Searching for leads by the technology they use

19th Sep 2019

Finding relevant data from which to glean leads for your business is always a tricky exercise. You've basically got a few main options:

• buy a list, which will inevitably be either awful or awfully expensive, or
• use something like Endole to create a list of companies based on things like location and financials (which is essentially a form of buying a list)
• manually research the sorts of companies you might want to work with, through things like simple Google searches

But there's another way, and it's a way that can get you super targeted potential prospects if it suits your business and it's done right. Let's say you're a website developer who specialises in WordPress, for instance. Wouldn't it be great if you could just find out which websites local to you are running WordPress? You'd have more chance of closing those local deals, and you'd already know they were in your target market before you got in touch.

How would we go about that? There's a couple of steps:

1. Gather a list of websites
   This could be from your local chamber of commerce, for instance, or a quick Google search for "business in [location]"
2. Automate the process of checking which websites run on WordPress
   Two sub options:
   1. The fast: Get a developer to build you a quick script to run through those websites' source code and check for WordPress specific code (things like links containing the /wp-content/ folder)
   2. The slow: Use a Google sheet. One column can include the website addresses, and another can include a formula to look for that same WordPress specific code. That's done using the IMPORTXML function, i.e.
      =IMPORTXML([cell with the website address], "//link[contains(@href, 'wp-content')][position()=1]")
      then a final column makes the results of that human readable, i.e.:
      =IF(ISNA([cell with IMPORTXML]),False, IF(ISERROR([cell with IMPORTXML]),"Unknown",True))

That's not just limited to WordPress websites. If you deal with people who are running HotJar, for instance, you might look for their tracking code in the source of a website. The XPATH for that would be something like //script[contains(.,'function(h,o,t,j,a,r)')], just in case you're into that.

Ultimately, if the tech your customers are using can be found in the source code of websites using that tech, you can use this technique to drill down on your most likely prospects right from the off. You can easily ensure that your marketing message is on point from the first moment your prospect knows about you. That's pretty powerful.

Questions? Hit me up. Always happy to geek out about data extraction.