Web Scraping for Lead Generation

Lead generation is finding potential customers for your products or services that your business can profit from. Business leads are essential elements for your commercial success, and they are especially significant when you launch a startup. Nowadays you can gain the necessary information about your prospects with lead scraping. So what is lead scraping? By lead generation, we mean gathering information about companies and people in your target audience.

Lead generation web scraping service is a sure way to get the contacts of the right consumers to market your product. Contact data could contain mailing addresses, emails, phone numbers, or more modern contact information such as profiles on social networks or topic forums. Collecting contacts through web data scraping services allows you to customize your audience choice, and specify the locations to look for leads.

To effectively generate leads, you should go through the three major steps.

Identify sources

You should, first of all, define where your target customers spend time on the Internet, and question whether you want to reach out to your potential clients directly or through their influencers. This will help you make your lead scraping process more focused.

If you want, for instance, to get contacts from all the companies in the U.S. healthcare industry that have up to 50 employees, we can scrape Crunchbase or other services to get it. It is absolutely legal to gather this information if the data is publicly available. The more information we scrape from the web about your leads, the more precise your offer can be!

Today, more and more information has become publicly available, so you can target your potential customers as specifically as possible. Web data crawling and scraping solutions allow you to collect, enrich, and aggregate business information about your potential clients (leads) from different web sources.

Another place to find a huge number of potential leads is social media. We can also retrieve profiles or any other business information from these profiles. There is almost no limit to what business data can be scraped!

One detail should be considered, however — you have to know the web sources that your prospects frequently visit . DataOx can scrape and collect data, but you define the best places where your target audience can be found.

Define the method of data extraction

As soon as you have figured out which sources to scrape data from, you need to decide upon the method of data collection. You can get information from various sites with the scraping tools available, write your own code, order customized scraping software, or outsource the data delivery tasks and service to a third party.

Using an off-the-shelf web scraper is a relatively simple and cheap decision, but a ready-made solution may not meet the specific tasks and requirements for your business.

Custom development is a good idea, but target sites often change their structure and apply anti-scraping technologies, which require proper software maintenance and adjustment in the long-term. So, take this into consideration when making your choice.

By ordering a customized data delivery service, you get detailed data gathered and structured according to your desired parameters and business requirements.

Cleanse and structure the captured data

Since web data is often corrupt, inaccurate, inconsistent, or duplicated, cleansing the data is a must.

It’s not enough to extract information about your leads from business listings, corporate sites, social media, or other sources. The captured data needs to be modified, properly arranged, and structured, so that it can be easily understood and used. You should be able to easily qualify the leads scraped. When working with data delivery companies like DataOx, you directly receive the information in the form you want, and it is ready to use.

What is more, we can directly integrate the collected information into a database or CRM system you already have.

The type of data you’ll obtain depends on your approach. You can use competition to your advantage and explore the base of customers, fans, and followers of your competitors. Public portals, list pages, online platforms, and social media are great resources to scrape.

Industry blogs, forums, and community portals can also provide you with valuable lead details, along with events and sites relevant to your sphere.

The easiest type of contact info to scrape is certainly email. Phone numbers are a bit trickier to find since people are reluctant to share them online. Still, you can also get telephone numbers with some effort.

Also, as we’ve mentioned above, contact information can often be complemented with social media profile details. You can find your leads via fan pages, group and events pages, and the like.

Lead generation is actually a never-ending process, and web scraping services can make this more effective by providing your business with opportunities for development, and giving it room for continuous improvement.

We scrape leads from many social media platforms, including Instagram. One of our clients had a valuable offer for some specific Instagram users. Our client knew his target audience: users who had more than 5000 followers, followed no fewer than 10000 other users, and used specific hashtags.

We collected these users’ emails. The big challenge was that only a small number of Instagram users have publicly available emails, so we needed to monitor millions of profiles.

We set up an incremental scraping solution, retrieving only new users that matched all of the client’s requirements. Every day, we monitored which users used the target hashtags or increased their followers to 5000, and we scraped them and added them to the database. For this client, we are monitoring the data continuously, lest we miss any prospects!

Through this solution, our client gained a lot of new customers and sales!

Through data scraping, the task of lead generation becomes simple, effective, time-saving, and cost-efficient; especially when you order data as a service.

To get more information about how we can help you with lead generation, schedule a free consultation with our data expert.