Web Scraping and Growth Hacking

While the term might not be familiar to everybody, website scraping has been used by digital marketers since before the phrase was even coined. Which makes it one of the oldest growth hacks in the book. Back in the day, web scraping involved manually copy-and-pasting information from websites into spreadsheets, to analyze the data and see where potential leads were, and how to reach them. While today we can get even more information, the process of web scraping is essentially the same. Automated web scraping helps you to extract data from HTML - letting you see what the internet cares about and how to focus your marketing. This is a great way to increase your prospect generation, as well as giving you a competitive market edge.

Why Use Web Scraping for Growth Hacking

So now that we know that web scraping is a way to get raw data from a website, how do you use the data to spark growth? Depending on what you’re looking for, raw web data is as valuable as gold. It’s possible to set web scrapers to look up specific information - from SEO keywords to monitoring prices, as well as engage in social listening. Having the information on what is happening across your industry is a valuable asset for being able to plan the what-comes-next for your marketing because you know what people are interested in, and what they need to see more of. In fact, the limit of what you can do with web scraping when it comes to growth hacking is virtually limitless. In the era of collecting big data, the practice of web scraping can be a relatively quick and inexpensive way to get a competitive edge.

Web Scraping for Lead Generation

Perhaps the most reliable asset of web scraping is the ease with which it can assist in developing strong leads. Once you know your target audience and know where they hang out online, it’s possible to scrape the data and find out how to keep in touch with them. Web scraping allows you to fine-tune what you need and helps you to get it. Perhaps more than any other discipline, the growth hacking mindset, and the web scraping mindset are so easily aligned. However, having access to vast amounts of data can be slightly overwhelming if you’re not sure how to turn it into useful data. This is where Scrapfly comes in. We provide fully managed web scraping, which can turn any website into a useful database - offering you insights and real-time monitoring in an easy to use dashboard.