18 growth hacking tools to automate digital prospecting in 2021

Web Scraping and Negative SEO

Web scraping is a computer technique used to meet various needs. Initially, one might think of retrieving content from a competitor’s site to quickly boost their own site. Indeed, some companies use it to improve their SEO content strategy and, in doing so, increase their organic traffic with relevant web content: this is known as "negative SEO." Companies divert traffic to their site, positioning themselves in your search results. Fortunately, the era of copying and pasting is long gone, as search engines like Google penalize such practices: penalties in terms of organic ranking can lead to outright blacklisting of the site.

Web Scraping and Sales Prospecting

As you may have guessed, web scraping is also used to enhance companies' sales strategies. As we've seen, it's a means of collecting data to enrich your prospecting efforts by gathering email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, company size, revenue, etc. This information can be utilized to enrich and update your CRM.

Web Scraping and Competitive Intelligence

Web scraping is also employed for competitive intelligence. By collecting data from several competing sites, you can analyze your market positioning, compare web, marketing, and content strategies, or even monitor price variations and offer evolutions.

Web Scraping Tools to Collect Prospect Information

Imagine you are searching for prospects in the restaurant industry. One way to collect information would be to visit a site like Yellow Pages to contact each establishment individually. The problem is that you would have to explore the site page by page, entry by entry, copying data manually, etc. With scraping, you can extract a large volume of data from directories like this one.

Small Volume Scraping

1. Octoparse: allows you to extract data from a website in three steps: input the URL of the site you want to extract data from, click on the targeted data for extraction, run the extraction, and retrieve the data.
2. ParseHub: follows the same extraction system as Octoparse: URL, targeting, download.
3. SpiderPro: a very user-friendly tool that allows you to collect the data of interest with just a click on the site. The data is organized and can be downloaded in JSON or CSV format. The advantage is that SpiderPro only costs $38!
4. Datanyze: for simple export of emails and phone numbers
5. Simple Scraper: allows for multiple data exports from websites
6. Sumo: helps generate more traffic, collect more emails, and convert more clients.

Mass Scraping

1. Prospect .io: find emails, launch, and automate marketing campaigns.
2. Drop contact: an ideal tool for enhancing your databases
3. DataMiner: to export data in bulk from search engines
4. Import .io: a comprehensive yet more complex scraping tool.
5. Agenty: competitive monitoring of prices, products, barcodes, competitive web technologies, lead generation, etc. Intended for web scraping professionals

Scraping Data from Social Networks (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)

1. Waalaxy: obtain the email addresses and phone numbers of your LinkedIn contacts and schedule automated prospecting scenarios.
2. Phantombuster: deploy a growth hacking strategy by tracking activities across your various networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Quora, Medium, etc.)

Web Scraping Extensions and Plugins

Here are two Chrome extensions that will help ease data extraction from Google.

1. Webscraper .io: with a simple point-and-click interface, extracting thousands of records from a website takes just a few minutes to set up the scraper.
2. Scraper: a very simple (but limited) data exploration extension designed to make online searching easier when you need to quickly obtain data.

Filtering Tools for Scraping

1. Prospectwith: Before exporting your data, find companies by defining precise search criteria such as size, revenue, location, sector, etc.

Tools for Finding Email Addresses

1. FindEmails .com: find emails of an entire company and verify their validity with this tool.
2. hunter .io: find existing email addresses simply by providing the company's domain name.

What the Law Specifies

This subject is extremely complex, particularly because the web has no borders. In France, here are the contested practices in data scraping:

• Lack of information for targeted individuals
• Absence of consent from individuals being contacted via email, phone, etc.
• Non-compliance with individuals' rights to object

Collecting data from internet users, even if publicly accessible online, can in certain cases be non-compliant with the Data Protection Act and GDPR. This practice involves several disciplines and cannot be approached in the same manner across different branches of law.

Generally, while data extraction may be allowed, companies engaging in such practices must remain vigilant about the terms of data reuse as stipulated by the CNIL: data origin, consent, respect for the right to object, data retention, GDPR obligations, etc.

Our Recommendations and Best Practices at Digidop

1. Avoid unfair collection methods: using data collected without individuals' knowledge is, in any case, a very ineffective prospecting method. Receiving a cold sales email with no prior contact or interest from the recipient is neither effective nor legal.
2. Prefer direct contact to obtain genuine and engaging consent from the prospect.
3. Utilize transparent data collection forms:
4. Implement a "permission marketing" approach aimed at creating a genuine relationship with your prospects. The goal is not to sell your product at all costs but rather to show interest in theirs.
5. Prioritize enriching and updating your professional database.
6. Automate the removal of inactive contacts for over 3 years.
7. Incorporate an unsubscribe link in your marketing emails: explaining why they receive these emails, the sender, etc.