SaaS Competitive Analysis Essentials: Monitoring Competitors' Marketing Moves

Does this sound like you?

You’ve launched your SaaS product after all the blood, sweat, and tears you’ve put into it, sure of the benefits it will bring to the masses, or at least your target market. 

However, things don’t go as you’ve hoped they would. 

Your marketing campaigns lose steam and your competitors are outpacing you. 

You’re struggling to keep up. 

Where did it all go wrong?

You’re not alone. In today’s competitive market with fickle customers and new developments every day, many SaaS companies struggle to stay afloat. 

No wonder it’s a challenge to capture the hearts of your potential customers. 

And as they say, knowledge is power. If you want to be competitive, you have to know the competition as much as you know your company. 

You need to answer questions like “How are your peers positioning themselves?” “What campaigns are they running?” “What are their blind spots?”, and “What are their strengths and weaknesses?”

The single most powerful thing you can do to find out all that information and more is to conduct a SaaS competitive analysis. 

With it, you can gain valuable insights into your competitor and your target market. 

You’ll be in the know–the latest trends and developments will be at the palm of your hand. 

You can even discover where your competitor is falling short and how you can leverage it. 

SaaS competitive analysis puts you back in the driver’s seat so you can make better decisions backed by data and make your brand soar. 

If that sounds like something you’re up for, keep reading because in this article, we’ll talk about what SaaS competitive analysis is, what it can do for your business, and how to conduct your own competitive analysis in a few steps. 

Let’s go!

Monitor your SaaS competitor’s marketing strategy in 6 steps

• What is SaaS Competitive Analysis?
• What are the Advantages of SaaS competitive Analysis?
  • Strengthen your Unique Value Proposition (USP)
  • Give your strategy a refresh
  • Have a competitive advantage
  • Pinpoint opportunities
  • Reverse-engineer successful strategies
  • Understand your customer better
• How to Conduct SaaS Competitor Analysis
  • Step 1. Identify Your Top Competitors
  • Step 2. Research Their Offerings
  • Step 3. Examine Their Marketing Strategies
  • Step 4. Observe customer engagement, reviews, and feedback
  • Step 5. Analyze Strengths and Weaknesses
  • Step 6. Formulate a plan
• Competitive Analysis Frameworks
  • SWOT Analysis
  • Porter’s Five Forces 
  • Feature Comparison Matrix
• Recommended Tools for Conducting SaaS Competitive Analysis
  • Panoramata
  • SEMRush
  • Ahrefs
  • Ubersuggest
  • Moz
  • BuzzSumo
  • Hootsuite Streams
• Sharpen your competitive analysis in the SaaS industry
• Frequently Asked Questions
  • How do I find my competitor's marketing strategy?
  • How to do SaaS competitor analysis?

What is SaaS Competitive Analysis?

SaaS competitive analysis is the process of monitoring competitors in the SaaS industry and looking at their marketing strategies and online presence.

A complete competitive analysis includes research and data gathering about your competitors’ products, social media platforms, SEO, ads, and other content.

What are the advantages of SaaS competitive analysis?

SaaS competitive analysis has several benefits for your business

Strengthen your Unique Value Proposition (USP)

What is the biggest reason your prospect should buy from you? 

You need to get this right by testing it multiple times. 

If your competitor has a similar product or service, you need a solid USP that will draw your target customers to you. 

It may seem like an arduous process but competitive analysis in SaaS is well worth it. The benefits will speak for themselves.

Competitive analysis gives you information on how you can improve your USP and enhance your website and landing page copy through that improved USP.

Give your strategy a refresh

If you’re not conducting competitive analysis, your strategy might be stuck in the Middle Ages. 

Sticking to the same old things that have worked in the past is all well and good but it’s not enough if you want to boost your brand and increase your conversions. 

Have you tried looking at what methods work in your industry? Let your competitors be your guide. 

With competitive analysis, you’ll keep your fingers on the pulse of the market and know the latest trends. 

Have a competitive advantage

You ultimately want to beat the competition and have all that revenue to yourself.

Competitive analysis is the way to claim a competitive advantage once and for all. Monitoring your competitors allows you to discover their weak spots. 

Maybe their product pages are lackluster. 

Maybe their ads don’t get enough engagement. 

You won’t know these weaknesses or leverage them until you track and analyze your competitors.

Pinpoint opportunities

A SaaS competitive analysis helps you identify opportunities to seize before your competitor does. 

You need to differentiate yourself. You don’t want to have the same offerings or content your competitor has. 

Audiences want something new and different. And in order to find that shiny new thing, you need to look beyond your product. 

Competitive analysis will be the spring you draw on for ideas to finetune your marketing. 

Reverse-engineer successful strategies

Of course, your competitors are doing something right, too. 

Your job with competitive analysis is not only to turn their shortcomings into opportunities but also to use their successes for your successes. 

