Businesses love data. With access to the right data and analytical tools, there is apparently no limit on what they can hope to achieve. Market data provides businesses with invaluable insights into the behavior of their competitors and their target audience. The more market data a business has, the more powerful its insights. That’s why you should growth hack your market data acquisition process.
What Is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is an umbrella term for a variety of strategies and techniques that focus on growth above all else. It is most commonly associated with startups who are still in their earliest phases and are looking for a way to grow as fast as possible with the available budget. As a result, growth hacking is also concerned with the most cost-effective ways of growing a business.
The Metrics That Matter
For any growth hacker, there is a variety of data they can turn to for a clear indication of how successful their efforts have been. However, focussing on the wrong metrics will send growth hackers down blind alleys and cause them to miss the most important measures of their success.
Authentic Metrics
It is important to understand which metrics actually matter to growth hackers. Authentic metrics are metrics that give you a direct indication of how your current strategies are paying off. For example, the number of followers you have on Twitter after a campaign doesn’t directly tell you whether your business is growing, or by how much. On the other hand, if you have managed to measurably increase your sales, this would indicate that you are growing your business.
Let’s say that your business offers a free trial of its flagship product. Following the implementation of a new growth or marketing strategy, you might see more users sign up for the free trial. However, if none of these users are going on to become paying customers, this increase doesn’t really indicate any meaningful growth.
Growth hackers need to establish their most authentic metrics. Be careful of being sucked in by an indirect metric that tells the story you want. Just because you have raised awareness of your business, it doesn’t automatically mean you are growing.
Impact Metrics
Once you have a list of your most important authentic metrics, you should then turn your attention to impact metrics and the story they tell. Your impact metrics refer to the impact that your authentic metrics should have. In other words, growth hackers need to consider how improving one metric will have a positive knock-on effect on other metrics.
For example, if you are able to improve your conversion rate from referrals to your website, which would be an authentic metric, the impact of this is an improvement in the lifetime value of each user.
Web Scraping
Web scraping is one of the oldest but most powerful techniques that digital marketers have available to them. Going over data used to require a significant amount of time and manpower as people had to work their way through large spreadsheets. However, web scraping means that automated solutions can be used to search through data sources and extract relevant data from them. Smartproxy experts explain everything in more detail on their website.
Web scraping is used to gather data from online sources, often publicly available. The data can ultimately be used for any number of purposes, but it is most commonly applied to digital marketing. An extensive web scraping operation can reveal much detail about a business’s target audience, enabling marketers to target them with their messaging.
The exact legality of web scraping remains a grey area. There are currently cases on the matter making their way through US and EU courts. However, for the most part, it is accepted that data scraping is legal. Websites and online platforms might take steps to prevent automated scripts from accessing their services or data. But many have learned to live with scrapers and bots as a necessary evil.
For any business that needs market data, there are several ways how web scraping can help.
SERP Scraping
Scraping search engine results pages can tell a business a great deal about how their competitors are performing, or how consumers are responding to their efforts. Scraping SERPs will also provide extremely useful data for devising an SEO strategy – SERP scraping is a turbocharged form of keyword research. Tracking your most important keywords is simple and straightforward and will augment your other keyword data.
Social Media Scraping
Word of mouth can make or break a business. All it takes is a positive or negative word from the right person and a business’s fortunes can reverse in an instant. Social media platforms are the arenas where modern consumers exchange their opinions. The way that people discuss you on social media is vital information to have.
Scraping social media platforms for mentions of your business will ensure that you are always informed about the latest developments in public opinion. It will also let you significantly grow your bank of market data without having to invest much time or money.
Data is a very powerful resource for any modern business. Growth hacking your acquisition of market data means that you always have the most detailed picture possible. When you are relying purely on internal data, you can learn a lot about your individual business and customers, but not so much about the wider market.
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