Every business is looking for opportunities to develop and grow. Without this mindset, stagnation is inevitable, and when stagnation sets in, the decline is just around the corner.
Our goals as business owners or high-ranking employees in companies are always to find new ways for our companies to grow and develop further.
One of the most straightforward ways to achieve that is to expand your target market. It is a tried-and-true development method many enterprises used so many times in the past.
Let’s look at why that is the case and how you can use web scraping to do it better.
Why companies need to expand their markets
The first barrier any company reaches in terms of growth is saturating the market they’ve initially targeted. Whether they’ve achieved absolute dominance or carved up the market amongst the competitors, the growth stops at some point. That is true whether you offer products or services.
The only thing that makes sense at that particular point is to expand toa new market. If you manage to establish the same footing as with your initial one, you’ll manage to keep your brand growing and add more revenue to your bottom line.
Furthermore, conquering a second market is immensely easier than doing it with your first. You’ve been through the whole process already, and now it’s just a question of finding the specificities of the new target market(s) and developing accordingly.
How can companies enter new markets?
The way a company expands into another market is very case-specific. The approaches can vary wildly depending on what the company does and what the target market is.
Still, it’s based on reliable data and information in most cases. You can explore and exploit what your competitors are doing in the target market or cross-compare your current target audienceand find similar groups in the new market.
These are only a few ways you can go about it, but penetrating a new market revolves around gathering information.
The better information you have, the more reliable your plan is. That is why web scraping works so well for this particular purpose.
Using web scraping for better market reach
There’s no universal approach to using web scraping to expand into a new market. It all depends on what kind of expansion you are going for and what type of business you are running. A B2C business will go about this situation very differently than a B2B company.
Still, web scraping is a very sophisticated approach to data acquisition, and with the proper know-how, you can adjust it to gather and sort any data.
That cuts down the time and the manpower necessary to handle this part of your expansion. Also, you form a unified database with uniform formatting, which makes the data much easier to analyze.
How to use scraping for market expansion
Scraping is a tool with a wide variety of uses for a brand with this ambition. If you wonderhow to extract data from a websitewithout wasting time and other resources, web scraping is a solution. The same goes for more specific tasks like getting email addresses or additional information from one or multiple websites. Read more in a blog post by Oxylabs.
A significant issue for automated and large-scale data gathering can be security measures information holders create to protect their data from scraping. They usually shut down these kinds of operations through IP bans and blacklisting.
Still, most modern web scraping solutions will have a way to avoid that, usually through advanced “naturalization” settings simulating human behavior while scraping and IP rotation to avoid getting a ban from a specific website.
The flexibility of scraping as a tool is unprecedented, and you can adapt it to any data gathering goal. If that goal is expansion, it can help with market research, competitive analysis, contact acquisition, and other information.
You can even use web scraping to improve your SEO efforts, ensure brand protection, optimize prices, and collect data for testing and training your machine learning models.
Scraping can help gather tasks so even small teams can overcome a lack of manpower, join the big dogs in using data-driven business approaches, and avoid wondering how to extract data from a website without wasting time.
Conclusion
We hope we managed to shed some light on data gathering as a concept and outline its importance when it comes to market expansions.
In the modern business environment, information sets pros apart from amateurs. Being able to gather it and draw valid conclusions sets you up for success. Web scraping allows you to avoid going into a new market blind and avoid unforeseen problems with your expansion.
It’s up to you to identify your data acquisition goals, and data scraping software will take care of the rest – you only need to find a reliable tool.
