Five Reasons a News Crawler Is Essential to Your Business

“Originality is the art of remembering something but forgetting where you heard it.”
Case in point, especially when it comes to running an online business.

Why?

Because in today’s online marketplace, sales, brand management, and genuine engagement are all practices that shouldn’t begin with you, they should begin with your audience.

In other words, the best content isn’t born from originality – at least, not in the way we tend to think about it. Instead, the best content comes directly from what your market and ideal customers are already consuming, reading, and talking about.

As the legendary author and copywriter Robert Collier put it: the point of effective marketing is to “enter the conversation already taking place in your customer’s mind.”

Unfortunately, keeping track of that conversion is nearly impossible. As early as 2010, Google’s Eric Schmidt reported that “every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”

That’s why – to stay current, relevant, and effective – one of the best investments your business can make is a customized news crawler.

A news crawler will not only find and alert you to content faster than you could on your own, it will also reduce the heavy-lifting involved in sifting through the mass amounts of both structured and unstructured data that’s added to the web every day.

In fact, here are five reasons a news crawler is essential to your business.

Brand Reputation

Brand reputation management goes beyond responding to negative comments. It’s also about appreciating the compliments, and (most importantly) listening to your audience so you can have an up-to-date relationship with them.

Brand reputation begins with making a good first impression. It means mitigating as much “bad press” as you can so that you don’t start off on the wrong foot and end up playing damage control to mend it over time.

Unfortunately, bad press happens, which is why brand reputation must be set up to alert you as soon as a story breaks.

The real benefit of a news crawler, however, is that it enables you to go beyond quantitative metrics and dig into what reporters and real people are actually saying about you. Webz.io specializes in aggregating this unstructured data and presenting it a structured form, through our News API, so you can measure and improve your brand’s standing.

Keyword Monitoring

Keyword monitoring is vital when it comes to marketing your online business.

According to a recent study by BrightEdge, “organic search drives 51 percent of all visitors to B2B and B2C websites, trumping all other non-organic search channels, including paid search (10%) and social (5%).”

This means, as Huffington Post recently put it, “The Best Place to Hide a Dead Body is Page Two of Google.”

Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) lives and dies by keyword monitoring, which is an in depth process that includes on-page elements like keyword density, headers, sub headers, tags, and images along with off-page elements like links, references, and social media shares.

But traditional SEO is just a step in the process.

As much as Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and ranking tools Moz can tell you about your keywords numbers, what they can’t tell you is the sentiment behind the numbers.
With a news crawler, you can gage not just the popularity, value, and competitiveness of keywords, but meaningful insights into their context and content as well.

The result is a full picture concerning the positive and negative feelings around those keywords. You can also capture the emotional response that content through user-generated comments. Thus, by the time you get to writing your own content, you know which words to use, which ones to avoid, and exactly how to position them.

Content Creation

Just like keyword monitoring, creating consistent and compelling content — meaning both quantity and quality — is non negotiable.
But how do you maintain a constant flow of ideas to fuel that need? Moreover, how can you ensure that the content you invest in is the right content?
A customized news crawler is a phenomenal source for inspiration as well as a data-driven method for determining what topics and subjects are already at the front of your audience’s mind.

But there’s another way of creating relevant content that news crawlers help with. It’s called newsjacking.

What is newsjack?

When something happens in your industry reporters, analysts, pundits, and bloggers look for experts to say something about it. Newsjacking is the practice of connecting with those experts and sharing your ideas and opinions.

The benefits of newsjacking include free media attention and exposing potential buyers to your company not as a salesperson … but as a thought leader.
The trouble is that it’s not easy to be proactive — especially to be first — if you don’t know exactly what’s happening in your industry and who’s writing about it.

That’s where a news crawler comes in and brings you all the trending stories in your industry automatically giving you a chance to “newsjack” and create relevant content before a fresh story becomes old.

Market Conditions

It’s obvious that if you’re conducting business in a certain industry staying current on that industry’s market conditions is a must

Nonetheless, it’s shocking how many business owners and marketers rely exclusively on their own historical data instead of scouring the internet for what’s happening right now. This could be due to the fact that market research is expensive in terms of time and resources. But it’s a vital part of business and it should be treated as so.

So how do you keep yourself and your team informed and ready to operate in the market?

A news crawler comes in handy by being the one tool that “roams” the market for you and comes back with all the important information on your market’s conditions in little time. It will help you understand your market in terms of:

• Pricing and demand.
• Product innovations.
• Buying trends.
• Customer response.
• Emerging leaders.

Influencer Outreach

Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful ways to boost to your online marketing efforts – if you do it right.
The first step is by knowing who to approach. There are obviously very many influencers in your market. Think all the reporters and thought leaders in your industry. However, only a few are best fit for your business at a particular time.

The second step involves building a human connection with your ideal influencer. And this is very important. When doing influencer outreach, you should remember that your number one goal is to establish a lasting relationship, not to come off as pushy or selfish.

To know who to approach and build a genuine and lasting relationship will take more than just creating a list and cold-emailing. Tracking who’s writing what is the first step to forming a relationship. This means you need to be up to date with what they’re passions and specialties are. What were their last three articles about? How were they received? Did they give a talk or host a seminar? And how does that align with your business?

A news crawler tracks all these activities and gives you full information on your target influencers. This information, makes it far easier to narrow down your list to the most suitable influencers at the time and reach out to them based on exactly what they’ve said and done.

In Conclusion

From helping you manage your brand reputation to generating keyword insights to improving your own content marketing to monitoring the conditions of your market to connecting with influencers, a customized news crawler is an indispensable tool in your business’ online success.

Ready to learn more? Take a look at our News API now.