Transition To CMR Marketing With Web Scraping
With online shopping and online reviews, consumers have more information and control of their choices than ever before. Even the little things add up. Just last week, I was looking for an incense holder for my room, and Googling the product name produced enough results to have me scrolling for days. The myriad options available online give consumers the ability to buy products from almost anywhere in the world. This creates massive competition and means that local businesses must compete against global ones in a whole new way.
We are entering the era of CMR (Consumer Managed Relationships) marketing, which gives consumers the power to search for the perfect product before buying. This shift in perspective means that businesses looking to be successful right now must understand and cater to consumers. With the use of CMR marketing strategies and tools like web scraping, you have the ability to understand and manage how your customers feel.
If you already know the basics of consumer-managed relationships, then use the table of contents below to use web scraping to gauge customer sentiment.
Table of Contents
What is CMR Marketing?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a longstanding concept in business that refers to an organization’s prime role in its relations with consumers. In recent years, a shift to customer-managed relationships (CMR) is taking place due to customers increased access to technology, seemingly infinite options, and increased expectations. This theoretical shift is meant to respect the consumer’s knowledge and buying power, especially since young people are becoming more averse to traditional forms of advertising.
The official customer-managed relationship definition is a relationship in which a business uses internet or tech-based methods that gives the customer control over the nature and duration of their relationship with the business. For example, coffee or grocery subscription services create websites where customers manage their shipments, frequency of shipments, and can terminate the subscription if they desire.
While there traditionally would’ve been a person in charge of entering and managing consumer information, allowing customers control over this process allows them to control how much information they share with a company and the nature of that information.
The Importance of Customer Knowledge Management
Customer knowledge management is the process or tools that a company uses to collect and analyze data relating to customers with the goal of enhancing sales and engagement.
Customer data includes
- demographics
- purchase history
- personal information
- loyalty program membership
- customer feedback
Having access to this data is essential for engaging in CMR marketing because it gives you an idea of what information can be provided by the customer themselves. Instead of collecting personal information the old-fashioned way, CMR-based experiences allow the customer to input that information themselves, which creates comfort and control for the consumer.
Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from web pages, is a great customer knowledge management tool to have. Web scraping can help you organize feedback, personal information, and other data provided by customers. While scraping may traditionally be seen as a method for collecting outside data, Scraping is valuable for collecting CMR data provided by customers and supplemental data to increase customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Using CMR Data
Using CMR in marketing helps give customers a sense of control over their choices while providing you with valuable data to help your organization grow. Below are some benefits to using CMR consumer marketing data.
Creates control for the consumer
The most important benefit of CMR is the control the consumer feels in the transaction. Since people have more control over what they buy with the immense amount of online product information, it is harder to appeal to potential customers with advertising alone. Not only can consumers independently research claims made in ads, but they can also more readily share negative experiences with businesses on social media or in comments. Giving consumers control over the relationship and experience allows them to personalize the experience, reducing negative pushback.
For example, there are many coffee subscriptions available online. Most of these companies ask you to take an online quiz about your taste in flavors so they have a better chance of sending you the coffee you like. This is a win for both the consumer and the company. For the consumer, they have a sense of control from the beginning about the experience. Taking the quiz gives them confidence that you are working hard to tailor the experience to their liking, which feels more personal than just grabbing coffee at the grocery store. The customer also typically has power over the size and frequency of shipments and can decide to end the relationship as well. While not abnormal, the customer can control these decisions through an online form and in their own time instead of contacting a customer service representative.
Companies also have an advantage in this situation. Because the consumer is in control of their experience, custom accountability is increased. When this happens, the consumer has the power to fix the problem themselves online mostly without additional support from employees. This allows the company to worry less about problem-solving since customers are empowered to fix it themselves. Therefore, companies will spend less time troubleshooting and managing customer experience and more time creating new products or services for consumers to add on to their existing experience.
Lessens organizational data burden
By giving consumers more control, organizations have more opportunities to collect customer data. Because consumers provide a certain amount of data in this scenario, companies don’t have to seek out personal information or demographic data on their own since it will be internally generated.
Having more customer-provided data allows your organization to make complete and accurate customer profiles. While all businesses do this at some level, the customer’s participation in CMR empowers consumers and incorporates data collection into the client process. Web scraping is the perfect way to supplement customer data with other online feedback data, social media data, and creative data.
Better ad campaigns
While traditional advertising is on the way out, there is more room for personalized and creative forms of advertising. Customer data is essential for creating more personalized ads that will stand out in a sea of online ad content. Using social media data to discover which platforms your customers are on or what social issues matter to them helps you create marketing campaigns that speak to consumer ethics instead of product-oriented advertising. Because there are so many options for any product on the market, the consumer experience and company ethics are more important than ever.
Scraping Robot and Customer Managed Relationships
Web scraping is an essential tool for collecting CMR data and supplementing it with additional social data. Below are ways to use web scraping to your advantage.
Social media data
Social media is a data goldmine. Because CMR asks customers to provide basic data, your organization has more time to collect supplemental customer sentiment data to help you make the most of the data consumers give you themselves. Scraping social media profiles gives you information on who someone follows, who is following them, and the type of content they engage. You can also scrape trending topics and glean insights from how your customers feel about important issues such as climate change. Understanding your client’s beliefs can help you create a profile and therefore service better suited to their lifestyle. Because of the abundance of options online, speaking directly to your customers’ values helps you stand out in a crowded marketplace, especially those with less product variation.
Today, people share their favorite products and companies with friends through social media. By understanding how your consumers engage online, you can better find ways to tailor online advertising so that it feels more personal and less like a nuisance.
eCommerce review data
For companies selling products online, eCommerce sites give you access to tons of review data that helps you understand customer sentiment regarding your product or service. While CMR asks customers to do this at some level, scraping reviews for additional data only strengthens the data customers provide. The more sentiment data you have, the easier it is to spot patterns in the responses.
Custom scraping solution
When your data needs go beyond what customers can provide themselves, you need a custom scraping solution. At Scraping Robot, our team helps you build a custom solution that helps you scrape at high capacities (millions or billions) for a lower per scrape rate. Working with our team also rids you of having to manage proxies and data development, giving you more time to engage with customers and find ways to personalize the process. Custom scraping solutions guarantee customer privacy and security, which makes it easier for people to trust your organization with their personal information. Helping ease the risks of sharing online gives you better data to work with since customers won’t feel insecure about how you’re using the information.
If a custom scraping solution seems right for you, check out our process page to get started.
Conclusion
Customers today have more power than ever. With internet access in their pockets, consumers like myself are more likely to do research on all their options before buying a product or service. CMR marketing hands the power over to the customer, asking them to control and manage their relationship with a company. This usually manifests in managing subscriptions or using creating personalized experiences. However, this power imbalance helps organizations as well. They spend less time collecting customer data on their own and in return have access to more honest feedback from customers, enabling them to create more personalized ads and services. Adding web scraping to your CMR routine gives you access to supplemental data that helps your organization grow.
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