Lead generation is the foundation of any successful sales and marketing strategy. According to a 2020 report by Hubspot, 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge. Without a steady stream of high-quality leads, businesses struggle to grow revenue and scale.
But finding and collecting data on potential leads is often a slow, tedious, and manual process – until now. Enter web scraping, the ultimate tool for building a lead generation database quickly and efficiently.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of using automated software to extract data from websites. Rather than manually visiting individual web pages and copying information, web scraping tools can quickly collect large amounts of data from across many web pages.
Here‘s how it works on a technical level:
- A web scraper is given a list of target URLs to extract data from
- The scraper sends HTTP requests to each of these URLs to retrieve the HTML content of the web pages
- The HTML is parsed to identify and extract the desired data elements, like names, job titles, emails, phone numbers, etc.
- The extracted data is cleaned, formatted, and exported into a structured format like a CSV or directly into a database
Web scraping automates the repetitive and time-consuming process of manual data collection, making it possible to build a large lead database in a fraction of the time.
Why Web Scraping is a Game-Changer for Lead Generation
The traditional approach to lead generation has been heavily manual – sales development reps scouring LinkedIn, marketers buying expensive lead lists, and interns copy-pasting contact data into spreadsheets. This old-school approach is both incredibly inefficient and unscalable.
Web scraping completely revolutionizes lead generation by:
Accelerating lead data collection by 1000x: What might take a human hours or days to manually gather can be web scraped in minutes. With advanced web scraping tools, it‘s possible to collect over 100,000 lead records per hour.
Scaling to collect lead data on millions of prospects: There are over 4 billion web pages indexed by Google containing valuable data on potential customers. Web scraping tools can systematically extract lead data from across millions of websites 24/7.
Providing the freshest data on new leads: New companies and contacts are always emerging. With web scraping, you can get lead data that is up-to-date by regularly collecting new data. No more outdated lists.
Enabling hyper-targeted, persona-based lead generation: By scraping specific company attributes and data points, you can build highly targeted lists of leads that precisely match your ideal customer profile.
Reducing cost-per-lead by up to 75%: Web scraping allows you to collect your own proprietary lead data at a much lower cost than purchasing lead lists from data brokers. According to Integrify, an average B2B lead costs $31 to acquire via traditional channels. With web scraping, this cost can be reduced to under $1 per lead.
The impact of web scraping on lead generation can‘t be overstated. By leveraging web scraping, businesses can collect lead data at a speed, scale, freshness, targeting, and cost that was previously impossible.
Lead Generation Data Points to Collect with Web Scraping
To build a valuable lead generation database, you need to collect key data points that will help you understand and engage each lead. While the specific data you‘ll want to collect depends on your business, here are some of the most common and useful data points to gather via web scraping:
B2B Lead Generation Data Points
- Company Name: The name of the company the lead works at
- Website: The company‘s website domain
- Industry: The industry or vertical the company operates in
- Location: Geographic location, like headquarters city/state/country
- Company Size: Number of employees or annual revenue, to gauge company size
- Contact Name: Names of key decision-makers and influencers
- Job Title: The contact‘s role and seniority within the organization
- Email: Business email address to directly reach out to the lead
- Phone Number: Phone number to contact the lead via call or text
- Social Media Profiles: Links to the lead‘s LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. for further research and engagement opportunities
B2C Lead Generation Data Points
- Full Name: The consumer‘s first and last name
- Email: The best email to reach the consumer
- Location: City, state, zip code of residence
- Age/Birthday: To understand the lead‘s demographic and personalize messaging
- Gender: If your product/service is gender-specific
- Income: Household income range, to assess purchasing power
- Home Value: Estimated value of residence, another wealth indicator
- Marital Status & Family: Single vs married, presence of children
- Interests/Hobbies: Key interests, group memberships, affinities that align with your brand
These data points create a foundation for understanding each lead and enable personalized marketing and outreach. By collecting a combination of demographic, firmographic, and contact data, you‘ll be able to segment leads and tailor your sales approach.
Step-by-Step Process for Building a Lead Database with Web Scraping
Convinced of the potential of web scraping for lead generation? Here‘s a step-by-step breakdown of how to use web scraping to build your own high-quality lead database:
Identify target personas and accounts: Get crystal-clear on your ideal customer profile. What types of companies and individuals are most likely to buy from you? Build a detailed description of their attributes.
Build a list of target websites to scrape: Based on your target personas, identify websites that are likely to contain relevant lead data. This could include industry databases, conference attendee lists, business directories, competitors‘ websites, and more.
Choose a web scraping tool: Web scraping can be done with custom programming using libraries like Python Scrapy and Node.js Cheerio, but for non-technical users there are also powerful GUI tools like ParseHub, Octoparse, and Mozenda.
Configure and launch your web scraper: Using your selected tool, set up your web scraper to target the websites and data points you‘ve identified. Most tools have visual point-and-click interfaces for selecting the data elements to extract. Test on a few web pages first before launching a full scrape.
