4 Great Ways To Build Audience Engagement With Web Scraping

Having a stand-out, innovative product in your market isn’t enough to keep your customers engaged with you anymore. Building a relationship with them and appealing to their values, beliefs, and lifestyles is what brings them in. Brands like Patagonia fully immerse you in an outdoor-driven lifestyle, even online, and they make sure you know it and feel it every time you use one of their products. 

Audience engagement is a powerful tool to not only build relationships but also receive crucial feedback and criticism. But, gathering the data to ensure that you can build trust within your customers doesn’t have to be as time-consuming as difficult as you think. Web scrapers are a great tool to utilize to fuel your content creation to boost engagement. 

If you are familiar with the ins and outs of audience engagement, feel free to use the table of contents to understand more about the applications of web scraping in engagement strategy.

Table of Contents

Explaining Audience Engagement and Web Scraping

Audience engagement (or commonly referred to as customer engagement) is defined as “an interaction between an external consumer/customer (either business to customer or business to business) and an organization (customer or brand) through various online or offline channels.”

In this blog, I will focus solely on online channels. Online channels have increasingly become necessary to stay relevant in markets. Building a relationship with your audience to be engaged with your customers takes a lot of strategic planning and data. 

Instead of manually gathering data, utilizing tools such as web scrapers can save you a lot of time and frustration.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is an automatic data collection tool that extracts large amounts of data from websites. Web scrapers parse through web pages for relevant information and collect the data you’re looking for. Once all relevant data is compiled from a web page, the scraper extracts it (essentially by copy and pasting the data) into a document, such as a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, the data is categorized for you for easy analysis.

Scraping Robot’s web scrapers usually only need a keyword or URL to start scraping. There are many benefits to using web scrapers besides the ease of use; this data is recorded without mistakes, and usually within minutes. The benefits are more than technical, however. They also help you build an engaging brand. But how do you do that?

How to Measure Engagement with Web Scrapers

Here are a few ways to measure how your customers are currently engaged with your brand.

Understand consumer behavior

Understanding consumer behavior begins with analyzing what products and services are most popular within your brand. By analyzing what price points you’re having the most success with, you can understand budgets and see what consumers think your products are worth. 

Whatever information you scrape for your brand or organization, you can also find by scraping your competitors’ pages and websites. If they are outselling you, you can begin to understand why your target audience is choosing them over you. Is it because of prices, better quality, brand-name recognition, or another factor?

Seek out customer needs

A key question to answer when crafting your audience engagement strategy is, “What does my audience need?” Previously, online surveys were the primary way to gauge customer needs. Now, most customers need an incentive to complete these surveys because if a brand is no longer meeting the needs of a consumer, they know a competitor product can. 

Web scrapers are an excellent source to gain more insights into their needs. A great example of a company that succeeded in figuring out customer needs is Uber. The ride-sharing app gathered data on the steps of taking a taxi versus an Uber and found out that consumers did not like the elusiveness of taxis. The process of calling, waiting for a cab to dispatch, wait for the cab to show up, and pay cash, and depart was inconvenient. Instead, giving consumers an option to know exactly when a car was coming with online payment was fulfilling customer needs.

Luckily for us, people spend a lot of time online talking about things and processes they are frustrated and ecstatic about. Finding out where this information is located and scraping this information is a great way to find out the needs of your audience.

Know where your audience is located

Another aspect of enhancing your audience engagement is understanding where your customers are coming from. Are they shopping online? Are they shopping at large retailers or brick-and-mortar shops? If you can answer these questions, you can position your brand in your marketplace better to help find your audience. 

This data can be found by web scraping! Once you understand where your customers are, adjusting the way your brand is presented in the consumer mind can help engage them and increase your sales. It’s a win-win!

Scraping Your Social Media Audience Engagement

Social media is a goldmine of data for you to analyze for use in your engagement strategy. Here are some data points you can collect.

Collect customer sentiment

Like I mentioned earlier, people talk a lot on social media. People have no problem sharing what they love and have no shame in talking bad about products and services they had bad experiences with.

By scraping these posts online you can measure metrics such as:

• Tone
• Context
• Feelings

This way you can adjust your strategy to solve these consumer problems and either bring the customer back or bring new ones in. People trust people more than they trust brand messages online, so making sure there are positive reviews to back up your product can be a big step in the relationship with your audience. 

Scraping Robot’s Google Scraper and our HTML Scraper can all gather this data for you. To start, our Google Scraper can help garner results of where people are talking about your brand to collect customer sentiment reviews. Once found, utilizing our HTML Scraper on social media pages (and others, if found) to aggregate overall sentiment about your brand.

Segment your target audience

If you lack understanding about your current audience or would like to branch into another segment of a target audience, scraping consumer social profiles are a great resource of information. 

While all psychographic information isn’t necessarily scrapable, you can find information such as:

• What careers are your customers involved in?
• How old are they?
• What are their hobbies?
• What is their salary? (This is a general estimate, of course)
• Where are they located? (Urban, Suburban, Rural)

These questions craft buyer personas and can be a powerful tool to utilize when crafting content and campaigns for your audience.

Brand monitoring

Brand monitoring is the act of monitoring the way people are speaking about your brand. While I already mentioned scraping data on customers, watching how your competitors, employees, the press, and other industry leaders talk about you is essential.

When looking for reviews to back up your brand, people can look to these sources when making a buy decision. Topics that these groups of people could be talking about could be:

• Customer services
• Comments about your sales process
• Social engagement
• Also, every other touchpoint where consumers engage with your brand

Identify trends

Lastly, keeping your business on track with an ever-changing industry standard is vital, or customers will have no problem leaving you in the dust. Most markets are elastic and come with innovations that are necessary to keep up with and market around.

Social media is the place to learn about prominent trends the second they’re established. Scraping the feeds of recognized industry leaders (and their blogs!) keeps you informed so you can keep your audience stimulated.

Use Scraping Robot to Engage Your Audience

Scraping Robot’s unique module offerings are a great place to gather the data necessary to create great content and boost your customer engagement. We can continually scrape data every 60 seconds so you can keep the data-flow ongoing and fluid. So, you always have the most up-to-date information when completing analysis.

Not only are our modules great, so are our prices. With the initial offering of 5000 free scrapes per month, you have many opportunities to gather data (for free!). When you run out of scrapes, each additional scrape is only $0.0018 and extremely affordable. If you want to take a look and fit the scrapes you need into your budget, feel free to use our pricing page to do so. No gimmicks, hidden fees, or subscription fees added.

Final Thoughts

While there are many data points to gather to build your best audience engagement strategy, Scraping Robot is here to make the process painless. The needs for every organization are different, so setting goals that are attainable ensure that you can be steadily growing, rather than trying to do too much at once. Building a successful strategy takes many bouts of trial and error, but with useful data, you’re more apt to succeed. Happy Scraping!

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