Market Research: Understanding Your Target Audience and Competition
In the context of software product development, the purpose of market research is to deeply understand the needs, pain points, and expectations of your potential product users.
This process involves extensive analysis of user behavior, adoption rates of similar services, market and technology trends, and the competitive landscape.
As any SaaS product development company will tell you, market research is vital. It provides insights that inform not only your product’s features and functionality but also the pricing strategy, customer service model, and marketing and sales approach.
This article explores the specifics of conducting effective market research for SaaS product development.
Need for SaaS Market Research
Market research helps you identify market gaps and customer needs to tailor your product for maximum success. It guides strategic decision-making around product enhancements, pricing models, and scaling opportunities.
During the design phase, market research gives you insights into user needs, behaviors, and preferences that help you create accurate user personas. These personas guide your product’s features and user interface design.
In the implementation phase, market research helps validate your assumptions and refine the product. It clarifies technology choices, integration needs, and security requirements.
As you develop the marketing plan, SaaS market research provides essential information about competitors, market positioning, and effective communication channels. It can help hone the selling propositions, pricing strategies, and promotional campaigns so that they resonate with the audience you’re targeting.
Know Your Target Audience
Your target audience has a set of characteristics, needs, and behaviors that your product aims to cater to. A clear understanding of this audience helps you develop a product that resonates with users and meets their needs.
To understand your target audience comprehensively, you need to gather four different types of data.
Demographic data involves age, gender, education, occupation, and income level. This information helps you understand who would use your product.
Psychographic data gives insight into users’ attitudes, values, and motivations. It helps you understand why they would use your product.
Technographic data involves understanding the technology your audience uses—the devices, software, and platforms. This data helps you understand how your users interact with technology and what technological solutions they might need.
Behavioral data involves information about how your users interact with your product: their usage patterns, engagement metrics, churn rates, and more. This data helps you understand how your product fits into users’ lives and workflows.
SaaS Customer Segmentation
It’s essential to segment your audience based on their common characteristics and behaviors, creating distinct user personas. Each persona represents a segment of your audience and can guide the development of features, user experiences, and marketing messages.
Evaluating the Market Landscape
Analyzing market trends helps identify opportunities for product innovation, anticipate changing customer needs, and proactively adjust your product strategies. It also helps in strategic planning, such as forecasting sales, identifying potential growth areas, and setting realistic goals.
Evaluating the SaaS market involves looking at factors like market size, growth rate, trend data, and change drivers.
Market size refers to the number of potential customers or the market’s revenue potential. Understanding the market size helps determine if the market is large enough to be profitable.
Growth rate refers to how fast the market is expanding. A high growth rate might indicate a burgeoning market with significant potential.
Trends are directional changes in the market. Identifying trends helps anticipate shifts in customer needs, technology, and the competitive landscape.
Drivers of change can significantly impact the market, like technological advancements, regulatory changes, or societal shifts.
To evaluate these factors, you need to gather and analyze relevant data. Various tools and methods can assist in collecting this data, as well as help you perform SaaS competitor research.
Industry reports are often published by research firms and contain detailed information about market size, growth rate, trends, and significant players. Examples include reports from Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.
Expert interviews can provide valuable insights into market trends and potential. Talk to as many industry analysts, consultants, and thought leaders as possible.
Online data tools like Statista, IBISWorld, and SimilarWeb provide data on various industries, including SaaS customer segmentation, market size, growth rates, and trends.
Social Listening Tools like Brandwatch and Hootsuite allow you to monitor social media and news for discussions related to your market, helping identify trends and customer sentiment.
SaaS Competitive Analysis
Understanding who your SaaS competitors are, what they offer, and how they operate often provides significant insights. It can help you differentiate your product, identify opportunities for innovation, and form strategies to attract and retain customers.
When conducting a SaaS competitive analysis, you should examine four key aspects of your competitors’ operations.
- Product Features: What functionalities do your competitors’ products offer? How do they compare with your product?
- Pricing Models: How do your competitors price their services? Do they offer tiered pricing, freemium models, subscriptions, flat-rate pricing, or something else?
- Marketing Strategies: What marketing channels do your competitors use? What messaging and positioning do they use?
- Customer Reviews: What do customers say about your competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses according to users?
SaaS competitor research is invaluable. Understanding these aspects can help identify gaps in competitors’ offerings and hone your product development and marketing strategies.
Applying Insights in Product Development
The insights gathered from SaaS market research should be translated into actionable steps for product design and development.
Insights into your target audience and what they’re willing to pay for a product like yours can inform your pricing strategy.
If your research uncovers a common frustration among your target audience that your product cannot solve, it could indicate a need for a new feature or an enhancement of an existing one.
Understanding user behaviors can help optimize your product’s interface and workflow, improving user experience and satisfaction.
Customer feedback gathered through surveys, user interviews, or product usage analysis provides direct insights into what is working well in your product and what needs improvement. These insights can help prioritize feature enhancements, identify usability issues, and guide the development of new features that directly respond to user needs.
Market and SaaS competitive analysis can help you differentiate your product, highlighting unique features or capabilities in your marketing messages.
Knowing the prevalent trends in your market can help align your product and its features with those trends, making it more attractive to potential users. It can also simplify SaaS customer segmentation.
Keep an Eye on Trends
Markets are constantly in flux, and the SaaS market is no different. The sudden tidal wave of artificial intelligence proves how rapidly the tides can change.
The growing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning could transform how we analyze and interpret market research data, making the process more efficient and the insights more profound.
The increasing focus on data privacy might lead to new ways of gathering and using customer data, for example, or impact your regulatory compliance.
And the continued rise of remote work and digital transformation will undoubtedly shape the kinds of SaaS products that companies need to develop.
Continuous SaaS competitor research is essential, given the SaaS industry’s dynamic and highly competitive nature. As customer needs, market conditions, and technological capabilities evolve, companies must remain adaptable and ready to pivot or iterate their products.
Fueled by ongoing market research, this adaptability can be the difference between thriving in the SaaS industry and being left behind.
