How to use web scraping for lead generation and sales?

Naman Misra -

Lead generation is the heartbeat of all businesses. Without an effective lead-generation process, any business cannot grow and sustain for long. Traditionally, lead generation was done either manually or through marketing campaigns. However, today, most businesses generate leads online by getting prospective clients to visit their websites and share details to start a conversation.

But not every visitor to your website is ready to buy, and even fewer are willing to share their details for fear of being blasted by emails or calls. Hence, a business must be able to generate leads and have a healthy pipeline in place for its sales teams to pursue.

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There are many ways through which businesses can generate leads. The following lead generation methods are classified as cold outreach strategies:

  • Purchasing a database: Some organizations specialize in collecting and maintaining business databases. They usually maintain records for multiple contacts within an organization, and you can purchase this database depending on your requirements. However, purchasing a database has some drawbacks: (a) these can be expensive; the more accurate and detailed the information, the more expensive it will be, and (b) access is usually subscription-based, and you need to continue subscribing to maintain access. You also don’t have control over how often this data is updated.
  • Partnerships and collaborations: Partnering with another business is an effective way to share lead information. This is usually a barter where both partners share their customer details. However, with more data protection laws coming into effect, it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to share customer information.
  • Landing pages and online surveys: Businesses can create targeted landing pages and online surveys to gather information from prospective clients. Getting traffic to these landing pages however, presents another challenge in itself.
  • Self-scraping customer details from websites: Collecting lead information through web scraping can be an effective lead generation method. Since the scraping is done through automated workflows, this method requires little manual effort and can ensure that the data is always up to date. Also, once established, this method can be used to scrape information from several websites.

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What is lead generation scraping?

Lead generation scraping is the process of automatically extracting contact information for key decision-makers within an organization from one or multiple websites. It is one of the most effective and affordable methods of generating leads.

Companies use website scraping tools to extract lead information from a website and then push this data into their CRM system. Sales and marketing teams can then use this information to reach out to prospective clients. 

The information that is scraped is dependent on the business use case. However, some common data points that are always scraped are - 

  • Name
  • Email Address
  • Phone Number
  • Job Title
  • Business Name

This method of lead generation is not only the most affordable but also the most logical way to generate leads, particularly for startups, since it requires little to no manpower and can automate this process for small teams.

The Lead Scraping Process

The lead scraping process consists of 4 main steps. These steps remain the same regardless of the industry or use case that you might have. The only thing that needs to be changed is the data is to be scraped from the target website based on your requirements.

#Step 1: Identify the data required

Before starting the web scraping process, it is important to understand what information is required. Based on your business use case or the industry that you operate in, the data requirement might be only the contact information of people with a specific job title. Having this information ready before starting to scrape websites can be very helpful.

#Step 2: Shortlist data sources

Once you know what data you want, it's time to determine where to get it. Data is commonly extracted from business listings, online directories, or social media platforms. Before scraping data from a website, ensure the data quality and check the terms of service to ensure that data scraping is allowed.

#Step 3: Decide on the web scraping tool

The next step is to select which web scraping tool will best serve you. Many web scrapers can help you extract relevant information from websites. Deciding which one is crucial to ensure that you get accurate data from this process.

#Step 4: Format the data structure

Finally, the data extracted from a website may be in different formats, like Excel, text, or even XML. Converting this unstructured data into a structured format and uploading it to the CRM is the last step in this process. Many advanced data scraping tools like Nanonets can automate this entire process for you.

Web scraping for lead generation with Nanonets

Nanonets is an AI-based data extraction software for businesses looking to automate processes and eliminate manual tasks using no-code workflow automation. Nanonets can scrape data from websites and extract data from PDFs, documents, images, emails, scanned documents, or unstructured datasets with more than 95% accuracy.

Nanonets’ workflow automation can automate the entire workflow, from scraping data from a website to providing structure and uploading it to the relevant location.

Watch the demo video below to learn how Nanonets workflow can help automate website data extraction.

Web scraping with Nanonets

Pros of using Nanonets - 

  • Easy to use
  • 97%+ Accurate
  • Excellent support team
  • Fast information recognition
  • Ability to intake large volumes of documents
  • Reasonable pricing - Check Pricing
  • 200+ languages supported
  • 24x7 customer support
  • Free Plans + Cost-effective Pricing Plans
  • Personal training sessions
  • In-built powerful OCR software
  • Cloud and On-premise hosting
  • White label options

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Benefits of web scraping for lead generation

Benefits

There are many benefits of using web scraping for lead generation. Some of the key benefits are listed below - 

  • Resource optimization: This method automates the entire lead generation process, requiring the least time and money. Making those resources free to be invested elsewhere.
  • Greater efficiency: Automated lead generation processes free up time for sales, marketing, and other teams to focus on the job at hand rather than manually searching for leads on websites and copy-paste them. This leads to much greater efficiency and output.
  • Better customer insight and outreach: With accurate and up-to-date lead information, the sales team has a better understanding of the prospective client and can tailor a much more personalized sales pitch for the leads, making the sales process much more effective.

Other Web Scraping use cases

Web scraping use cases go beyond just market research. Some other popular use cases are -

While web scraping itself isn't illegal, especially for publicly available data on a website, it's important to tread carefully to avoid legal and ethical issues.

The key is respecting the website's rules. Their terms of service (TOS) and robots.txt file might restrict scraping altogether or outline acceptable practices, like how often you can request data to avoid overwhelming their servers. Additionally, certain types of data are off-limits, such as copyrighted content or personal information without someone's consent. Data scraping regulations like GDPR (Europe) and CCPA (California) add another layer of complexity. 

Finally, web scraping for malicious purposes like stealing login credentials or disrupting a website is a clear no-go. By following these guidelines, you can ensure your web scraping activities are both legal and ethical.

Conclusion

Lead generation is usually a time-consuming and expensive process for most organizations. However, it is also one of the most important processes for organizational growth. Even a slight improvement in this process can lead to tremendous gains for your organization. Hence, it is imperative that businesses use web scraping for lead generation. It is not only a cost-effective and efficient lead generation method, but it can also scale to become one of the most important lead acquisition channels for any organization.

Eliminate bottlenecks caused by manually scraping data from websites. Find out how Nanonets can help you scrape data from websites automatically.