How Scraping Can Be Helpful for Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs)
The uses of web scraping have increased tremendously due to its adoption across all sectors of life in the last few years, and so has its market—from a net worth of US $500 million by the end of 2022, with a predicted worth of $1.3 billion by 2030. Web scraping has opened a wide range of solutions, potential offers, and new possibilities for all kinds of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which can not only increase business financially by many folds but also take businesses to new dimensions in the AI world.
“Everything starts with the customer.” – June Martin
Web scraping is a powerful tool so powerful, indeed, that you could build an entire business based around scraping data from the internet. After all, data has value, especially if you can turn that data into valuable insights for other people. We have discussed below some web scraping and data mining driven solutions which can be helpful for gaining a big share of the market and increasing your business performance by many folds.
Comparison or Price Tracking
A very popular use of web scraping comes from price comparison and price tracking for competitors’ websites. You could set up a web scraper to pull product details and pricing from multiple retailers and offer buyers the best price in the market. This not only increases your sales or keeps you ahead in the market but also provides free branding of your business without spending anything on advertisements or marketing.
Scraping Solution has helped many businesses compete in the market by providing the right information at the right time through its scraping services.
Lead Generation
Web scraping can also be used for lead generation, either in the B2C or B2B sectors. You could use web scraping to build high-quality leads for all kinds of businesses. Of course, you wouldn’t want to tackle this project lightly; for example, you would have to make sure you’re scraping high-quality leads that are worth contacting.
Get started by contacting us the best way to get quality leads in your business sector.
Target your audience with Scraping Solution
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Web Listing Aggregators
Aggregators are great businesses that rely heavily on web automation. The best part of this concept is that it is extremely versatile you could create an aggregator website for job listings, real estate, automotive listings, and much more. It’s all about finding a niche listing that can draw the attention of enough people to make it useful.
The aggregators like Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, and even Skyscanner hugely rely on web scraping. Their data is continuously being scraped either from small aggregators or from big company websites.
Financial and Marketing Analysis
Web scraping can also be utilized to extract large amounts of data from all sorts of industries. These datasets can then be data mined to extract valuable industry or market insights. This data can be sold to companies in said industries, or you could run this analysis on demand for your clients. This might be one of the most involved and complex ideas on the list but also one of the most profitable.
“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Today, ninety percent of business success depends on the initial market insights, market size, and future trends of the same market all of which can be captured or mined using web scraping and data mining. According to Forbes, data-driven insights are now the backbone of innovation and competitive advantage for modern businesses.
Sports Data Services
Sports data has huge value in today’s world, especially in betting, training, and coaching scenarios. It can be interpreted in many different ways with web scraping, you can extract data from all sorts of sports and leagues to collect them all in one place, be it for further analysis, sports betting, or fantasy leagues.
Most sports businesses are data-driven these days. Even an athlete’s perfect arm movement in today’s world has a history and data support of many decades. That’s why it’s a well-established fact that if you want to innovate something amazing, you must have full insight into market needs, its history, and its future otherwise, you cannot develop anything with solid foundations.
For more on how data transforms sports analytics, explore IBM’s insights on data-driven sports innovation.
Booking Industry
Data scraping has opened new horizons in recent years new business niches where, with little effort, you can get yourself appointments or booking slots at not only reasonable rates but also at exceptionally close dates. This business is becoming very popular in the hotel industry, immigration industry, and any situation where you need to book a slot before arrival.
It’s a scenario where you set the web scraper to keep checking if someone leaves an already booked slot between two mentioned dates. As soon as someone cancels their booking (due to an emergency or change of plan), the slot becomes available to book again often at a better rate and the scraper books it automatically within seconds. This approach has become very popular among travel agents, the driving license industry, and tourism companies.
There are many other scenarios where web scraping and data mining can be helpful and usable across various industries. It’s hard to discuss them all in one blog. For more details, please visit our Scraping Consultancy or explore another blog written on the same topic but covering different industries.
If you need custom scraping or automation for your SME, get a free quote here