“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle
Data is better than no data and what is better than data? Information. Clean, precise, concise actionable information - this is the pinnacle of enterprise decision making. But, also having that huge amount of data at your disposal is sometimes overwhelming as it gets a little difficult to determine what data is actually important. We are at a huge advantage here as so much data is available at our disposal and web scraping publicly available data can make hell and heaven difference in competitor analysis.
Your business idea is amazing and you’ve got no competition! Such a nice dream this would have been, right? Alas! It’s time to wake up. Whether you are aware or not, there are a lot of competitors out there and they are equally hungry for success as you are. What makes an executive decision smarter is the one that is taken considering the competition. Competitor analysis is the backbone of a strong marketing strategy. In this article, we will talk about how competitor analysis is crucial for any business who wishes to excel and how the different methods of competitor analysis can be analyzed and tracked to come out with effective strategies that will be a starting point for their business planning and marketing.
1. Product and Price Comparison
The human desire for easy attainability, convenience, round-the-clock accessibility, and fast turnaround has resulted in nearly half of U.S. B2B businesses to offer their full product line online. The new-generation online eCommerce portals have changed the way eCommerce businesses functions. They have ready access to more data and thus, intuitively using web scraping to watch out for competitors to get real-time pricing and product updates are considered a smart move. Since price is one of the most significant factors for purchase decisions, closely monitoring competitor activities with the help of scraping large volume of data from the web gives businesses a competitive edge and help them seize new opportunities!
Take an example, an online reseller - It is very important that he keeps a continuous track of all available inventory so that he doesn’t lose out on revenue due to unavailable stock, so real-time data scraping is absolutely necessary here. The competition, in this case, is in real-time. Companies likeBinaryFolks scrape data in real time and make sure that the businesses' crucial data is always on top of their information game by monitoring all dynamic datasets available publicly.
This is a fact that consumers will always shop from websites that provide them with a high-quality product at a lower cost than others. Thus, knowing what your competitors are up to and gaining insights into their product and pricing strategies with the help of data scraping tools will help you determine a strategy that will captivate your customers and keep you ahead of the game.
2. SEO Audit
Everyone wants to rank first on Google. But, easier said than done. There must be a lot of sites that rank better than yours. Instead of getting jealous, why not use data scraping to find out what they are doing uniquely or differently that results in their first page Google ranking. Extract which keywords they are using, what content topics they write mostly about, backlinks and what PPC campaigns they are running to gain an insight into their SEO strategy. Not only what makes them stand out, but also scrape what pain points they are not taking into consideration and see how great web scraping can be for marketing when done right. According to top SEO companies, proper scraping of SEO data and analyzing it can give you insights about your competition’s link acquisition strategies, potential advertising opportunities, sneak peek into their on-site optimization and web traffic.
SEO is not rocket science, so, it’s not tough to decipher, but it definitely has a learning curve. Once you get a hang of it and understand the reason and logic behind your competitor's strategies, you can put together an effective strategy to find out the mindset of your customers and speak their language.
3. Social Media Audit
More than 70% of all B2B marketers use at least one of the “Big 4” social media sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) for marketing.
Whether your business’s goal is to boost sales or increase awareness, only data doesn’t help. How your competitors are using that data for their benefit is the most important. Know who the big players that your target audience follows, what social networks your competitors are on, how big their following is and how quickly that is growing, how often they post, which hashtags they use etc - in short; conduct a thorough social media competitive analysis.
The most important benefit that top social media marketing companies offer is competitive industry insights. You get to know the common industry trends, your target audience’s preference and also, what your competitors have to offer; thus a 360 coverage of the industry trends. This will help you know where your brand stands w.r.t your industry, who the influencers are in the niche and find opportunities to do something unique, something that no one is doing. This will help you set a foot in the right direction. Draw inspiration, but do not duplicate. What works for them might not work for you, so, try and understand their strategy, but build your own unique one.
4. Reviews and Comments Scraping
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Acc. to inc.com, 84 percent of customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation and 68 percent form an opinion after reading between one and six online reviews.
So, if you think that reviews get lost in the internet noise, think again. Staying up to date with the customer preference and finding out their likes and dislikes can actually help you stay ahead of the competition and use the information to dominate the market. Scrape your competitors’ overall ratings to capture the ups and downs, track the popularity rating and service related reviews. Also, try and segment them by cohort to get more understanding of your target audience. This will, in turn, allow you to carry out campaigns with respect to the specific market persona and gain an edge over your competitors.
Final words
“You should learn from your competitor but never copy. Copy and you die!” - Jack Ma
Competitor analysis helps companies to view what their company has to offer in direct comparison to their competitors. There is a lot that you can learn from this kind of competitor analysis - starting from what they are doing to what they are not and also everything in between that. Data scraping makes these public data more and more accessible and is more en vogue than ever. Without data scraping, it will be difficult to gather these huge amounts of data and without data and knowledge of what your competitors are up to, it will be difficult to gain deeper marketplace insights.
The whole scraping process can be automated by developing a custom web scraper and hence, lessening your effort and time in the process. Read an article here to know what to keep in mind before custom developing a web scraper! By analyzing the competition and monitoring them on a daily basis, the insights that businesses gain helps them stay one step ahead, understand where they fit in the market and how that position can be maximized.
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