Use web scraping for brand monitoring

The old adage that any press is good press may be losing its veracity in an era when press and reviews are at our fingertips 24/7. What steps can a company take to protect its reputation in this socially accelerating world? 

By extracting brand monitoring data, business intelligence (BI) teams can both capitalize on positive publicity and work to mitigate negative sentiments. A comprehensive BI strategy acknowledges the multipronged nature of brand monitoring and online sentiment analysis by scraping data from many sources and analyzing many of the factors that comprise online brand reputation.

However, manually acquiring data for brand monitoring is a strenuous task. Fortunately, we can now easily automate brand monitoring by using intelligently designed web crawlers.

In this guide, we’ll give you a sneak peek into a few common and impactful use cases that organizations use to produce actionable insights and keep a watchful eye over their brand.

  • Brand reputation
  • Investment decision making
  • Product development
  • Politics and campaigns

Brand Reputation

In today’s highly competitive market monitoring and managing online brand presence a top priority to protect your reputation. If you are not monitoring your brand online or looking at how your products are positioned and priced, you can end up in a situation where your brand reputation is damaged and your business suffers.  

Investment Decision Making

Research in the financial industry has shown that news articles and social media opinions can directly influence the stock market. Both the informational and subjective aspects of online articles can impact volatility, stock price, trading volume, and market activity.

The market moves quickly, and being even half a step ahead of the competition can be incredibly valuable. If many firms are receiving the same traditional data, investors can differentiate their strategy (and bolster their earnings) by incorporating brand monitoring data into their decision-making.

Product development

Take a minute to think about the sheer number of reviews, forums, customer service tickets, and social media endorsements that circulate at all times. A negative review can cost a company many sales, but without the technology to use data comprehensively, companies often proceed with limited actionable insights about how to change their products - let alone develop new ones. Brand monitoring based on web scraped data equips product development teams with data-driven insights into the changes customers want to see and the quality of a product’s performance. In this way, brand monitoring is not just a retrospective but a vital tool in the product creation, planning, and design process.

Politics and Campaigns

Political opinions are often some of the most emotionally endowed views that people hold. Therefore, sentiment analysis meshes with politics quite well as voting behavior, campaign success, and partisan changes are rarely completely rational. It is evident in past elections that calculated expectations do not always become reality. One must pay sufficient attention to the sentiments expressed about campaigns, candidates, legislative bills, and presidential job approval.

All of these subjects are constantly discussed on forums, social media, and article comments, so scraping them is an ideal - if not the only - method for extracting such data.

We hope some of these exciting use cases for brand monitoring data have inspired you to implement such data into your own workflows and to innovate in your industry. Investors, government officials, and businesses alike can avail of the broad insights brought by brand monitoring data to realize their fullest potential and endow their operations with the most effective, world-class solutions currently available.

As the internet continues to grow, the amount of data it generates grows with it, opening new opportunities for all types of organizations to improve their processes and make more informed decisions. Therefore, we firmly believe that now is the best time to act. By incorporating brand monitoring data streams into your organizational processes you can ensure your organization is disruption-proofed and fully prepared for the world of tomorrow.

Learn more about web scraping for brand monitoring

Here at Zyte , we have been in the web scraping industry for 12 years. We have helped extract web data for more than 1,000 clients ranging from Government agencies and Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startups and individuals. During this time we gained a tremendous amount of experience and expertise in web data extraction. 

Here are some of our best resources if you want to deepen your web scraping knowledge: