How to Use Web Scraping to Generate Leads and Sales

Any business depends on reliable leads. Qualified leads are essential for generating sales and therefore revenue for any company. Marketing departments everywhere are busy constantly updating their databases of prospective clients that may generate future sales. Such databases normally contain all essential information about companies (location of offices, the contact information of decision-makers, etc.), including the likelihood of dealing with the prospects in the future. 

It makes perfect sense that in order to generate leads your company will use all of the publicly available information on the Internet. You will likely parse info from social networks, articles published online, and other not-so-obvious sources. 

Of course, gathering all this data by hand and further compiling it into a readable table for analysis can quickly become a real ordeal. That’s why businesses, big and small, invest in creating or buying ready-to-use solutions for automatic lead generation. This has become a fast-growing sector of business generating billions of dollars for companies providing solutions for lead generation. 

At some point in your expenses related to using third-party solutions (or scraping bots) for automating lead parsing, you will find it justified to make your own script for the same purpose powered by proxies. 

In this article, we will give you some tips on what proxies will be the best in creating lead scrapers. We will also talk about the optimum lead generation techniques based on what you already have and a set of residential static proxies that we can provide for this purpose    

What is Lead Generation Scraping?

So, what is lead scraping? By definition, Lead Generation Scraping is the process of obtaining data and information on your potential customers from various online sources. Your ultimate goal is to compile a database of contacts containing emails, phone numbers, Telegram addresses and social media profiles in order to place these individuals through the top of your sales funnel and identify those who will be willing to consider your product offering.  

An important thing to keep in mind while you scrape online sources apart from knowing how to scrape leads properly is to proceed ethically. This means that you will not be violating the rules of data collection set forth by the sites you access, nor the profiles you scrape.  

Benefits of Lead Scraping for Business

Among the most obvious benefits of gaining more potential customers, lead scraping may bring information to improve on the following areas that do not come to mind first:

Improved Business Efficiency. Once you learn more about your customers, you can fine-tune your business strategy to allocate more funds and resources to the areas that will bring you more revenue, while spending less on the production or delivery of things that are less profitable. 

Sharpened Targeted Marketing. After collecting valuable data on the location and preferences of your potential customers, you will be able to direct your offers exactly to their needs. This will be a by far better way of addressing their concerns than cold calls or email spamming. Totally Revamped CRM Experience. Think about creating all-new and personalized offers to your customers. Everybody likes personal delivery in business, regardless of what they say. With more info on your clientele, you will be able to customize your offers to make them irresistible.

Essential Steps of Web Scraping for Lead Generation

Step 1 – Data Sources 

Your ultimate task is to find high-quality leads. To extract them from the Web you will first need to identify the sources of data of such leads. It means that you need to decide for yourself if you are looking for companies as your prospective clients or influencers that will lead you to sales eventually. 

You could also engage in scraping Amazon, other pages, or your competitors’ websites if they have this information readily available for public use. It could give you some insights on what kind of customers to look for and in what sectors of the economy. 

Also, before you start looking for potential sources of your clients, make sure you ask yourself the following questions:

• Where are my current customers coming from and what are the similarities in their buying behavior? 
• Where do they work online and where do they go to spend their leisure time online (are we talking about local leads or international prospects)?
• Are there any online directories, projects, or services that list my ideal customers?  

Step 2 – Data Extraction  

Once you have an understanding of where your potential clients are located you can proceed with extracting data from such sources.

This can be implemented in one of two ways:

• By using a ready-made solution – a web scraper from a third-party developer, or
• By creating your own web scraper using proxies.

Of course, the final decision is totally up to you and your budget conditions but if you are looking at spending thousands of dollars on a third-party solution, you might as well consider some tools for web scraping for lead generation in Python or in some other language to be able to do it using your inhouse code and people. 

Tips on How to Scrape Business Leads

There are a few good places to start scraping your business leads if you are really concerned about the quality of the information you are about to gather. 

