How to Get Data for Sales and Marketing Intelligence?

Request your data now
By clicking "Submit", you agree to our Privacy Policy
Businesses use sales and marketing intelligence to derive insights into various markets and how to grow their operations. For most organizations, keeping track of the competition and the current market state is an integral component for business operations to thrive. In recent years, market and sales intelligence practices have expanded to include data analytics and analysis. Companies use marketing intelligence data to enhance their business models and meet the projected goals and objectives.

Sales and market intelligence utilize web scraping to analyze multiple information sources and create a broader picture of a business's existing customers, markets, the growth potential for new services or products, competition, and problems. The process consists of an ongoing collection and analysis of essential information that helps an enterprise to understand its customers, competition, and markets. Data analysis assists organizations to gain a holistic understanding and knowledge of the overall market. The market and sales intelligence data enables brands to make informed decisions impacting various business areas, including product development and effective marketing campaigns.

Role of web scraping in sales and marketing intelligence

1
Monitoring competitors
E-commerce is a highly competitive field requiring companies to monitor their competitors in real-time to fine-tune their competitive strategies. With internet scraping, it is possible to monitor business rivals and understand their activities. For instance, you can pull a competitor's product deals and details and offer better ones to attract more customers. Automated systems also use the extracted data to assign product or service prices based on a detailed analysis of the information.
2
Market research
All businesses must perform market research to identify consumer needs and new markets. Web scraping service provides different data types, including service or product information, social media reviews, top searches, among others. Web data extraction is the easiest and most reliable way of gathering vast data amounts to facilitate holistic market research.
3
Content aggregation
For most organizations, quick and continued access to trending online topics is critical to targeting the largest market with the latest product and service offerings. Companies can use website scraping to monitor popular social media and channels and news portals to remain updated on trending sales and business data. Content aggregation is a reliable way of accessing real-time data relating to market changes, the emergence of new products, monitoring competitor activities, and perform sales intelligence.
4
Sentiment analysis and machine learning
Sentiment analysis involves analyzing customer reviews, complaints, and opinions regarding services, products, and events. Web scraping services and tools and crawlers can easily acquire information pertinent to sales and marketing intelligence. On the other hand, machine learning utilizes tagged entity extraction from various metadata values and fields, clustering systems, or statistical tagging to scrape structured web data. Web scraping assists businesses to extract data accurately and efficiently.

Data sources for sales and marketing intelligence

Sales and marketing intelligence are ongoing processes of collecting and analyzing information related to a brand's competition, customers, and markets. The process involves two primary types of data – internal data and external data. Internal data consists of data a company generates ad maintains, whereas external data comprises readily available data that can be accessed through research. The following are web scraping methods you can use to collect sales and marketing data and analyze it to make strategic and operational decisions.
1
Website analytics
The internet has revolutionized sales and marketing practices. Most businesses today rely on social media platforms to market their services while urging millions of potential customers to purchase them through a website. Companies can scrape for and analyze website traffic patterns and engagements on social media profiles to gain deeper insights into their online interests and behaviors. Scraping website analytics is an effective method of understanding consumer needs to enable businesses to prioritize certain services and products to penetrate a larger market.
2
Company feedback
Customer-facing employees (employees who directly interact with customers) are valuable organizational resources since they directly communicate with current and prospective customers. For example, customer service personnel or sales representatives provide firsthand unique data regarding the market and consumers. Companies can engage customer-facing staff members to gather consumer feedback to understand how they can improve their products and services. Some of the methods businesses can use to collect customer feedback include directing consumers to an online survey or website. Web-scraping tools can collect the customer's opinions and input for analysis.
3
CRM data
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a method through which companies manage interactions with current and potential customers. It is an approach that facilitates how a business can manage and analyze its interactions with customers. Organizations use CRM to streamline their processes, enhance customer service, increase profitability, develop customer relationships, and increase sales. Most CRMs are web-based and suitable sources for web scraping to collect and analyze essential business-customer data.

4
Social listening
Social listening is an excellent source for gathering external customer data. You can monitor online conversations between new prospects and existing customers to derive vital information about the market or brand. The primary methods used to gather customer insights include web scraping tools and crawlers, social listening tools, and manually tracking trending topics. Social listening can enable businesses to understand how customers perceive specific brands and products by following their criticisms and positive feedbacks. The data is vital to product development and service improvement.
5
Market analysis reports
Various market analysts publish detailed reports that provide expert assessment and analysis of specific markets, industries, products, or services. The analyst reports offer valuable insights about a customer base, particular competitors, and best sales and marketing practices. Companies can use the reports as sources of scraping web business data, understand the best methods of maintaining a lead in current markets, penetrate new ones, and other valuable insights.
6
Industrial events
Industrial events, such as trade fairs, conferences, and union meetings, can help companies understand the current market trends and rival businesses' viewpoints. For example, tradeshows are one of the most effective sources of sales and marketing intelligence. Enterprises practically give out handouts when showcasing their new inventions, products, and services. Attending industrial events enables companies to gather valuable insights regarding their competitors' product and service offerings and marketing strategies. Also, most of the industrial events are hosted online. Businesses can scrape data from website and use web scraping services to gather critical data relating to their competitors, product offerings, and sales and marketing initiatives.

Sales and marketing intelligence benefits

Companies use marketing intelligence to scale various sales and marketing activities. The following are some of the advantages enterprises stand to gain from marketing intelligence:
Pricing
Pricing is a common challenge among retailers. Setting the price of a product too high may cause customers to shift to less expensive businesses, while setting the price too low may prevent the maximization of potential revenues. Leveraging sales and marketing intelligence enables retailers to establish an optimal price for the services and products on offer. It helps analyze average customer purchase sizes and budgets and the price points of similar services and products from competing business rivals
Competitive analysis
Sales and marketing intelligence assists companies to assess their competitors within their respective markets. Market intelligence provides businesses with a method of deriving essential competitors' insights, such as their weaknesses and strengths, and what they do differently. Besides, sales and marketing data is used in a competitive analysis to enable enterprises to monitor their competitors and identify actions to implement to gain a more substantial competitive advantage.
Product development
Marketing intelligence furnishes companies with vita information regarding common and daily problems consumers face and existing products for addressing the issues. The data is crucial to designing and developing new products. It also informs updates and design modifications for existing products to enhance their capabilities. With sales and marketing intelligence, organizations can confidently make informed decisions relating to product or service changes to attract new customers and penetrate new markets.
Penetrating new markets
As entrepreneurs seek to grow their business, it is smart to research beyond the existing markets and devise foolproof plans to penetrate them. Sales and marketing intelligence provide the requisite information needed to study and identify new markets.
How to develop an effective sales and marketing intelligence program
The first step is to secure the support of C-Suite executives. Sales and marketing intelligence is an ongoing strategy requiring the entire organization to embrace web scraping to realize data-driven mindsets and cultures. Getting the business's decision-makers on board ensures that a marketing intelligence initiative remains a business priority.

Enterprises also need to understand that data quality is pertinent to achieving effective sales and marketing intelligence. Incomplete or inaccurate data can hinder a company's ability to utilize marketing intelligence to increase sales and lead the competition. Therefore, it is essential to use proven web scraping methods and evaluate collected data before incorporating it in daily sales and marketing analysis and operations. Businesses must verify the data's accuracy and authenticity to create a robust sales and marketing intelligence program.

Lastly, you can develop an effective marketing intelligence program by scraping web data from multiple sources. Limiting data gathering to specific sources restricts the extent you can understand the market. Limited sources may result in underdeveloped or flawed sales and marketing plans. Companies can invest in market intelligence platforms, services, and tools to ensure rich and varied data sources.