In the era of media digitization more and more businesses, non-profit organizations, government institutions, and news agencies embrace news scraping to gain competitive intelligence about their specific niches and interpret actionable insights into a data-driven strategy.
Today we no longer have to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to get informed about what’s going on around us. All we need is to research online news and get real-time updates on any topic, even before it turns into a printed article. But with the massive amount of news outlets and global newsflow, it’s virtually impossible to read, watch and analyze all the editorial content that relates to our business on a daily basis. And here is where companies need news scraping as a fast and scalable tool to identify their mentions in media, manage brand reputation and gather industry intelligence. Web scraping services, like Datahen, handle the task of flipping through online media to harvest relevant data, allowing your team the time to focus on your brand development strategy.
From tracking what the press is saying about your brand to monitoring your competitors, news website scraping can have an enormous number of benefits for your business. Here are just some of them.
Monitoring and protecting your media reputation
While your PR and marketing teams do their best to project a positive brand image, by using powerful channels and influencer voices, what people are thinking and saying about your business, in reality, may be totally different. Yet your online reputation can make or break your business because an increasingly large number of customers trust online reviews and recommendations for making a purchasing decision. So your media reputation management should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy.
By scraping news websites, you can monitor your brand perception, keep track of what the press is saying about your brand and see where your strategy might be missing the mark. After all, if you have a clear idea of what are your strengths and weaknesses, you have better chances of developing a solid reputation management strategy and build positive brand awareness.
News scraping will help you assess your media reputation and take measures to improve it if you see that you are falling behind your competitors or there’s a little bad buzz about your brand. You will be able to spot negative discussions in media about your company and react to them before they can affect your brand image.
You will also learn which media outlets have featured you in a positive light and can share this information on your Social Media channels to drive customer trust among your existing followers and discover chances of future collaboration with those news outlets.
Gaining competitive intelligence
Ignorance is bliss, they say, but knowledge is power, especially when it comes to knowing your competitors. As a business owner or marketer, you’re always aware of your strengths and weaknesses, but in order to win the game, you also need to Sherlock on your competitors to learn who you’re up against and what steps you should take to leave them in the dust.
Scraping news articles offers you a pool of competitive insights about your counterparts’ trump cards and mistakes. It exposes what customers and some influencers are saying about your competitors and their products. It allows you to learn what their PR coverage looks like, what products they are going to launch next and what counterpunch you can prepare to keep up with them. In addition, you explore their product messaging and other important metrics.
By possessing this data, you can take advantage of your competitor’s weaknesses and adapt your media presence accordingly.
Assessing your communication strategy
Scraping news websites will give you actionable data to measure the effectiveness of your PR and outreach strategies. You will get tangible evidence of how your press releases have been featured in media and gain historical data about the results of your past PR initiatives. This way you can check what kind of campaigns and communication bring you most coverage and what initiatives are the most effective in terms of ROI.
One way you can measure the results of your PR strategy is by gauging the number of press clippings that mention your products or services. When your brand receives a large number of mentions in publications that are most read by your prospects, your PR strategy is successfully raising your brand awareness.
Besides the quantity of media clippings, you should also monitor the quality of the editorial content where your brand is mentioned. If it displays your brand in a positive way, clearly conveying your key messages, you can assume that your PR strategy has been effective.
Getting insights about your industry trends
Scraping news websites allows you to harvest large amounts of data from virtually any website, even if they don’t provide an API for raw data access. In this way, you can gain information in near-real time about any topic you are interested in, without the need to copy and paste hundreds of pages of content. After determining the right keywords, you can have data scraping services extract the necessary data from various media sources, filtering the results and weeding out the outdated information. This will allow you to keep track of the trends in your specific industry and instantly respond to the changes. Next, you can compare the harvested content to see how your topics of interest are covered by media, and how you should plan your communication strategy.
Investing resources to scrape news articles can reap many benefits for your business. It allows you to recognize important signals in the media, anticipate the trends and changes in your market, track the effectiveness of your PR programme and gain important data about your competitors. While most think that you need to learn a programming language to scrape news articles, it’s not necessarily so. By engaging a news scraping service, like Datahen, you can extract data from any online news source at any frequency, while the experts will ensure that the procedure doesn’t violate any anti-scraping policies which some websites have in place.
