Looking to generate leads for your business and want to use Internet sources? Lead scrapers are the tools for the job. Read our article below to discover the best lead scrapers to use and ways you can develop yourself using Python.
How do you generate leads for your business that is not well known and there are no ways your ideal customers would find you as a new business? For some, social media ads and Google ads are the way to go but there are situations that such wouldn’t work or you aren’t ready to shell out the amount required to do that successfully.
In such a situation, you look for a way to get the contacts of prospective customers usually email addresses for online communication, and then reach them in other to market and close deals. If you intend to go this route, there are two options – it is either you buy an already prepared database which integrity could be questionable and usually quite expensive or you generate your own.
Our focus in this article is on those that would want to generate their own lead themselves but that means extra work at reduced pricing. One thing you need to know about doing so is that you will be automatically pulling business names and contacts if available from the websites you can find them in a sizeable number.
You can either use an already-made web scraper if you do not have coding skills or develop one yourself you are ready to get your hands really dirty and do the job for yourself. We would be recommending some of the best lead generation software out there and also show you how to develop a custom one using python. Before going into that, let take a look at an overview of lead generation via web scraping.
Lead Generation through Web Scraping
Web scraping is the process of using computer bots known as web scrapers to automatically pull data from web pages on the Internet. In the lead generation context, it could be seen as the process of using specialized web scrapers known as lead scrapers or lead generation software to extract contact details of prospective customers from web pages on the Internet. The process involves crawling websites with business listings such as Yellow Pages, Yelp, or even specialized ones as in the case of booking.com (booking-scraper) for hotels and cars.com for car listing, among others searching for relevant businesses to pull their contact details. At first, this might look easy but can be very technical.
For business listing sites that you can find contact details publicly displayed, you do not have much problem. However, if you have to deal with a website that only provides you names and addresses of businesses without their email address such as in the case of cars.com, then you will need to use a service such as Hunter or FindThatLead. One thing you need to know is that business listing websites do not support the scraping of their content and as such, have their anti-spam system setup to prevent web scrapers.
Only when you are able to bypass the anti-spam system would you succeed at generating the lead you want. Already-made lead scrapers have this figured out. If you are developing a custom lead scraper, you will need to integrate measures to bypass anti-scraping features.
How to Generate Business Lead Using Python
This section has been written for coders. If you know you are not a coder or do not want to create a custom lead scraper from scratch, you are better of going to the next section of the article where we recommend already-made lead generation software that you can use without writing s single line of code. With coding skills, you can develop lead generation software with any programming language of your choice.
All you need is the programming language to have support for an HTTP client and a way to parse out required data from web pages. We would be using Python in this section as it is quite popular among web scrapers and it has a good number of libraries and frameworks for web scraping.
Because lead scraping is broad with a good number of target sites so, there is no tool that can be said to be the best for it. If the target website can load completely with Javascript disabled, then you should use either Scrapy if you want to develop a complex scraper or the duo of Requests and Beautifulsoup. However, if the site requires Javascript to render completely, then you will need to make use of Selenium as it is the popular tool for scraping Javascript-based pages for Python developers.
All of these tools mentioned are third-party tools that do not come with the standard Python distribution – you will need to install them separately in other to use them. I will advise you to read the documentation for each of the tools to learn how to use them better.
One thing you need to know about scraping data from websites is that the target websites do not appreciate that. It might interest you to know that except you conceal the footprint of your lead scraper, you should get blocked after a few requests. This is because some of these websites can easily identify web scrapers. You will need to use high-quality residential proxies for some of these sites to hide your IP footprint.
Bright Data and SOAX are some of the best providers of high-quality residential proxies.
Other measures to integrate to avoid getting blocked include randomizing user agent string mimicking popular web browsers, setting random delays between requests, and setting other appropriate headers.
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Sample Code for Scraping Lead Generation
The code below is a simple lead scraper that scrapes the name and phone number of businesses on Yelp. It is just a proof of concept and you cannot use it in a product-level test as it would most likely break or get blocked after a few requests because no measures have been put in place to bypass anti-scraping systems. We used the duo of Requests and Beautifulsoup (all Python libraries).