Yellow Pages 

This is one of the most respected and trusted business directories across North America. It is also one of the largest, containing information on thousands of companies. If you want to engage in lead scraping it is the best place to start. You will be able to have a table of up-to-date contacts of your leads (featuring addresses, phone numbers, and emails). 

Yelp

Another great resource of business leads is Yelp. Having over 90 monthly million users, this online directory was long associated with bars and restaurants. But in fact, it is now populated by all kinds of businesses, including medical services, repairs, electricians, movers, and so on. 

What is good in Yelp from the scraping perspective is that it features a review score for each business. So, you can use it to your advantage and prioritize the leads in your table from the most preferred by their customers. Such businesses are all about building long-term relations with their customers and that means repeat business to them. 

Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin

We want to mention different kinds of web resources to pinpoint the fact that you can also target influencers that may have direct connections with your business audience. You can use hashtags for business leads scraping in certain industries and points of interest. 

Just like with business directories, web scraping for sales leads inside social networks will require reliable and fast proxies that will help you in completing lead generation with web scraping. You can buy proxies for web scraping and use such high performance datacenter proxies or geo-targeted residential IPs based on your mission requirements. 

Now, the process of website scraping for lead generation using specialized third-party apps would look pretty straightforward. You will need to launch the app, initialize the proxies, select a URL for scraping and get ready to get a table of results as an outcome. If you decide on using such a web scraper to scrape leads, you will likely need a set of tested and reliable proxies. Next, we will talk about some features to look at when selecting such proxies. 

Examples of Lead Scraping in Different Industries

Please consider some of the most frequently spotted examples of lead scraping benefiting businesses in various industries.

Lead Scraping for B2B

If your company is engaged in providing SaaS services to other companies, the quality of your software solution greatly depends on the information that you can source online. This is true for all kinds of B2B solutions from marketing research tools to sales automation apps. With bot scraper leads that can be collected using proxies you will likely get ahead of your competition in offering more info to your clients to choose from.   

Lead Scraping for e-Commerce

In e-commerce use cases you will need web scraping leads to structure and organize a more sophisticated marketing campaign for your potential customers. This way you will be able to specify products or services for the customers that are most likely to appreciate the products that you want to offer to them. 

Lead Scraping for Real Estate 

As for real estate, here you may target your proxy-powered bots to collect info on customers (sellers or buyers) from a certain geographical area. You will be able to concentrate the efforts of your sales force right where there will be more potential for closing the best deals in the market.

How to Choose the Right Proxy for Lead Scraping

If we are talking about the performance and longevity of proxies for lead generation, then the best proxy for this mission would be the static IP proxy. They have all the attributes to mimic a regular user from a certain location and are virtually undetectable for any anti-bot protection system. What you definitely need to avoid is using free public proxies for scraping leads. This practice will only lead to permanent bans of your IPs on the side of a scraped resource resulting in a hard time reinitiating the process.  

We at PrivateProxy provide our customers with a wide selection of residential proxies to choose from. Our network infrastructure covers all of the most popular locations worldwide for reliable lead generation. If you want to integrate our proxies with your proprietary scraping solution, you will enjoy our API for most of the computer languages out there. Also, if you use our services, you will have 24/7 access to your proxy dashboard where you will be able to track stats on using your proxies, and, what’s even more important, you will have access to our tech support for resolving any possible questions or concerns in real-time. 

Consider PrivateProxy Your Trusted Partner

PrivateProxy has been a reliable residential proxy provider for over a decade now. Our customers enjoy our services all across the Globe. We have established a name in the industry as one of the most trusted proxy providers and make it our first rule to study the use cases of our customers to provide them with the best possible proxy solution. 

Final Thoughts

Lead generation is an exciting and super useful process for businesses. Statistically, after a period of 6 months, the companies that engage in some sort of automation in lead generation can boost their sales by ten or more percent. 

Now, If you are looking for more information on how to scrape business leads, you will enjoy our guide on how to use proxies for scraping, and you can always ask our account managers directly about any use cases related to lead generation by typing your query in a chat box in the lower-right corner of the screen. We will definitely help your business grow with our proxies. 

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