Step-by-Step Guide to Competition Research in SaaS: A Blueprint for Product Marketers, Growth and Leadership Teams

As a product marketer, growth strategist or leadership team member, you may have heard the call for "competitive research" at some point in your career.

But where do you begin, and how do you ensure that the research provides valuable insights that can be actioned?

Don't worry; you're not alone.

In this article, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step process for conducting effective competition research for your brand.

Here's how to get started:

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors

The first step in conducting competition research is identifying your competitors. To do this, you’ll need to conduct both an internal and external survey.

The internal survey should include employees from your organisation who can write down the names of three competitors and their reasoning for why they consider them to be your competitors.

The external survey should include customer feedback on what do they use and say about your competitors. This information can be gathered from customer interviews, recordings, written requests in the form of emails, form fills, and chat support.

You can also add third-party review pages like G2 into the mix to help you comprehensively understand your competitors.

Step 2: Differentiate Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Once you have identified your competitors, it’s time to differentiate between qualitative and quantitative research.

Qualitative research will give you an understanding of the competitive landscape by focusing on the quality of the copies, messaging, navigation structure, and overall aesthetic of the competitor's pages.

Whereas Quantitative research shall be a weighted average of the number of parameters on which users can get their work done through the platform

Step 3: Conduct Qualitative Research

Use any whiteboarding application to create buckets of all your competitors and analyse the following aspects

1. Copies
2. Aesthetic and Functional Design
3. Navigation
4. Messaging

Understanding the messaging of your competitors will give you an idea of what their differentiation is and what pain points they are trying to solve for their target audience.

Conducting qualitative research can provide you with several key benefits.

Out of which the primary use case is, it can help your team create battle cards for sales or customer-facing teams. This can help them with conversations with users and customers for upgrades or increasing form fill to paid customer conversions.

Step 4: Conduct Quantitative Research

To conduct quantitative research, you’ll need to break down user needs into discrete jobs and then rate different products or competitors on how well they allow users to accomplish those jobs.

This will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor and determine where you can differentiate your SaaS.

For Example

1. Ease of Use

1.1 - Can we assets for reuse: Will the platform allow you to save assets or designs for future use?

1.2 - Filters to easily: Can you create custom filters to sort?

2. Security

2.1 - Ensuring two-factor authentication: Is there a two-factor authentication feature at the account level to keep data safe and prevent security breaches?

2.2 - Soc-2 Compliance: Does the service have SOC-2 Type-1 compliance certification?

and more...

When rating different products or competitors, it’s important to have more than two people involved to minimize any biases.

Step 5: Evaluate the findings

With both qualitative and quantitative research, you should have a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape.

Extra Note - For better visualisation - Have a one pager document citing or linking all of your findings with an conclusion - It makes it easy to present to your leadership / management team

This information will help you understand your differentiation in the market and how you can position your brand to stand out from the rest. This further can be translated into a positioning map through computational excel frameworks

Get started on the your competitive research now - make informed decisions about your strategy and drive growth and success for your product