Your business deserves to reach the goals you aim for it. However, it won’t until you know what your competitors or similar companies are doing.
And to find that out, you must conduct online market research and attain data that can benefit your sales.
But can you get any public data that you may want to consume? What about geo-restrictions and hindrances like IP blocking?
Table of Contents
Why Does Your Business Need to Conduct Online Market Research?
Whether you are a small or a big business, online market research plays a significant role in your venture’s success.
- It helps you understand your target audience in a better way through data on their behaviors, needs, and preferences. With this information, you can create strategies that resonate with your target market.
- By conducting online market research, you identify different market trends. This way, you stay to beat the competition quickly and make clever decisions for pricing, strategies, and product development.
- Market research is a great tool to get competitors’ data. It also helps you know their strengths and weaknesses and how they perform to stay ahead in the competition.
- Finally, online market research is a practical approach to getting customer feedback. Through this information, you can curate strategies and make decisions to increase customer satisfaction.
Is It Easy to Do Online Market Research?
Online market research has many benefits but has many pain points.
For instance, collecting accurate, updated, and relevant data can be challenging. This is especially true when you need to order a large amount of public data that helps you meet the objectives of a large target audience.
Moreover, not every website is welcoming. Online market research often faces hindrances like geo-restrictions and IP blocking, restricting your access to relevant information online.
The process is also immensely time-consuming and costly. Plus, you may have to handle the privacy concerns of the websites to avoid getting into a legal issue.
So, How Do Marketers Get Information Online?
Marketers understand the potential of online market research and can’t let the benefits disappear. Therefore, they use web scraping to get the information they want.
Legal and authentic web scraping practices can help you attain data for product development, competitive analysis, trend and price analysis, and other relevant procedures to curate a successful marketing strategy.
It is a powerful tool to get insights into consumer preferences and habits. Web scraping is an efficient way to get all essential data quickly.
How Can You Perform Web Scraping?
Web scraping is an excellent procedure in today’s digital world and can be conducted using residential proxies.
A residential proxy provides access to a vast pool of proxies linked with residential IP addresses. This characteristic makes it challenging for web servers to detect your online activity related to web scraping.
This means that you may get successful with web scraping without being identified. Moreover, all your activities remain anonymous, allowing you to gain better privacy and security.
Residential proxies can also help you bypass IP blocks and geolocation restrictions. As a result, you get easy access to location-specific data.
Residential proxies help you gather data from various sources. This means that the quality of the data collected is usually excellent.
How Does a Residential Proxy Work?
This proxy works as an intermediary between you and a web server. It starts when you send a request to your desired website using a residential proxy.
The proxy routes the request via a residential IP address. Instead of considering you the source of the request, the web server identifies the proxy as the primary source.
The website accepts the request and responds to the proxy. The proxy receives the response and forwards it to you.
When you use a residential proxy, you appear as a local using the residential IP address. This identification helps you conduct web scraping without being identified for your activities.
How Is a Residential Proxy Better than Other Proxies?
Some common proxies are shared and dedicated datacenter and mobile proxies. These have their own characteristics and also help in web scraping.
However, unlike a residential proxy, a shared datacenter proxy offers low security and privacy to the user. Similarly, a mobile proxy is more expensive than a residential proxy, making it unaffordable for many.
Moreover, when it comes to detection, it is hard to identify users with residential proxies compared to those using datacenter proxies. This is because their IP addresses are similar to those in the residential IP pool.
All these factors make a residential proxy more appropriate, competent, and useful for web scraping activities.
Final Takeaway
Now that you know the power of web scraping, use the tool to conduct online market research and gain all the relevant insights on your competitors and customers. To run web scraping effectively, utilize your residential proxies and bypass all the restrictions easily.
