Every business be it a small organization, a medium-sized team, or an enterprise. Revenue is generated when businesses have customers paying them.
To reach those customers, businesses reach out to potential people who can be interested in the problem you are solving.
In this blog, we will know how web scraping can be one of the ways to generate leads, what are its advantages, and how different industries can use it.
What is Lead Scraping?
Lead Scraping is the process of collecting information such as emails, names, contact numbers, etc., using web scraping. The process involves using third-party software to do this very part of web scraping.
This way, businesses can enjoy the freedom to focus on other tasks, while with scraping at the backend they can generate leads at a generous amount each day. The whole process has the advantage that it can be done at scale and the output can be sent to the CRM a company is using.
Methods to Scrape Leads
Scraping leads, or extracting contact information from various sources, is a common practice for sales and marketing teams looking to generate leads and grow their customer base. Here are some methods to scrape leads:
Creating Your Custom Scraper
If you are a developer, then you can build a scraper using Python or Nodejs.
Websites like Yelp and Yellowpages can be scraped using these languages. You can crawl and parse the data to extract details like phone numbers, emails, etc. Even for parsing, you can use different programming languages, we have created some tutorials that might help if you choose this method. eg.
Parsing HTML with C# or Pasing HTML with Python.
If you choose this method, there is, however, a caveat, which is that this method cannot be used to scale.
Normal scrapers get blocked easily due to IP blocking. To scale up using this method, you have to overcome challenges that come with scraping, like proxy rotation, managing headers etc.
Using Web Scraping Tools
The second & best method is to use a web scraping tool.
Now, there can be different types of tools. for no coders you may find using no-coder scrapers.
No-coding tools like Octoparse can help you initially. There are Chrome extensions like Instant Data Scraper.
Again, there are limitations with using these no-coding tools.
However, if you have some technical knowledge, you can use a web scraping API like Scrapingdog.
There are a lot of tutorials on our blog and YouTube Channel from which you can learn web scraping to scale your lead generation process & learn how to effectively use a web scraping API.
Using No-Code Tools
You can use no-code tools like Make, n8n & Zapier to build their custom scrapers.
Typically, these no-code tools are easy to use, and API can be integrated into them using the API_KEY, making it best for people who want to generate leads.
Recently, we have written some articles using Make, which you can use as a reference.
Some Websites Where You Can Find Your Target Prospects
Yelp
Scraping leads from Yelp involves the extraction of business names, addresses, phone numbers, and websites from Yelp listings. These leads can be potential clients or prospects.
You can kickstart your journey by reading web scraping with Yelp.
When you search on Google it shows the Title, link, and description. Inside this description, you will sometimes find emails or phone numbers. This data can help you generate leads. You can extract the data from the box of Google Business. You can learn how to scrape Google search results with Python to start scraping leads.
Google Maps
Google Maps can also provide you with email addresses, phone numbers, etc. Although scraping Google Maps is not an easy task, you should always use scraping APIs to do it. You can read this guide on scraping Google Maps with Python.
I prefer LinkedIn for generating leads. LinkedIn is like an ocean of leads and you can find your target customers over here. It is used by more than 900M users which means you can extract thousands of leads every day from Linkedin. If you want to scrape LinkedIn person and company profiles then read Scraping LinkedIn Profiles with Python.
There can be more platforms where you can generate leads from; the ones mentioned above are some of the common ones.
Again, for each one of them, you can use no-code tools.
Conclusion
Web scraping can sometimes be a little rough and therefore you should avoid scraping those particular websites. For example, LinkedIn does not allow the crawling of public profiles. Do remember that the quality of the audience is far better than the quantity.
Our main focus should be on finding leads that can become our customers in the future otherwise there is no point in collecting emails like a robot just for the sake of keeping the lead pipeline open.
In any case, if you have any questions/suggestions or feedback, do reach out to us on chat!!
