“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from others’ mistakes.”
Warren Buffet said that. And he’s absolutely right.
The best way to avoid making mistakes is to learn from someone else’s mistakes. It’s hard to recognize your own wrongdoings until you analyze the performance of your competitors, and by then it’s often too late. If you want your SaaS company to flourish, especially in terms of customer engagement, then examining your direct competitors’ SaaS SEO strategy is an important step.
In this guide, we pay homage to Mr. Buffet’s philosophy and discuss everything under the sun about competitive analysis – its definition, practical applications, and ways to successfully conduct competitor analysis.
Let’s jump straight into it!
What is Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis involves the study, research, analysis, and comparison of your company’s competitors. It allows businesses to evaluate their main competitors and examine their SaaS SEO strategies, products, sales, marketing strategies, and customer retention tactics. Thus, you will be in a position to understand your competitors’ highs and lows, navigate through successful strategies, avoid disastrous tactics and witness your business flourish.
Competitive analysis can also help you find strategies that outperform the competition as you stay updated on the latest trends, understanding what works and what doesn’t.
Your competitors can be divided into two categories: direct and indirect.
Direct competitors are companies that have products almost identical to your own. They may solve the same issues as yours and have identical target audiences.
Meanwhile, indirect competitors offer a variety of products while targeting the same market. They may not have the exact same product as you but due to the comparable target market, use strategies that could benefit you as well.
Also, remember! Keep an eye out for companies that aren’t currently your competitors but may come in contention in the future.
Why Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis is like scouting your opponent’s sports team for strengths and weaknesses before a game. It not only provides valuable data about them, but it also allows you to reflect on your own.
The following are some of the advantages of competitive analysis:
- Analyzes strengths and weaknesses – yours as well as your competitors’.
- Identifies prospective market options.
- Helps develop your value proposition.
- Simplifies learning from others’ mistakes.
How to Conduct Competitive Analysis
Identify Your Competitors
The first step in conducting a competitive analysis is to identify your direct and indirect competitors.
How do you do this?
Well, for starters, you can just Google your product.
Your competitors are likely to have reviews or blog sites that describe their products. You can start by looking for articles with titles comparable to your products or solutions.
SWOT Analysis of Your Competitors
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis is largely a tool for assessing an organization’s internal environment. Making one for your competitors is a smart place to start before you begin to compare your results.
Strengths
What are the strengths of your competitors’ SEO practices? What elements of their strategies perform successfully in the marketplace? You can identify these core assets and use them as a starting point to discover how your company compares to others.
Weakness
Find out the weak links in your B2B SaaS competitors’ SEO strategies. You can do this by comparing them to your own strategies, or to a company with a successful SEO structure in place, and find out where they’re lacking. This is a great way to find optimum solutions to your own shortcomings in an efficient manner.
Opportunities
Opportunities are trends or events that may favour a company, such as emerging product needs or less competition in your domain. This helps you plan out your next strategies for your SEO, for example, using a trending subject to enhance your visibility.
Threats
Threats can hurt businesses. Security issues, data breaches, and new competitors are some sources of threats for SaaS companies. Identifying these threats for your competitors allows you to reflect in terms of your own company, and set up contingencies for them.
Also Read: Are You Targeting the Right Audience For Your SaaS Company? Find Out Now!
Mistakes to Avoid While Conducting Competitive Analysis
Now that you have an understanding of how to conduct competitive analysis, let’s focus on a few common mistakes to avoid while doing so:
- Being unwise with data
Data is not the sole decision-making factor when it comes to competitive analysis. Though numbers are crucial for data analytics and statistics they can be extremely misleading if considered in the wrong context.
Remember! Do not blindly follow the data without understanding the bigger picture.
- Doing it too less or too often
Analyzing your SaaS competitors often makes sense prior to your product launch or before ramping up your marketing activities. But remember, competitive analysis is not a one-time process. It must be an iterative process that allows you to keep learning from others’ (and your own) mistakes and successes, to create sustainable growth.
On the other hand, doing it too often is not ideal either and might cause you to overanalyze and complicate simple decisions, pushing them until you have enough data, eventually failing to make the right call at the right time.
The sweet spot? Up to 2-4 times a year.
- Analyzing too many competitors
Competitive analysis is but one aspect of a successful SaaS company. It makes little sense to spend most of your time analyzing an unrealistic number of competitors. Depending on how crowded your SaaS niche is, monitoring up to 5 competitors is enough to give you a good idea of the market.
Most of your competitive rivals whose product offerings and pricing models are similar to your own while targeting a similar buyer persona will feature in that list of 5.
So there you go. You are now armed with the knowledge to gather insights about your competitors and primed to learn from their actions. Conducting a competitive analysis allows you to gauge your market standing, customer satisfaction, and new industry trends, and sets you up for the future.
If you’re still unsure how competitive analysis can work for you or want more information on how to use the data from your competitors, we have a team of proficient digital marketers who can do it for you! Reach out to us at +91 99864 60086 or email us at [email protected] and book a consult today!
Bonus! Want to learn more about creating the perfect growth plan for your SaaS product?
GET FREE ACCESS TO Our SaaS Growth Plan Ebook.
An experienced Marketer with a demonstrated history of working in the digital marketing and advertising industry. Aravind is skilled in building ROI driven marketing strategy, digital strategy planning, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social media marketing, Search engine marketing, Landing Page Optimization, Web development, Media planning Google certified analytics and PPC expert.