In the era of online marketing, change is the only constant. As new tactics to successfully
navigate the market are devised every day, the online marketplace is a labyrinth not everyone
can successfully cross. While the e-commerce industry is filled with brands big and small, only a
few have managed to leave a mark. Giants like Amazon and eBay have undeniably found great success and with good reason. One thing that has played a key role in their success is their
access to a huge wealth of web data that these companies successfully manipulate to their advantage.
The Power of the Web
As people walk around the internet, they leave footprints, which later can be collected to figure out customers preferences and purchasing power. To be able to access this ocean of data, and use it to set a winning marketing strategy is what has led many companies to the pinnacle of success.
Small companies often have a finite amount of resources, and due to their lack of knowledge of the ongoing trends, they end up making decisions that don’t benefit them in the longer run. This is where data analysis becomes an indispensable resource. It gives you an unprecedented access to this abundant knowledge resulting in a deeper insight of the consumer behavior and your competitor’s strategy.
Data and Some Dirty Tricks
The amount of data created daily is humongous. Each day, nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created leading to innumerable new footprints of raw information. To manage everything manually is virtually impossible. That’s why there exist automation software which makes the task of collecting and analyzing data a cake walk. These generate leads, run and download reports and gather new, articles, blog posts etc.
It is always good to have a spy, not only outside your company but inside as well. Business intelligence, whether internal or external helps in revealing new insights, gauges the marketing effect and promotes long-term stability. This is intelligence gathered from measuring SEO metrics, social media performances, aggregate product reviews and by identifying trends in the industry of products releases, news etc.
This not only allows companies to keep an eye on their competitors but empowers them with ideas to continually improve their own performance and products. While it is not possible to directly get access to a company’s marketing strategy, by looking at the plethora of web data like prices set by the competitors, analysis of marketing and promotion efforts, and studying the competitor’s weaknesses and strengths, a good competitive advantage can be gained.
Getting Down to Business
Web data can empower your organization in numerous ways-
1. Pricing Strategy
Dynamic pricing is essentially the driving force behind the growth of every e-retail organization. Imagine how much data you will have if you collect all the price changes from all products in the market at every hour. You can simply run that data through an analytics tool and figure out for yourself how much you need to charge for which product. You will also come to know which products can be placed in the premium category and what discounts can be given. And this is
just the tip of the iceberg, knowing about dynamic pricing strategies gives you a deep understanding of consumer insights and helps to establish a stable platform.
2. Campaign Monitoring
Branding nowadays is all about creative ways to market and position yourself in existing market. What works and doesn’t, is all about experimenting and finding it out for yourself. In the midst of rapidly changing preferences, brands are often at a loss, unable to figure out how to promote themselves. Data analysis goes through a plethora of data to figure out what kind of images and marketing strategies work for which kind of brands.
3. Demand Analysis
There is never a better opportunity than when a product is not dominating a market. If your competitor is out of stock for a particular product, it’s time to hike your prices. But how will you come to know that this golden opportunity had sprung up? That’s where data analytics comes in, pinpointing the demand-supply curve for your genre of products.
4. Channel Partner Management
If you are one of the third party sellers, you know the struggles of keeping up with the price changes which varies like a blowing wind. Sites like Amazon agree to margin upfront.
For example- if they buy a product from you for 100$ they will probably sell it for 150$ and
deduct the price difference of a discount from your share. This kind of technique is very
damaging for small businesses. Data analytics helps you understand the prices in real time
as and when they change.
The term ‘Big Data’ gets thrown around a lot. However, the important part of the strategizing equation is web data: The data which enables you to position yourself competitively in the market. While the whole task of extracting this wealth of information may be daunting, web scraping services like Datahut equip you with actionable insights by finding you the right data from the web.
Contact Datahut to know more.