Market Research with SEO to Drive More Sales for B2B SaaS
Smart startups know how important market research is for understanding their customers and what they're looking for in content.
But here's the thing— Most companies do not have a clear process for market research, and most are reluctant to invest in it.
They know that if you don't know what your customers want, you'll never be able to produce content that appeals to them, thus selling.
What you’ll learn from this article?
- A 3 steps framework to learn about the competitors by just using Google
- Understanding the key features of your B2B SaaS, and others
- What are your competitor's niche & targeted audience
- New content ideas coming from actual pain points
You’ll not get...
- The feedback that an actual customer interview or internal insights can bring you
Who is this for?
SEOs and Growth marketers need to understand better the B2B software they work for (& its industry) in order to create better content ideas & ultimately better results.
What is competitor analysis? How does it relate to market research?
Marketing research is a simple, yet effective tool to help you get a better idea of how your software is performing in the market and how should it be marketed. It can also give you insight into what your customers want, need, and expect from your company. But many companies fail at doing this well. In fact, some don't even have any sort of market research task or processes involved!
Competitor analysis is simply the act of doing market research but this time looking at potential advantages and disadvantages of other software.
Good marketing research should:
- Help you understand better your customers’ pain points. And how your product can solve their lives. And thus, write content that brings more revenue. Brendan Hufford, arguably one of the most reputable names in the SaaS SEO space, explains in this Youtube video at minute 40:00 about content that drives revenue and not necessarily being “SEO friendly”.
- Help you know what are the marketing distribution channels of your customer
- Help you know what is the language and location of your customers, and decide if multilanguage content is needed.
- Help you get to know the customer's needs, and gain better insights on what features should be pushed
How to do market research for a B2B SaaS with just SEO
In this case, we’ll do some hypothetical market research study for software you may already know called Drift (a B2B Conversational SaaS).
Let’s suppose Drift doesn’t have any marketing research placed, and we are going to:
- Create an awesome study on their current competitors (Intercom, Chatra, etc), and what Drift’s product excels at.
- Lookup at potential features their competitors are missing and their main pitfalls.
All this research with just Google. No calls.
Before the research
- I don’t know what Drift is all about, how different is it from Intercom?
- If I were to create an article that would resonate with Drift what could it be?
- What is Drift not doing in SEO & Content terms compared to its competitors?
After the research
- Drift is not just a conversational solution, actually, it is very different from X, and they are trying to specifically solve X
- One good piece of content they don’t have that matches the Customer Persona, and tackles a pain point they solve is X TITLE
- Intercom has this X program, ETC (here I have to put something based on the findings)
1. Create a list of 7 competitors in Excel
You can COPY THE COMPETITOR ANALYSIS EXCEL TEMPLATE HERE
List your competitors by using G2 alternatives.
Alternatively, if G2 doesn’t have competitor data for your software, use your direct competitor’s competitors.
2. Use the following questions
- Describe their product, and what it does
- What is their pricing page showing? What are their plans?
- What are their main marketing channels? (Could be content, LinkedIn, cold, etc)
- How do they attract clients? (Brainstorm based on their website)
- What are they doing really well?
- What is their Ideal Customer Profile? (which type & size of businesses)
- What are their pitfalls & limitations? (Use G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, GetApp, Trustradius)
3. Enrich your data by looking at reviews at G2, and see what are the cons of your competitors
G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, and GetApp are some of those software review sites.
With that data, you can add an extra row to Excel using the negative reviews and find the possible shortcomings of your competitor.
That’s how you are able to answer the following question:
- What are their pitfalls & limitations?
Conclusion
The importance of market research for content marketing is like the importance of your lungs for breathing. If you don't have a system to make sure your lungs are healthy and ready to do their job, then you're in trouble. And if you don't have a system in place to keep your marketing content healthy, if it's not looking out for its customers' pain points and trying to understand the market as a whole, it's going to be in disarray. In fact, it'll be worse than disarray: it'll be chaos. It'll be a disaster waiting to happen.
So, I encourage you to:
- Analyze your current competition by looking at their reviews, and trying to write down the cons
- Do not keep the sales from your marketing strategy aside from content selection + creation
- Find the “use cases” of your competitors, by simply looking at your competitors’ navbar, usually, they have some dropdowns named “solutions” or “product”.