Business Analysis Tools: How Web Scraping Can Drive Insight

As much fun as it is to bask in current business success, you should be constantly checking to make sure there aren’t any simmering issues coming to boil. Regularly performing business analysis is one way to help reduce unexpected roadblocks. By using business analysis tools, such as web scraping, to collect data, you can catch problems early and enlist your team to come up with imaginative solutions. Even if you have no glaring issues, adapting to markets is important to growing as an organization in scope and confidence.

If you already have some business analysis tools in your tool belt, then use the table of contents to learn about the various strategies for effective analysis.

Table of Contents

What Are Business Analysis Tools and Techniques?

Business Analysis is the method of identifying business problems and then developing strategies and goals to counteract those problems. In order to perform this analysis, you’ll need the help of business analysis tools. These tools help you collect data which gives you insight into the problems you should be working to solve.

By performing business analysis, you can improve your production process, improve your product, and enhance your trust among consumers.

Tools for business analysis

Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from web pages, is a useful tool for business analysis at all levels. For larger organizations with an established analysis team, web scraping can supplement data and help you communicate insights to other team members. For those just starting out, web scraping is an easy, cheap, and efficient way to gain insights from public data.

In addition to web scraping, here is a list of business analysis tools readily available:

• Jira
• Confluence
• Trello
• Rational Requisite Pro
• Balsamiq
• Pencil

There are more business analysis tools lists and free business analysis tools out there as well. When looking for the right tools, it is important to make sure the tools are built to work with the kinds of data you’re using. Certain tools work better with sales data and others with sentiment data and vice versa. Web scraping is useful with many types of data, making it a great first tool.

Business Analysis Tools and Techniques

Once you decide which business tools are right for you and gather additional data with web scraping, there are a few different techniques for performing business analysis. Below are just a few examples.

SWOT analysis

SWOT stands for

Strength
Weakness
Opportunities
Threats

SWOT analysis should be performed by employees diverse in perspective so that you identify the maximum amount of possible outcomes.

Strengths are defined as actions and advantages that work well for the company including

• brand reputation
• trustworthy employees
• good reputation
• high product quality

Weaknesses would be the opposite, therefore lazy employees or negative brand reputation. While strengths and weaknesses are all internal, opportunities and threats are external. Therefore, any external advantage is an opportunity and an external disadvantage is a threat. For example, an opportunity could be new technology you have access to, but a threat might be new technology you can’t afford which impacts your ability to keep up with competition.

Performing SWOT analysis is useful for recognizing internal and external problems, but also identifying internal and external advantages that can be used as strategies moving forward.

For example, you can use your own sales data and competitor sales data to perform SWOT analysis to determine your goals such as increasing lead generation.

MOST analysis

MOST stands for

Mission
Objective
Strategy
Tactics

Once you perform SWOT analysis, a good next step is to then perform MOST analysis. With knowledge of the problems and tools at your disposal, you can begin to properly create goals and a game plan. For example, once you decide increasing lead generation is your mission, MOST analysis helps you develop strategies. Mission is an organization’s constant process. To be as successful as possible, every department should contribute to the company’s mission statement. This way the communal goal is clear as well as everyone’s individual assignments. A mission can be more general, but objectives must be measurable and realistic. Using the ethos of the mission to create smart and trackable goals helps each department stay on track while maintaining the larger picture.

After you’ve agreed on your goals, you should brainstorm both strategies and tactics. Strategies are long-term ways of meeting your objectives, while tactics are short-term.

MOST analysis is especially useful because it helps you create multiple approaches that use internal and external advantages and long-term and short-term steps for action. With the variety of approaches and resources, your chances of success are higher. Collecting sales data, consumer data, sentiment data, and more helps you perform MOST analysis within your organization. Working with multiple types of data helps you determine which problems to solve.

Mind mapping

For organizations with more visually oriented teams, mind mapping is a great brainstorming strategy. Similar to the neurons in one’s brain, mind mapping is focused on associating ideas to help you get to solutions. Mind maps are all about throwing out ideas to help get your brain going in the right direction.

After you decide on a primary topic, goal, or problem, you then start mapping outward. For example, if lowering your price point is the main goal, that becomes the center of your mind map. The first branch from the center may be “materials,” which means the branches extending that first branch would be different strategies and tactics you can use to evaluate the cost of materials that make up your product. You then repeat these steps for each large branch (contributing factor to price) your team thinks of. Mind maps are meant to be fairly simple but can be as specific as you desire.

By the end of the mind mapping process, you have a visual game plan that can be easily shared and understood by your team. You can then assign different parts of the map to different departments to work on. Since you build the mind map as a group, mind mapping is a strategy that feels creative and open, encouraging all team members to contribute.

Benefits of Tools Used for Business Analysis

Business analysis is essential during every stage of organizational growth. Here are a few benefits of collecting and analyzing business data.

Modify your process

Lots of products today go through a long journey before they ever reach your door. In order to properly analyze how your business is functioning, you must look closely at each step in the process from the prototype to production to packaging.

Business analysis helps you identify weak spots in your workflow such as poor shipping or expensive materials. Streamlining your process and cutting costs in unexpected places makes both your own and the consumer’s experience better.

Improve product

Similar to modifying your process, the product itself should be analyzed. Scraping customer reviews can help you see problems with design or flawed materials. Using a web scraper, you can clearly see the consumer data side-by-side. This makes the recurring compliments and complaints easier to spot than if you manually read each review.

Improving your product in a way that helps you stand out in the market or troubleshoots helps you build more trust with consumers and create a great reputation.

Build consumer trust

Consumer trust is everything. Social media makes it easier than ever for people to rave or rant about specific products, services, places, anything really. Scraping social media comments related to your product can give you more honest insight than traditional consumer research. You can also scrape trending topics of brand names for more general insights on brand identity or social issues.

Learning what your customers value helps you make decisions in service of those values moving forward. As more and more options flood the market, sticking to your values will set you apart as a brand and consumers will take notice.

Web Scraping as a Business Analysis Tool

Web scraping is a tool that can be used at any stage of business analysis. Once you collect your initial data, you might use scraping to find data to support any follow-up questions that arise. However, scraping modules are limited in scope and size. Scraping Robot’s custom scraping solutions offer you creative control over the kinds of data you collect. Working with our team, you will be supported in your specific data needs, whether that be scraping by the millions or billions or finding alternative data sources. One of the many advantages to building a custom scraping solution is that you receive the expertise and care the Scraping Robot team has to offer. This means you won’t be stressed about security laws of development. Additionally, you will be collecting data perfectly tailored to your project instead of trying to make generic data match your needs. If this sounds like the path for your organization, check out our process page to learn more.

Conclusion

Business Analysis is a key part of improving and growing as an organization. Without properly identifying problems, you’ll never find the solution. Web scraping, one of many business analysis tools, helps you extract data from web pages that teach you about the health of your organization. Once you collect proper data, your team can collaborate and use their imaginations to find internal and external tools to problem solve. It might seem laborious, but regularly performing business analysis ensures the continued health of your business and therefore your team.

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Hannah Benson