Corporate Data: How to Collect and Use It to Grow Your Business

It’s no secret that big data is a major driver of almost all business decisions. If your company isn’t clear on the value of corporate data and how to best collect and use it, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. Companies from small businesses, to government agencies, to Fortune 500 businesses, strategically use data to increase their performance.

But, even if you know about the importance of corporate data, you might still be wondering about the best ways to collect this information. In this article, we’ll talk about how you can use proxies to collect this kind of scalable data for your business to use in a variety of ways. Feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the sections that interest you most.

What Is Corporate Data?

Corporate data includes any information that is valuable to your business. This can include concrete financial data such as the cost of raw materials or more nebulous concepts such as your customers’ sentiment about your brand messaging. The types of data most useful to you will vary depending on your industry and your goals. Data collection is a virtuous cycle, though. The more data you collect and analyze, the more you will be able to narrow down the data that is valuable to your company.

Corporate data for marketing strategy

One of the most impactful ways to use data is in your marketing campaigns. By using data to understand your ideal customer, you can gain a competitive edge in speaking to their needs. You know you need valuable content for your website and an effective social media strategy, but what should you write about, and how can you outrank your competitors? This is where a data collection strategy can help you. By gathering information from social media, search engines, and retail sites, you can hone in on what’s important to your customers and provide it to them.

Corporate data as a primary enterprise function

In this age of big data, simply having access to vast amounts of information isn’t enough. You need to understand what this data means to your business and how to use it to guide decisions on changes to your products, services, and marketing campaigns. Data can be a useless jumble of nonsense or one of your company’s most valuable assets, depending on how it’s used.

One of Gartner’s Top 10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2021 includes data and analytics as a core business function. It’s no longer enough for data collection and analysis to be a secondary consideration. The value of your business will increase if the people who understand the data are involved in setting goals and making decisions, whether that person is the chief data officer of a large corporation or the solopreneur in a one-person operation.

How Can You Implement a Corporate Data Management Strategy?

With a staggering amount of data being created every minute, figuring out how to sort through it and distill it into usable information can be overwhelming. Collecting and analyzing data manually is simply far too slow to be effective. Web scraping with proxies allows you to collect and export data from websites automatically.

You can set up a web scraper to collect all of the data on a website or just the information you’re interested in. After they finish corporate data mining, web scrapers can import the data into a spreadsheet or another useful format. Web scrapers have become an essential part of corporate data solutions for most companies.

The Best Approaches to Corporate Data Mining

While web scraping is the best way to collect a lot of data in the least amount of time, it does come with some challenges. Most websites don’t want to be mined for data. This may be because they don’t want their competitors to have access to their data, but it’s more often because websites don’t like bots in general. Many bots have malicious intent. If a website detects non-human behavior, such as requesting information from thousands of pages per second, it may ban you.

Since websites can ban you by blocking your IP address, you need a web proxy to mask that IP address and convince the website you’re trying to scrape that you’re not a threat. Web scrapers expect to be banned and are designed to be used with proxy IP addresses. By switching to a new proxy IP address each time an address is banned, your web scraper can continue corporate data mining until your project is complete.

Why Do You Need a Corporate Proxy

A corporate proxy IP address is an IP address that acts as an intermediary between you and the website you’re connecting to. Your IP address tells a website your general location. Your IP address is associated with where you connect to the internet, not the device you use. So, at home, all of your devices will generally have the same IP address. At work, you’ll have a different IP address. If you take your laptop to the beach on vacation, you’ll be using still a different IP address.

A proxy IP address hides your real address. There are a lot of reasons you might want to disguise your IP address besides web scraping. Many people choose corporate proxy IP addresses for security and privacy. Corporate proxies provide an additional layer of corporate data protection between you and hackers that may be trying to get your information. They also give you a level of anonymity that can be hard to come by in today’s digital landscape.

Different Types of Corporate Proxies

There are a lot of options when it comes to proxy IP addresses. There are even some places that offer free proxy addresses. However, using a free proxy server is a bad idea for several reasons. Most free proxy servers are not secure. They may also contain malware and make you vulnerable to hackers. There have even been cases of hackers setting up free proxy servers to gain access to their users’ sensitive data. Free proxies are also usually very slow due to the large number of people who use them.

Dedicated and semi-dedicated proxies

Depending on your budget and your needs, you can choose between dedicated or semi-dedicated corporate proxies. Semi-dedicated proxies are shared with up to three people. A dedicated proxy, as the name implies, is only used by your company.

There’s no doubt that dedicated proxies are better. They’re faster and give you full control. The only downside is that they’re more expensive than semi-dedicated proxies.

Static and rotating proxies

A static proxy will give you one IP address. While a static proxy IP address can be a great option for hiding your location and giving you anonymity, it’s not effective for web scraping, because it will get banned fairly quickly. A rotating proxy will frequently assign you new IP addresses. If you’re using a web scraper that makes thousands of different requests at the same time, each of those requests will be made with a different IP address.

Rotating proxies are more expensive than semi-dedicated or dedicated proxies. However, they’re ideal for web scraping because they decrease the chance you may get banned. They also offer more security and anonymity. Since they automatically rotate, you don’t have to worry about manually running scrapes yourself. Rotating proxies are, quite simply, the single best option for large-scale, corporate web scraping.

Datacenter and residential proxies

Datacenter proxies are hosted and produced in a data center and are not associated with internet service providers or physical addresses. Because of this, it’s fairly easy for websites to tell that datacenter proxies aren’t real users. They are likely to be banned quickly, and you’ll need a lot of IP addresses to get through your project.

Residential proxies are associated with internet service providers and specific locations. These IP addresses are the type you have at your home. Because these proxies look more like human users, they’re less likely to get banned. These are ideal for web scraping projects. However, they are more expensive, and you have to be sure they’ve been ethically sourced.

Rayobyte Corporate Proxies

Rayobyte is the largest and most reliable US-based corporate proxy provider. We understand the challenges that come with trying to figure out corporate data solutions and are committed to maximizing your uptime and minimizing bans. We have a tech team that’s available 24/7 to help with any issues. Our proxies run at speeds of 1 GBS, and we give you unlimited bandwidth.

If you’re interested in datacenter proxies, we have over 300,000 IP addresses. We offer you a choice of 9 ASNs. We have end-to-end hardware control, so we can guarantee you 99% uptime. We offer immediate proxy rotation and data center redundancy to make sure you always have access to the websites you need. This is often the most efficient and cheapest solution for businesses getting started in web scraping and corporate data solutions.

Residential proxies offer some substantial advantages over datacenter proxies, but they are associated with some challenges as well. Some sites ban all datacenter IP addresses. Some sites aren’t quite as drastic, but they may ban an entire ASN if they detect bot-like behavior from a particular datacenter proxy. Residential proxies are immune to this type of mass banning because sites don’t want to risk blocking too many legitimate customers.

The main problem with most residential proxies is that they are unethically sourced. Rayobyte is committed to doing business ethically, or not at all. All of our residential proxy IP addresses are obtained from users who have intentionally granted permission. They are fairly compensated and can opt out at any time. They also have some control over how their connections are used.

We are committed to working with you as a partner in your corporate data solutions. Reach out to us at any time. We’re here to help you with all things proxy-related.

Final Thoughts

An effective corporate data strategy is not just an essential part of doing business, it’s also an important part of your company’s valuation. Web scraping is the most effective tool you can use to collect and analyze data relevant to your industry. A reliable, ethical, and high-quality proxy provider can help your business achieve its long-term goals.

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