There are many articles (from Forbes, HuffPost etc) talking about how marketing could use the help of big data. I won’t go into those areas - you've already read those posts, you know what’s up.
This post is here to tell you the role that web crawling plays in helping you get the data that you need for your marketing strategies.
What is Web Crawling?
Web crawling is a data retrieval process, practically serving as a search engine (but with no CSS embedded) for any data available on the web. Of course, all this information goes into databases and are indexed. Other data processing tools such as Tableau can be used to make the data more readable to us.
Web crawlers are a tool that promotes accuracy and efficiency in analyzing the market or consumer behavior. All this research is vital for segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP), an essential component of marketing strategy.
Firms can find more precise trends in customer buying data by looking at customer activity on their pages, and some external data like location and age. In marketing segmentation terms, that’s the bases covered: geographic, demographic (age, gender), behavioral (frequency of buying, interest in various products), which gives some insight to the psychographic (attitudes, personality). Even technographic (mobile app usage, etc.) profiles are covered.
In conclusion, web crawling is the process of market research.
Web Crawling as A Potential Replacement for Market Research Methods
There is a massive amount of public data published, and if it is appropriately processed, it could offer insights. For example, if a marketing company wanted to know if the public liked eating croissants, they could retrieve the information from a web crawler. They would use a sentiment analyzer to categorize the data and then look at the overall results. The results derived from web crawling would be accurate since the sample of answers available is large enough.
To some extent, web crawling can also compete with the utility of primary research. Primary research is meant to help firms understand how others perceive their product. For example, if Grab wanted to know what people thought about the surge in prices, they would have to do primary research.