over, web scraping can be used to migrate the data from the old source to the new infrastructure. This can be done manually with a lot of work. To automate your data migration, consider using a free web scraping tool, such as ParseHub.
Why should you use a Web Scraper for your Small Business?
Web scraping can be used for many business functions, especially for sales, marketing, and research. Web scraping is a method of Data Harvesting, in other words, pulling essential data from sites, directories, search engines, or social platforms.
Web scraping for a small business can save you a lot of time, rather than manually copying vital information. The saved money and time can be spent on other parts of your business.
How to use web scraper data for your small business?
The primary reason to use a web scraper for your small business would be sales and marketing. You can make a big targeted list of prospects, partners, or clients to engage with. Your small business relies on customers to drive sales, and web scraping is a perfect way to ensure your sales team engages with relevant contacts.
Web scrapers, such as ParseHub, allow you to harvest multiple data points and columns which can help your sales team during pitching and outreach. The more information you have saved, the more natural the sales process would be.
From a marketing standpoint, web scraping for your small business could be integrated with a CRM, such as Moment, to engage with every prospect. If your small business uses paid ads, you can also use your web scraped data to ensure the ads reach relevant users via retargeting.
ParseHub makes web scraping for small businesses easy
ParseHub makes web scraping easy, as it requires zero coding knowledge, and allows you to scrape anything on the web. Just click the data that you want to scrape, and ParseHub will do all the heavy lifting. Everything is done on the cloud, so your small business does not need to worry about web scraping servers or infrastructure.
Since new data is always being added, ParseHub also allows for scheduling and continuous web scraping for your small business. The data can be utilized using JSON for any applications your small business may have, or simply as an Excel or CSV file to be read easily.
To maintain your small business’ privacy, ParseHub uses a vast network of proxies that ensure your web scraping runs smoothly without any restrictions websites might have.
ParseHub saves you time and money, as getting a custom web scraper can cost you a lot. ParseHub’s cloud software can be scaled to millions of entries and works with any website, even if the data is hard to harvest with other scrapers.
Want to see ParseHub in action?
Let’s say you’re a fintech company that is interested in cryptocurrencies. Your small business would need to scrape all the coin data for you to run an analysis. Here’s an example of how your small business would run ParseHub’s web scraper.
As you can see, it’s super fun and easy to scrape data when using ParseHub. Your small business will thrive with new data that can be used for marketing, sales, research and development.
If you’re interested in scraping the web for your small business, try ParseHub today for free!
