Lead generation is still the key to business success, particularly for companies that rely on sales to new customers. Along with generating leads with traditional forms, many businesses have turned their attention to generating leads with web scraping. Because there is a lot of information available online and most of it is free. Businesses can easily gather such data with web scraping and convert it into structured forms for use. In this article, we’ll dig into the world of lead generation and provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to maximize your efficiency in scraping data for lead generation.
Things You Need to Know about Lead Generation
Leads are possible clients who have shown interest in a product or service. Their interests can indicate their willingness to make purchases or work with a company. For businesses that focus on sales, leads are their lifeblood and serve as the foundation for sales and income development. Without leads, they would struggle to extend their consumer base and achieve long-term success.
Lead generation is a method to acquire and collect information from potential customers. Companies can engage actively with their target markets and establish trust-based relationships this way. For instance, when organizations have this data, they can nurture leads through tailored marketing initiatives and eventually generate revenue by converting them into paying clients.
How Can Web Scraping in Generating Leads
Leads are essential for successful sales. However, you might meet several challenges while scraping leads from websites. For example, it’s tedious to grab leads with the old manual copying and pasting, and the data might be inaccurate or irrelevant if you haven’t collected and refreshed it on time. As a result, these challenges will lead to a waste of time and resources.
Here is where the web scraping solution comes in. Web scraping is a technique that allows users to grab data in bulk and get structured data to make efficient moves. Besides saving time, it’s also helpful in many aspects.
Save time and effort
Web scraping simplifies the process of collecting leads from specific data points. It can automatically gather details, including job titles, company names, phone numbers, email addresses, etc., from diverse platforms, like industry-specific websites, social media, and job search engines. Then, you can swiftly access the suitability of leads for your products and services. Compared with using “ctrl + C” and “ctrl + V” to grab leads. Thus, web scraping allows you to prioritize your time and effort on focusing on the most promising leads.
Get real-time leads
Data on the Internet is fast-changing, especially information about leads. Web scraping can help you gather up-to-date information from websites 7/24, ensuring you get the latest data for staying informed about your target audience making smart decisions, and adapting your generation strategies to meet the market trends.
Improve data accuracy
We should admit that human errors in manual data entry have detrimental effects on lead generation. Web scraping reduces the possibility of human-induced errors by directly extracting from its source. Then you’ll get a more accurate and trustworthy dataset that can improve the marketing performance based on leads.
Enhance leads identification
As mentioned above, web scraping can extract data from various online sources and uncover a wealth of information about potential leads. Its capacity for digging into different websites expands the horizons of lead identification. So, you can identify new opportunities to engage with a larger audience, and eventually maximize your potential customer base.
How to Build a No-Coding Lead Scraper
A proper business leads scraper tool is the key to improving your efficiency in lead generation. In this part, we’ll walk you through how to build a lead scraper with Octoparse in easy steps. Octoparse is a no-code web scraping solution for anyone. Whether you’re good at writing scripts or have no experience in coding, it can be your AI web scraping assistant.
If this is your first time using Octoparse, you can download Octoparse for free and install it on your device. When you open the software, you can sign up for a new account or log in with your Google or Microsoft account to unlock the powerful features of Octoparse.
Tips: you can also check out our top list of web scraping tools in 2024 to have a quick view of other solutions that can contribute to lead generation.
Step 1: Create a new task for lead generation
When you have a page that you want to pull leads from, copy its URL and paste it into the search bar on Octoparse. Then, click “Start” to create a new lead scraping task.
Step 2: Auto-detect leads information on the page
Wait until the page finishes loading in Octoparse’s built-in browser (it might take seconds). Next, click “Auto-detect webpage data” in the Tips panel. This feature can scan the page automatically and highlight all the extractable data on the page. Then, you can check if Octoparse makes a good “guess” on what data you need in the browser or check all extractable data fields on the “Data Preview” panel at the bottom.
Step 3: Create and modify the workflow
After you’ve selected all wanted leads data, click “Create workflow” to build the workflow. A workflow is an auto-generated flow chart with every action of the scraper. By reading the chart, you can easily understand how the scraper works.
Also, each action on the workflow is clickable. With a click on any one of them, you can check if the action works as expected. It is an effective way to test and troubleshoot the scraper before launching your scraper. You can edit or remove improper actions from the chart or add new actions to make sure you can get data as you need.
Step 4: Launch the lead scraper and export data
Once you’ve reviewed all the details, you can click the Run button to launch the lead scraper. Small tasks can be performed directly on your device if they are small. Running on local devices is preferred for quick runs and troubleshooting. Meanwhile, you can hand the task over to Octoparse cloud servers. The cloud platform can process your task on 7/24 and scrape the latest information for lead generation, which is a more effective option for scraping leads.
After the task finishes running, you can export the extracted leads to a local file like Excel, CSV, JSON, etc., or a database like Google Sheets for further use.
Tips: still want a more effortless way to scrape leads? Try Octoparse Contact Details Scraper template below for lead generation, and scrape data by only entering several required parameters!
https://www.octoparse.com/template/contact-details-scraper
Wrap-up
Lead generation needs skill and an eye for detail. Web scraping, without a doubt, is the solution to increase efficiency for collecting leads. It helps businesses to collect up-to-date information on leads around the clock and ensure the accuracy of data, which will contribute to the efficiency and performance of marketing and sales. With Octoparse, you can easily grab leads from most mainstream platforms like LinkedIn, Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc. Try it now, and double your efficiency on lead generation from now on!