You can discover which tactics are working for them, what type of content performs best for your shared audience, and what strategies to adopt in your own marketing. Competitive analysis will show you the way.

Understand your customer better

Finally, competitive analysis will enlighten you about the most important piece of your marketing strategy: your customer. 

Your audience is dynamic. Their needs change and your marketing and product need to evolve with them. 

What your competitor’s customers say about your competitor is a goldmine of information for what makes your audience tick. 

They’ll help you find out what needs are not being met by your competitor and how you can swoop in to save the day.

How to Conduct SaaS Competitor Analysis

I’ll take you step by step through the process of competitor analysis for SaaS companies. First off, we’ll start with…

Step 1. Identify Your Top Competitors

The first step in a competitor analysis is to determine who your competitors are and who are worth monitoring. 

If you don’t know where to start, try these two methods of identifying your competitors:

Use search engines

Google knows best. Look up your product category on Google and see which tools come up. 

For example, you can search for “best appointment scheduling tools” and it will give you articles about tools that fit those keywords. 

Check SaaS review websites

Review sites such as G2 and Capterra have categories for almost any type of SaaS tool under the sun. 

Again, you can input your product category or keywords and it will yield a complete list of the tools in their database. 

Step 2. Research Their Offerings

Once you’ve made a list of competitors to analyze, you can start exploring their product. 

With SaaS, unlike with ecommerce, it’s relatively easy to get ahold of products. You just need to sign up and start tinkering with their website (and they often have free plans, too).

Use this to your advantage and learn all you can the features and functionalities of their offering. 

Points to examine include how user-friendly their product is, if there are any bugs or technical issues, how accessible their support team is, and how they price their products.

Step 3. Examine Their Marketing Strategies

After you have a good grasp of their product’s features, you’re ready to do a deep dive into your competitor’s marketing strategy. 

Examine their digital footprint and information like what keywords they’re targeting (using tools like Ahrefs), their backlink profile, content types, CTAs, blog posts, and email marketing. 

You can also visit their website and do some spying. Check the user navigation and ease of use. 

Does their website load slowly or quickly? Does it look good on mobile? Compare these to your website and see what you can improve. 

Step 4. Observe customer engagement, reviews, and feedback

Just as important as what your competitor is saying to promote themselves is what their customers are saying about them. 

Observe how your competitor interacts with bad reviews, good reviews, and suggestions or feedback. 

Also, take note of negative reviews and see if there are any related issues on their platform.

Step 5. Analyze Strengths and Weaknesses

Now, with all the information you’ve gathered in the previous steps, you are in a position to evaluate your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. 

One way to do this is to use a SWOT analysis to spot the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your competitor so you can come up with a plan to outpace them.

Step 6. Formulate a plan

Lastly, you need to put your analysis into action and come up with a plan. 

Use the insights you’ve gleaned to improve your product, content, SEO, and overall business strategies.

3 Competitive Analysis Frameworks You Can Try 

SWOT Analysis

This is a classic for a reason. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. 

As the name suggests, in SWOT analysis, you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and leverage any opportunities and threats. 

It’s straightforward and doesn’t take a lot of time to do.

Porter’s Five Forces 

Another popular competitive analysis framework is Porter’s Five Forces. It’s where you evaluate the five forces involved in any industry. These forces are:

1. competitive rivals
2. the potential for new entrants
3. the negotiating power of suppliers
4. the negotiating power of customers
5. the ability of customers to find substitutes

Feature Comparison Matrix

For a granular analysis, try using the feature comparison matrix. It allows you to compare multiple competitors and analyze each of their product features. 

Through this process, you can refine your USP and check for gaps and opportunities in your product.

Recommended Tools for Conducting SaaS Competitive Analysis

• Panoramata
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• Ubersuggest
• Moz
• BuzzSumo
• Hootsuite Streams

Sharpen your competitive analysis in the SaaS industry

To sum it up, a thorough competitive analysis for SaaS companies starts with identifying competitors using Google and review websites. 

You then have to examine their product and see how it stacks up against your product. Their marketing activity and customer engagement is also a crucial component of the analysis. 

Lastly, you need to put all this information together and conduct an analysis using a suitable framework before putting together a plan to better position your product in the market and improve your strategy.

It may seem like an arduous process but competitive analysis in SaaS is well worth it. The benefits will speak for themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find my competitor's marketing strategy?

You can find your competitor’s marketing strategy by checking their website and exploring their product. 

You can then examine their SEO performance, social media presence, email marketing, and other aspects using online tools like Ahrefs and Panoramata

How to do SaaS competitor analysis?

You can conduct a SaaS competitor analysis by first determining who your competitors are, whether direct or indirect.

Next, you can research their products, observe their web presence, dissect customer feedback and reviews, and conduct an analysis using a suitable competitive analysis framework like SWOT analysis.