Clean and process the scraped data: Raw web scraped data often needs cleaning – removing HTML tags, splitting data in tables, handling missing fields, and de-duplicating records. Most web scraping tools have built-in data cleanup functionality.
Import data into your CRM or lead database: Finally, export your cleaned web scraped lead data into a usable format and import it into your CRM or database. Make sure you have a process for handling regular updates of new scraped data.
With a bit of upfront work to configure your web scraping tool and process, you can have an automated lead generation machine that continuously collects fresh data on your target prospects.
Predicting Lead Quality with Web Scraping + Machine Learning
Beyond just collecting lead data, web scraping can also be used to gather data that predicts the quality and value of a lead. By scraping additional data points like a company‘s web traffic, social media followers, press mentions, and more, you can build a lead scoring model that estimates the likelihood of a lead converting.
There are even AI-powered lead scoring tools that leverage web scraped data to make predictions, like Node and Infer. These tools use machine learning to analyze thousands of firmographic and technographic data points collected via web scraping to predict which leads are most likely to become customers.
The combination of web scraping and machine learning is extremely powerful for optimizing sales and marketing efforts. According to a case study by Node, the company helped sales outsourcing firm MarketStar identify valuable accounts most likely to convert, resulting in a 735% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversions.
Web Scraping Data Privacy and Compliance Considerations
Of course, with the power of web scraping comes responsibility. It‘s important that businesses use web scraping for lead generation in an ethical and compliant way. Some key best practices:
- Only scrape publicly available data: Don‘t scrape any data behind logins or that requires authorization to access. Focus on publicly visible web pages.
- Respect robots.txt files: Most websites have a robots.txt file that specifies rules for web scrapers. Configure your scraper to obey the instructions in this file.
- Limit scraping frequency and speed: Scraping too aggressively can overload a website‘s servers. Throttle requests and build in delays between page crawls.
- Comply with data privacy laws: Regulations like GDPR and CCPA govern the collection and use of personal data. Ensure you only collect data in compliance with these laws and provide notice and opt-out options where required.
Scraped lead data can be an immensely valuable business asset, so it‘s worth taking the time to ensure your web scraping is done in a responsible and sustainable way. Follow the above best practices to stay on the right side of regulation.
Web Scraping Lead Generation Success Stories
Still not fully convinced of the potential of web scraping for lead generation? Let‘s look at some real-world results from companies who have successfully leveraged web scraping to build high-converting lead databases.
ReInfer, a SaaS company for sales teams, used web scraping to collect data on over 100,000 companies to fuel their account-based marketing efforts. By combining technographic data like what tech tools a company uses with intent data like content keywords, they created highly relevant segments to send targeted outbound campaigns. The result? Open rates over 70% and meeting booking rates over 35%. (Source)
Zoominfo, one of the leading B2B contact data providers, has built a database of over 20 million company records and 60 million contact records. Their data is collected via large-scale web scraping – their crawler visits over 4.3 million websites every day to extract fresh data. This rich data has powered the go-to-market efforts of over 20,000 sales teams. (Source)
Full Circle Insights, a marketing analytics platform, used web scraping to enrich their database of leads with additional firmographic data like industry, location, and company size. By collecting this data and synchronizing it to Salesforce, they achieved a 75% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rates. (Source)
These results aren‘t unusual – they represent the transformative impact web scraping can have on lead generation efforts. With the wealth of data available across the web, any business can leverage web scraping to build a rich database of leads primed for conversion.
The Future of Web Scraping for Lead Generation
With the explosion of data across the web and the rapid advancement of web scraping technologies, the future of lead generation is undoubtedly tied to web scraping. Industry experts predict the continued growth of the web scraping market, driven in large part by lead generation use cases.
As Sandeep Kharidhi, VP of Data & Analytics at Zoominfo, puts it, "The combination of web scraping technology and predictive analytics will become a must-have for go-to-market teams in the years to come. The companies that leverage data most effectively will win."
And Brandon Bornancin, CEO of Seamless.AI, said: "In the next 5-10 years, every B2B company on the planet will be leveraging some form of web scraping to collect lead data and intelligence. It will become a standard practice."
The trend is clear – web scraping is becoming a critical tool for businesses to stay competitive and grow. As data continues to proliferate across the internet, web scraping will only become more essential for lead generation.
Conclusion
Web scraping is a true game-changer for lead generation. It provides the ability to collect rich data on target prospects at a speed and scale that is simply impossible with traditional manual methods. By leveraging web scraping, businesses can:
- Build massive databases of fresh, relevant leads
- Personalize and target their marketing and sales efforts
- Get deep company and contact data to better understand leads
- Identify high-quality leads most likely to convert
- Save time and resources on manual lead research
The results speak for themselves – businesses who use web scraping for lead generation achieve better conversion rates, close more deals, and grow revenue faster.
Ready to tap into the power of web scraping for your lead generation efforts? Start by choosing a web scraping tool, identifying key websites to scrape, and building your process for collecting and acting on lead data.
The bounty of the web awaits – go forth and scrape!