Strategic Insights: A Practical Approach to Competitor Research in B2B SaaS

The development of a proper content positioning and distribution strategy is not limited to understanding the strengths and advantages of your business and services alone. It is also necessary to have a deep understanding of other players in your market and how you compare to them. Conducting competitor research is a necessary step towards achieving complete success.

Through proper competitor research, you can see how your SaaS product and marketing approach compare to that of your competitors. This involves not only whether your offering has characteristics that allow you to stand out, but also whether your messaging will differentiate you from the crowd. For example, while your customer support may be the best in your industry, if all of your competitors frequently talk about the strength of their customer support, your statements about the same advantage are likely to be drowned out in the crowd.

To ensure that you are spending time on studying the relevant aspects of each company (and not wasting effort on insignificant ones), we will examine here the key points that need to be studied when researching each of your competitors. Before starting your own research, don’t forget to download our template below, which outlines the main provisions for recording and systematizing the results obtained.

The first step in conducting competitor research is, of course, selecting the closest and most significant competitors. To start, try to choose no more than 15, and ideally no more than 10. Not only do you not want to waste time studying all the other companies that a potential customer might choose, but the more competitors you include in your research, the less focused it will be. Try to only consider your direct competitors, those whom your audience regularly chooses instead of you, and who operate within the same set of features and advantages.

Once you have a selection of companies, it’s time to start working in a decreasing order of importance, paying attention to the key characteristics of each:

• Company Overview
• Positioning vectors
• Product Catalog ratings and reviews
• Pricing
• Target audience
• Value propositions
• Features
• Advantages

Company Overview

The first step in studying competitors is the easiest. Look at your competitors’ LinkedIn and home pages to determine some brief facts about them:

• How long have they been in business?
• How big is their team?
• What does their brand look and feel like?
• How do they briefly describe their activity in a slogan?

Positioning Vectors

Positioning vectors are axes on which you can compare yourself to your competitors. At the end of this exercise, you should find a couple of vectors on which you will occupy the first place.

Selecting two or three vectors on which, in your opinion, you will occupy the highest positions, assign ranks of 1 to 10 to your competitors on each of these axes. If you have selected the right positioning vectors, you will have the highest rating on at least two of them.

The first set of vectors you choose may not be the one you end up with. If during your research, you discover that the vectors you have chosen do not position you as No. 1, continue to use new ones until you find a suitable set for you.

Product Ratings and Reviews

Product review websites will be frequent stops for your audience when they reach the decision-making stage in the buyer’s journey and are choosing between your service and similar options. Studying your presence on these sites and your competitors’ presence will give you a good idea of which of these sites are important in your industry, as well as how people generally feel about your competitors’ services.

If most of your competitors receive dozens of positive reviews on these sites, you will want to make targeted efforts to increase your presence on them so that potential customers are not deterred by your star rating.

Pricing

Pricing will either be the easiest or the most challenging part of your competitor research. If you work in an industry where services are generally inexpensive, you will likely find that almost all of your competitors have pricing pages on their websites. In industries with high contract costs and individual corporate pricing models, your chances of finding publicly available prices are slim.

If you can’t find prices on competitors’ websites, turn to product catalogs or any forums and industry groups where your audience may be discussing competitors’ products. You can often find consumers discussing services with specific price links.

If all else fails, another common method is mystery shopping, where you pretend to be a customer and approach competitors for pricing information.

Audience

Who, according to your competitors, is the best audience for their product?

When studying your competitors’ audience, pay attention to how they position themselves in terms of company size, industry, and personnel. Choose the primary audience for your industry, and then see how often these audiences appear on your competitors’ websites.

By knowing who your audience is targeted towards, you can determine which areas of your total addressable market (TAM) are already covered and where there are gaps. Addressing the generally accepted target audience provides some assurance that they are interested in the overall solution you are offering and aware of it, but it may be difficult to establish a foothold in a fiercely competitive environment. If you decide to target a more niche audience, it may be easier to establish yourself, but you will first need to speak to people in that audience to determine whether there are genuine needs and desires.

Value Propositions

Value propositions are the key advantages that your competitors claim. These are the core elements that separate your business from the competition. Pay attention to the top three or four main points that each of your competitors emphasizes in their offer, and which they believe are the most important in demonstrating their value and differentiation.

Features

Features are an important part of competitive research, but their importance is often overestimated. Many B2B SaaS companies start and end their competitive research by comparing product features. While this will give you an idea of what advantages your product has or where it falls short compared to others, it will not give you any insight into how they position themselves.

You may indeed have a unique offering in terms of features, but you also need to understand how to make your messaging and positioning stand out from the rest.

Therefore, when creating a feature comparison table, comparing yourself and your competitors on what common features you have and what you don’t, just remember that those features that differentiate you can only do so if you can articulate them correctly. When writing about each feature in the future, be sure to think of them in terms of the “pain-claims-benefit” concept.

Advantages

In this section, you should create a grid of the main advantages promoted by your competitors. While features are the means by which a person solves their problem, solution benefits are the final results and solutions they hope to achieve.

After obtaining a list of the most common benefits that your competitors talk about, revisit each competitor’s website to note who is talking about these benefits, which benefits are most often mentioned, and which are not. Use this to find gaps in your competitors’ messaging: find the benefits that you can claim, but that others rarely, if ever, advertise, and use them to create a positioning niche for yourself.

After gathering all the data, take the time to write down the key elements of your offering and positioning that will give you an advantage over each competitor. You will likely continue to refer to the results of your competitive analysis when developing and refining your marketing strategy, and this will serve as a primary and quick reference for you to revisit. This is also an excellent exercise for gathering your thoughts about your competitors and finding the best way to present yourself in comparison to their company.

What’s Next

Not every element of your competitive analysis will be immediately useful, but it should serve as a constant reference point when creating guides, branding, or developing market entry strategies. You need to be an expert in what your audience sees when searching for a product similar to yours, and understand what your competitors are doing to position themselves as the best choice.

Conduct your own B2B SaaS competitive analysis using our free competitive analysis template. Get a complete picture of the competitive landscape. Identify gaps in your competitors’ features and positioning, and find where you can stand out. Test your strategic assumptions and find out what truly makes you unique.