How to Help Your SaaS Business Stand Out in Highly Competitive Markets

The SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) industry has experienced tremendous growth over the past decade. Even before the pandemic pushed businesses to adopt more cloud-based products and services to help sustain their operations without relying on on-premise infrastructure, SaaS solutions became an important part of organizational growth strategies.

The great thing about this added demand is that businesses now have a variety of SaaS options to choose from when trying to streamline their operations or enable custom services for their customers and partners.

While this increased solution availability is great for consumers, it has created a much more competitive market for SaaS providers.

With the SaaS market continuing to expand, it’s important for SaaS businesses to identify the right strategies for moving the needle on their business development efforts.

Thankfully, there are a variety of proven ways you can make sure you’re maximizing your business’s exposure and sales conversion percentages.

Know Who You’re Up Against

Before you can start improving your sales or marketing approach, it’s important to first get a lay of the land.

The type of competition you’re up against will have a large impact on how you should approach the market. This applies not only to the market segments you’ll want to focus on but also to how you construct your marketing budgets.

Competitor analysis isn’t something you want to rush. Passively looking online for other companies that sell similar SaaS solutions to your own doesn’t give you the insights you need to help your business stand out.

Instead, you’ll want to invest additional resources into your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis and use this process to help identify your biggest hurdles to reaching your market share goals.

This will push you to dig deeper when trying to understand exactly how your competitor’s offerings and marketing approaches stack up against your own and help you to prioritize solutions for addressing them.

Put the Market First

Knowing and responding to the competition is a good first step to take as a SaaS provider. But basing all of your marketing decisions strictly on what your competitors are doing is the wrong approach.

While knowing where your business ranks in terms of market positioning is important for business strategy development, listening and responding to the “market’s needs” is much more effective.

SaaS solutions are highly scalable by their design, meaning it doesn’t take long before many different offerings share the same feature sets or provide the same type of integrations as other brands. This is why focusing too hard on what your competitors are doing isn’t really the best way to start standing out.

In order to come up with a completely unique value proposition, you need to put the same amount, if not more, focus on what the market is actually telling you. This means looking for opportunities to engage with your audience across different platforms and making good use of feedback surveys to help guide your marketing decisions.

Validate Before You Push

After you’ve identified relevant market gaps you want to explore, you’ll want to make sure you validate any ideas before committing to many resources.

Proceeding with caution anytime you’re testing out new sales or marketing strategies is always the best approach and helps you to avoid costly mistakes that can be hard to bounce back from.

There are a number of different ways you can validate your ideas before moving to full execution. From a marketing standpoint, conducting A/B tests across different platforms or when building new advertising campaigns is a much more cost-effective way to identify inefficiencies in your approach, allowing you to course-correct before wasting too much time or valuable resources.

When thinking about your product design processes, creating an MVP (minimum viable product) allows you to soft launch SaaS products and features to a select group of customers before committing to a full-scale release.

This is one of the most important elements of safely introducing new SaaS products in the marketplace, as an onslaught of early negative reviews will quickly derail your ability to scale.

Niche Down Your Marketing Focus

When entering various markets, it’s often tempting for SaaS providers to cast as wide a net as possible to help them gain quick visibility for their brand and gather new interest. However, in almost all cases, this marketing approach leads to the highest costs with the lowest gains.

A much more sustainable approach is to shift focus to smaller, more niche market segments that have much less competition to contend with.

When you do this, you’re able to narrow your sales and marketing focus, allowing you to specialize in specific industry verticals and maximize your lead generation and conversion rates.

Even though niche markets have fewer buyers that fit highly unique use cases, they can also be highly profitable when you put a concerted effort into engaging with the applicable businesses the market represents.

Rather than starting off with wider and much more expensive market approaches, start off small and build from there.

Incorporate the Technologies That Matter Most

There are many opportunities for SaaS developers to create a highly useful product for their customers. However, maintaining that value over time requires real work to be done.

This is especially true when it comes to identifying the various technology requirements your customers have and how to integrate them effectively into your offerings.

With so many SaaS products on the market, it can be very easy for customer loyalties to shift, especially when other brands are offering more features for less investments. To help avoid this, it’s important to stay up-to-date on relevant technologies that can make your products even better.

AI-driven solutions, for example, are highly sought after by many companies now looking to add more automation to their daily workflows.

Not all new technologies will serve your audience’s needs or make financial sense to integrate, but it’s important to always look for ways you can continue to develop and improve your products with new innovative features your customers are actively looking for.

Keep Your Business Flexible

Most businesses put in a significant amount of hours and exhaust extensive budgets to make sure their offerings are ready for launch. But even if you see quick results post-launch, it’s important to remember that keeping your brand and your products adaptable is key to long-term success.

Over time, the market may start to dictate that changes be made to certain core features or even require you to pivot directions altogether.

Rather than allowing these situations to catch you off guard, maintaining an agile business model is critical to allowing you to view these situations as opportunities to innovate and improve instead of risky setbacks.

Make Your SaaS Products Stand Out

As a SaaS provider, it’s important that you carefully plan effective strategies for approaching new markets and driving new marketing initiatives.

By following the tips discussed, you’ll make sure you’re leveraging all of the opportunities available to your business while following cost-effective strategies for growing your lead count and generating new sources of revenue.

Author Bio Below:

Michael Bollinger, a Lexington, Kentucky-based entrepreneur, has left a lasting mark on the tech and software landscape.

As the founder of LegFi and File990, Michael launched PayHOA.com in 2018 after Togetherwork acquired his first two ventures.

PayHOA is an affordable community management software for homeowner associations that streamlines payments, communication, and vendor management.

Beyond his entrepreneurial pursuits, Michael finds fulfillment as a devoted husband and a loving father to his three children.

Read business articles related to Sales, Marketing, Advertising, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Management, Education, and Industry at SugerMint.