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
class YelpScraper:
def __init__(self, business_page_url):
self.url = business_page_url
def scrape_yelp_page(self):
content = requests.get(self.url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(content.text, "html.parser")
name = soup.find('h1', {"class": "css-m7s7xv"}).text
address = soup.find("p", {"class": " css-chtywg"}).text
telephone = soup.find("span", {"class": " css-1h1j0y3"}).text
star_rating = soup.find("div", {"class": "i-stars--large-4__373c0__1d6HV"})["aria-label"]
business_details = {"name": name,
"star_rating": star_rating,
"address": address,
"telephone": telephone
}
return business_details
url = "https://www.yelp.com/biz/mina-family-kitchen-san-francisco-2"
x = YelpScraper(url)
x.scrape_yelp_page()
Best Lead Generation Software
You do not need to know how to code in other to extract lead. In fact, it might interest you to know that we advise those without experience to use already-made scrapers as the tasks required in creating your own custom scraper can be complex depending on the uniqueness of your project. In this section, we would be describing some of the best lead generation software you can use.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is one of the best lead generation software you can use as a business to get the contact of prospective businesses that would serve as your customers. The service has got in its database, contacts of over 100 million companies and 130 million individuals. The prove you over 30 attributes which you can use to cross-check and choose only contacts that would be beneficial to you as a business.
One thing you will come to like about the ZoomInfo is that it is not just a contact database provider, it is a full-fledged tool that encompasses other tools such as sales automation, chat support, and even integrates well with other third-party tools. The tool is quite popular and has helped a good number of persons grow their businesses.
Lead Scrape
- Pricing: Starts at $97 per month
- Free Trials: available
- Data Output Format: many options available
- Supported Platform: Desktop
The Lead Scrape solution is one of the software you can use to generate leads for your business. From the name of the tool, you can tell that it is meant for scraping leads. This tool will help you I your B2B marketing by helping you find high-quality contacts of businesses and decision-makers that you could convert into customers.
With this tool, you can automate your lead generating process and for each company discovered by this tool, you get full details including address, phone number, email address, and social media handles. The process of using this tool is simple. All you have to do is select your target, select your location, and get all of the information you need to contact the companies you could convert.
FindThatLead
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
- Free Trials: available
- Data Output Format: many options available
- Supported Platform: Cloud – Chrome extension available
If you are looking for lead generation software that focuses on scraping email addresses of prospective customers then the FindThatLead is the tool for you. It is a lead generation software that you can use to find companies snd individuals you can convert to customers. Aside from using this software to send batch and blast emails, some users of this tool use it to generate custom Facebook and Google audiences for advertisement purposes.
One feature you will find interesting about this tool is that it does have a separate browser extension that you can install which would extract email addresses as you surf the Internet. This tool also comes with an email verifier so emails are tested to make sure you do not get useless emails in your list.
Related,
Octoparse
- Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
- Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
The Octoparse tool unlike the other 3 described above is not specifically developed for scraping leads — it had been developed as a generic web scraping tool that you can use to scrape all kinds of websites and data you want. You can use it to scrape business listing websites that the email addresses of the companies and businesses listed are displayed publicly.
All you need to do is use the point and click interface that comes with the tool to identify the data of interest on one of the listings and the tool will automatically identify the same elements on the other pages. The tool has got support for pagination and as such, manual operations are put at a minimum level. The advantage this one has over the others above is that you can scrape other data on the web as it is not specifically made only for lead scraping.
Scrabin
- Pricing: Starts at $12 per month
- Free Trials: available
- Data Output Format: CSV
- Supported Platform: Cloud
The Scrabin software is for those that want to generate leads from LinkedIn. With the Scrabin tool, you can automate smart engagement strategies to reach your prospects sooner and hit your SQLs goals faster. Some of the features that come out of this tool include auto-follow target accounts, scan and visit 1st, 2nd, and third profiles, export leads in CSV, and generate leads in n automated and segmented way.
You can use this tool to visit up to 15 profiles monthly and yes, it is safe for you without getting your account flagged. The tool deletes unanswered invites and can even send messages when you are not connected.
Conclusion
Getting the right customer for your business is key to sustaining the business and lead generation when done right will furnish you with contacts of the right companies, decision-makers, and individuals that you could convert into loyal customers. The Internet being a major source of such data should be one of your primary sources and you will need lead scrapers to be able to collect lead on a large scrape. The lead generation software described above is some of the best in the market you can use to build a business lead.
