How to Use Web Scraping In Your Business Expansion Plan
Everyone knows what it is like to feel stuck. You’ve taken all the right steps, succeeded, but then you start to plateau. It is time to grow. As a recent college graduate trying to find my place during this time of global instability, I can relate. Not being a student for the first time, I am learning to reflect and rethink how to structure my time and what passions to pursue. Just as people need to take chances to grow, so do businesses. However, it can be hard and scary to know where to start and what direction to head.
This isn’t something that individuals like me are going through alone. All over the world, business owners and organization leaders are faced with difficult decisions. How can they make their businesses grow? In order to find a new path, it is essential that businesses (both big and small) work to better understand their customers, competitors, and products. With preferences constantly changing, it can feel impossible to continuously succeed in the current market. But if you have a solid plan for business expansion, you can get rid of some of that anxiety. You need to start by collecting data, which can be easily (and affordably!) done with web scraping. By using a web scraping tool, companies can easily collect and utilize large amounts of data that help redefine their path and lead to growth.
If you already know the basics of web scraping, use the table of contents below to navigate to information on how to use it for business expansion.
Table of Contents
Stages of Business Growth
What are the stages of the business cycle?
The business cycle consists of a series of economic expansions and contractions. A single expansion and sequential contraction constitute a single business cycle. While these ups and downs are not periodic, they are recurring. The expansion stage is when real GDP grows for two or more consecutive quarters, also known as economic recovery. Once you understand the business cycle, it is easier to make the right choices at the right time.
What is business expansion?
According to Attract Capital, business expansion is a stage where the business reaches the point for growth and seeks out additional options to generate more profit. Traditional growth strategies include hiring more employees, opening other locations/franchising, mergers, new products, and expanding globally or online. Yet, without a deep knowledge of your customer base and market competition, it is hard to know which of these strategies to employ.
Digital Data and the Expansion Stage Of The Business Cycle
In order to know which steps to take to grow, you must first know the market and the consumers. By collecting digital data via web scraping, you can make sure your pricing is competitive, that you are reaching out to the right people, and get a sense of where the market is heading. Below are specific examples of how to use digital data to expand your business, whether big or small.
Creating more leads
By using data analytics, businesses can see how users on social media apps spend their time and on which apps they are most likely to buy products that are advertised to them. By figuring out which sites their customers are on, businesses can focus their energy on those that create the most leads (purchases). Having digital data also helps make businesses aware of their customers’ interests and helps them to avoid spending ad money on consumers that are unlikely to make purchases.
Understand your competition
There is no better path to success in a crowded market than finding a way to edge out the competition! While collecting data on competitors’ prices can help you create a better pricing strategy, there is so much more to learn about the competition. Web scraping can also help you understand where the customers you are trying to win over spend their time online so you can reach them before the competition.
Save money!
With web scraping, businesses can see where they are able to cut costs to avoid spending too much on strategies that do not yield enough profit. By being able to use data to properly reflect on strategy, businesses can both save money and time from being sunk into strategies that do not help with expansion. Additionally, by not collecting data manually, you can save money from developing an entire research team and streamline the process simultaneously.
Analyze different products
By using web scraping, it is easier for companies to track the success of individual products. Therefore, they will be better equipped to make decisions about which products to invest in. Doing this manually would surely overwhelm even the most organized of businesses and take too much time. With a tool like Scraping Robot, you can easily organize different data sets quickly.
Forecasting
Digital data is about more than understanding the present, it is also about anticipating the future. By being able to forecast the direction of the market, businesses can anticipate contractions and come up with strategies beforehand instead of waiting until it is too late. Once a business uses data to make expansion decisions, they can also use web scraping to track the progress of their decisions and make any necessary shifts. At this point in 2020, we all know how bad and anxiety inducing it is to be caught off guard. While the world continues to recover, digital data can help you navigate these shifts without feeling blindsided and overwhelmed. While nothing is 100% accurate, it feels good to make plans for the future even if they end up eventually changing.
How Can Web Scraping Help With Business Cycle Expansion?
Web scraping is a process where data is extracted from websites quickly and automatically, and then transferred into a spreadsheet where it can be understood and used in the future for marketing and other purposes. However, web scrapers are more than simple “data collectors.” A web scraping tool helps you to perform data analytics, which is incredibly vital for your business expansion plan. That’s because these tools can collect valuable data for your business, like emails, phone numbers, competitor prices, social media data, and more. This process is extremely useful and affordable, especially given the fact that doing such data collection manually could take weeks of labor. By using a web scraping tool, you can spend less time simply collecting data and more time finding creative and innovative ways to use it.
How Scraping Robot Can Help The Expansion Stage of the Business Cycle
While other scraping services are often expensive and sometimes incomplete, Scraping Robot is affordable, fast, and comprehensive! Scraping Robot is also built to be used by individuals and businesses of many sizes, therefore it is useful at all stages of economic growth and can be a long term part of your business plan no matter what. In a world that is increasingly complex, scraping can provide relief from the overwhelming uncertainty by organizing data in a clear and efficient way that helps you move forward no matter what lies ahead.
Conclusion
While it is easy to be complacent in life, both personally and professionally, growth is the only way forward. Trust me. As someone who’s end-of-college experience was upended by the pandemic, I know how it feels to be thrown off a path that feels so certain. I spent years imagining myself in a cap and gown I never got to wear. After a lifetime of watching characters in my favorite films throw their caps up in the air in celebration, I felt paralyzed and unsure of how to close a chapter of my life without the rituals I’d been promised. Thrust into a new world, I’ve had to shift all my ideas of what post-grad life looks like and be creative about how to move forward. If I didn’t take the time to branch out and consider other options, I would not be writing this very sentence!
Just as we personally face moments where it is time to grow in the form of moving, switching jobs, or choosing to take the path toward business expansion, there is also a crucial moment where the vitality of a business hinges on whether or not they are able to take chances that propel them into the future. Luckily, web scraping can help you make sure that the chances you take help lead you in the direction of success. Whether you are a big business or an individual trying to sell homemade goods, Scraping Robot can give you a better sense of where the world is heading as it relates to your work so you can make smarter choices to edge out the competition and grow as a business. With the knowledge that web scraping provides, you and your business are sure to find a smart path forward even when everything feels uncertain.
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