<![CDATA[If you’re involved in SaaS I’m sure you’re familiar with the likings of Capterra, GetApp, G2Crowd and their gazillion cousins. When I started at Salesflare, I was obsessed with these websites. Not because they would get us tons of leads. They just don’t if you’re not willing to open up your wallet big time for a good listing. No, I used to browse them for hours because of the gazillion reviews people left our competitors. It was a great way to get to know our target audience and their needs. It helped me figure out what kind of value we needed to create to win them over. Today, I know who our target customers are and I know what kind of value they’re looking for. The game has shifted from getting to know them to put the moves on them. Which brings us to the next phase: how do you target all those target customers at scale? This guide will walk you through the steps needed to get target customers like these in front of your value using cold emails, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn automation. We’ll be taking Capterra as an example but you can make this work for any webpage that provides you with at least the following three elements:
- first name
- last name
- company name
Here’s what a typical Capterra review looks like (for workflow automation gem Zapier)
In addition to the name of the reviewer and the company he/she represents, we’ll also have their role and their industry. Zapier has 130 reviews on Capterra. Of course, there’s no way we’re going to manually copy and paste all of that data. Welcome to the Scrapocalypse ⛏Process:
- 1: Create a scraping recipe with Recipe Creator
- 2: Scrape it. Scrape it real good with DataMiner
- 3: Match Company Names with Domains using PhantomBuster
- 4: Use FindThatLead to find email addresses for cold emailing
- 5: Match personal addresses to make Facebook Audiences with FindThatLead
- 6: Match LinkedIn Profiles with PhantomBuster
- 7: Automate LinkedIn outreach with Dux-Soup
Targeting possibilities:
- Cold email
- Facebook Ads
- LinkedIn outreach and automation
Tools:
- Microsoft Excel and/or Google Sheets
Step 1: Create a scraping recipe with Recipe Creator
There’s tons of scraping tools out there. To get the data we want, we don’t need something fancy schmancy. DataMiner is a free and easy Chrome extension that does the job. First thing you’ll need to do is set up DataMiner to scrape the data you want, creating a recipe for it. I’d happily share mine in the public DataMiner directory but I’d need to have a paid subscription to do that, which I don’t. Instead, I’ll just tell you how to create the recipe yourself, which will also get you acquainted with data scraping logic. Once you get a hang of this, no data on the web will be safe for you anymore. First, download Recipe Creator — another Chrome extension that will work together with DataMiner. Open it up on the page you want to scrape and click ‘New Recipe’. You’ll now be taken through a process that’ll help you define the data you want to retrieve from the review page. Check out this 2-minute video for instructions: https://youtu.be/XZY1KQq62hE This recipe will work for every Capterra product page you’d ever want to scrape.Step 2: Scrape it real good with DataMiner
Time to mine the gold. Open the DataMiner Chrome extension and select the recipe you just created with Recipe Creator. Bam. Names, roles, company names, industries and company sizes. Hit ‘Download’ on the bottom of the DataMiner UI for a .CSV with the results. Pretty sweet but not quite enough have them fall into your web. Yet.Step 3: Match Company Names with Domains using PhantomBuster
(There is an alternative way to retrieve Domains. This involves getting LinkedURLs from names + company names (with another PhantomBuster script) and then revisiting/scraping those LinkedIn profiles using Dux-Soup. Head over to Step 5–6 if this sounds more like your jam.) To find email addresses, we need (1) names and (2) domains. Names we already have. Domains we can find by running the Company Names through a search engine and getting the first result, which will be the company’s website in about 90% of the cases. No, we’re not going to do this manually.You’re a human being. This is robot’s work so we’ll have a robot do it.
PhantomBuster is a platform that gives you the power to automate repetitive data scraping tasks like this one. You just have to tell it what to do. We to set up a bot that automatically runs search queries in Google for each of the company names, then save the first result in a column of a .CSV export file. That is exactly what this script does. You can follow these steps to set up the script in PhantomBuster and run it to retrieve Company Domains from a list of Company Names:- Head over to Phantombuster and create a free account.
- Select ‘Agents’ from the top menu and Create a ‘New Agent’ from the form on the top.
- You’ll be taken to a scary-looking code interface. Stay calm, you just need to copy-paste a script into it.
- There may be some pre-filled code into. Empty everything (Select All > Delete/Backspace) and copy-paste the code from this script.
- The script will source Company Names from a Google Sheet. Copy the contents of the .CSV with scraped data you got from DataMiner into a Google Sheet and paste the link into the script as shown in the screenshot. Make sure to delete everything after the first combination of letters/numbers when you paste it in.
- The script will source company names from the column with header ‘Column’. If you followed the scraping script from Step 1 this should be fine.
- Go into ‘Settings’ and set a number higher than 0 for ‘number of retries’. Google has the tendency to block IPs if a certain number of searches are run from the same IP in quick succession. The script will relaunch and use another IP if this happens.
- Click ‘Launch’ — you’ll get something like this.
- Download the .CSV with the Company Domains – this will be called output.csv
Step 4: Use FindThatLead to find email addresses for cold emailing
FindThatLead is a badass lead finder tool that will get you email addresses from inputs like names and domains. From the data we have gathered, there’s two things we can do with FindThatLead:- ‘Domain Search’ to retrieve emails linked to a Domain
- ‘Lead Search’ to find specific emails from First Name, Last Name and Domain
Domain Search
All you need: a .CSV with a ‘Domain’ column — FindThatLead will get you emails for every domain.Lead Search
To find the email addresses of specific people at companies, you’ll need a .CSV with three columns: First Name, Last Name and Domain. Since you scraped the names in full, you’ll need to split first name and last name. The fastest way to do this in Excel is to select the column containing the name and then using Data > Text to Columns, using ‘Space’ as delimiter. A free FindThatLead account will get you 10 credits per day, so you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. Here’s the thing though: you won’t find anything cheaper that is as good.Step 5: Find LinkedIn Profiles with PhantomBuster
Having names and domains also allows us to match reviewers with LinkedIn Profile URLs. Similar to how we matched Domains to Company Names, we’ll have PhantomBuster automate scraping Google to retrieve LinkedIn URLs from name + company name. Yes, you’ll need another script. The steps to have PhantomBuster execute it are essentially the same as the ones described in Step 3.- create a New Agent
- empty the terminal and copy-paste the script
- link a Google Sheet containing names and company names. The script will take names from column A and company names from column C. This is based on the scraping recipe outlined in Step 1
- Run the script hitting ‘Launch’
- Download .CSV with results
1 comment
Clark
I’m really interested in automation at the moment so this article is very helpful. I’ve started using a tool called Salesloop (www.salesloop.io). It’s working well, in case any of your readers might be interested?