Using Data To Target Leads (Optimize Your Lead Generation)
Whether you are a business owner selling products or providing services, a professional looking for job placement, or an organization looking for sponsors, chances are that you have experienced the headaches of lead generation at one time or another. Lead generation, especially with traditional methods, can be a tedious process. The first time I tried building a list of potential employers in the SaaS industry, I spent two weeks to build a list of fifteen people, and seven of them no longer worked at the company I thought they worked at. That is how tedious and error-prone manual lead generation can be. Your experience might be better or worse than mine, but I bet you have been looking for a better way to target leads and optimize your lead generation process, too.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the lead generation process, how you can use data to target leads and generate quality leads, and how to use web scraping to collect lead information. If you are already familiar with lead generation basics, you can use the table of contents to skip ahead and see how you can use web scraped data to optimize your lead generation process.
Table of Contents
What is Lead Generation?
Unless you are running a non-profit organization or a charity, it is safe to assume that your main goal in business is to make as much money as you can, while hopefully doing the most good that you can. To make money, you need to sell more of whatever products or services you are selling. To sell more, you need more customers interested in buying what you are selling. And to get more customers, you need to generate more leads.
A lead is a potential sales contact, someone who has already developed an interest in your product (or is likely to develop one in the future) because they are familiar with the problems you solve with your products or services. In other words, a lead is a potential customer. So, lead generation is the process of identifying and collecting data on potential customers. Lead generation is the first step on the sales funnel, and it is an essential one. The ability to effectively target leads and generate a leads list containing quality leads is what separates a top-notch sales team from an average one because if your leads are of low-quality, then your sales process will be over before it starts.
If there is one thing that is certain in today’s world, it is that you can probably find your clients on the internet, no matter the business you run. Everybody’s using it. With the volume of data available on the web currently, collecting lead information and qualifying leads should be the easiest it has ever been. But this is not so. In fact, it has become increasingly harder to wade through the overflow of data on the web, especially using traditional methods. About 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day, if we can believe the experts. That is a mind-boggling amount of data. Manually processing this data for lead generation is like looking for a needle in a football field full of hay. And other lead-capturing methods like landing page offers, gated content, and so on are progressively having lesser returns as people become warier of giving out their information on the internet. This means that you, as a business owner, must develop a new method to target leads and obtain the information you need to build a quality leads list.
What is a Lead Generation Strategy?
Like I said above, a lead is a potential customer. Therefore, your lead generation strategy is the roadmap of identifying potential customers, capturing their information, and storing the data for marketing purposes.
The first step in every lead generation strategy is lead definition. Lead definition means identifying who your potential customers are, as well as who they aren’t. Who are the people that have or are likely to develop the problems your business solves, now or in the future? What do they do? Where are they found? What is the most effective way to target them? Who are the people that don’t care about what you’re trying to sell? (This last question is important to answer if you want to actually make money. Targeting the wrong audience can lead to poor, ineffective messaging that sells your product to the wrong people.) The answers to these questions constitute your ideal lead persona. A lead persona is a profile of your ideal potential customer, that person for whom your business is an answer to their prayers, if only you could get it in front of them. While all your leads cannot be this exact person, you should strive to get as close as possible.
Once you have defined your ideal lead persona, the next step is to capture their information, And here’s where the bone of contention is. Traditionally, you obtain lead information through means such as using a lead generation website.
What is a lead generation website?
A lead generation website is (usually just a single page) designed to capture people’s information in exchange for an offer. The offer could be a free subscription, the opportunity to view gated content, a free ebook, etc. The website will have a form that the user fills and submits to gain access to the offer. The offer must be attractive enough to induce people to release their information for a lead generation website to be effective.
However, creating an offer effective enough to justify using a lead generation website is nearly impossible nowadays. As the web becomes bigger and privacy moves closer to extinction, people have become increasingly paranoid about releasing their information to other people. This makes it necessary for you to develop a better method to collect lead information as a business owner. So, what is that better method?
How To Target Leads With Web Scraping
The lead generation process is merely trying to gather data on people potentially interested in patronizing your business. Like we said above, you do this traditionally by creating a landing page, putting an offer on it in exchange for user information, then creating content to direct people to your landing page. Content could be actual blog content, copy, ads, promos, etc.
But with web scraping, you can bypass all of this and go directly to collecting the data you need, when you need it. Web scraping is simply the process of automatically collecting data from the internet with a scraping bot.
When you perform a google search and collate the SERP results, you’ve scraped the web. However, when you use web scraping bots, you can scour the web at a massive scale, collecting large volumes of data in a short time. Web scraping bots work by crawling through the code of a particular page on a website and extracting the data you need. Web scraping makes it possible to find the needle in our football field of hay.
Using web scraping bots, you can directly obtain data on your ideal lead persona without using standard lead-capturing methods. Even better, you can set your scraping parameters to exclude the kind of people that don’t fit your ideal lead persona, something a lead-capturing website can’t do. All with the click of a button. You can also use web scraping to increase your audience engagement. Growing your audience engagement allows you to identify your audience members ripe to become paying customers and those who need more nurturing. In other words, it helps you to qualify your leads better.
To use web scraped data to target leads, you have to go back to your ideal lead persona and identify where your leads are found. Here are a few ideas on where you can find leads:
- Competitor websites: By scraping your competitors’ websites, social media pages, and forums, you can see the kind of people engaging with them and collect data on them. If they are interested in your competitors, then it is highly likely they’d be interested in your business too.
- Social Media: Social media platforms contain a wealth of information. Nearly everybody nowadays has a profile on one social media platform or another. So scraping data from social media platforms is one of the easiest ways for you to target leads with web scraping. There is a 99% probability that your ideal lead persona is on social media and even better, like personas tend to congregate. All you need to do is identify the platform where your ideal client personas are most present, and you can start collecting their data with web scraping. You can check out our blog post for more information on how to use social media to power your business. (Link to the article on the power of social media).
You Can Use Scraping Robot To Build a Quality Lead List
At Scraping Robot, we aim to make it as easy as possible for you to collect web data and build a lead list full of quality leads.
Our scraping service uses APIs, allowing you to automate your web scraping process, which in turn will enable you to automate your lead generation process and target leads effectively, without having to monitor your process 24/7. With our API, you can literally generate leads when you want without having to spend hours trying to figure out proxy resources and development time. Our web scraping service also uses multiple proxy addresses, allowing you to send an unlimited number of scraping requests without getting blocked. Once we’ve scraped the data you want, it will be delivered to you in an organized format using a spreadsheet. That way, you can easily analyze the data and import it into your data management strategy and lead management process.
When you sign up for our modules or API access key, you get 5000 free scrapes to scrape any website of your choice. Every scrape you perform after using your free scrapes costs only $0.0018. With our service, you can scrape leads from any website on the internet.
Conclusion
The ability to effectively target leads and obtain quality leads is what differentiates a top-notch sales team from an average one like we earlier said. At Scraping Robot, we aim to take your sales team from whichever level it currently is to as high as it can go. We do this by making it possible for you to collect all the data you need on your leads, as often as you want, at the lowest price you can think of.
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