Effective SaaS market research isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds.
You can’t do a taste testing platter, or hand out free samples! But you still need to get those invaluable customer opinions that inform business-critical decisions.
You need a carefully constructed strategy that’s tailored to the unique features of your products and services.
This step-by-step guide gives you the foundations to build your own SaaS market research strategy.
Why is market research crucial for SaaS companies?
Change is part of any SaaS product’s DNA. Rapid change. Your customers have varied use cases, and your long-term subscription relationships make you adaptable to their differing, evolving needs.
Take ScoreApp. You can use it for everything from quiz software to market research, and lead generation to HR. It’s grown and changed since we started, just like your SaaS products.
We build our change strategy on data. Lots and lots of lovely market research data! These data insights help us make confident decisions about product development, marketing and messaging, and customer retention.
We’re so convinced of the power of this data-driven approach that we want to force other SaaS companies to be successful too.
Unique elements to SaaS market research
SaaS market research has several points of difference to consider. You’re in a highly competitive market and need a way to know what’s going on in your customers’ heads, at all times. Market research insights give you deeper understanding of their needs, aspirations, and pain points – so you have the edge over your competition.
Usually, SaaS businesses operate a subscription model. Customer retention is just as important as finding new clients. And good SaaS market research underpins ongoing communication that doesn’t just ‘engage’ existing customers, but keeps them delighted by your product and gets them excited about your next innovations.
These defining business features mean that SaaS market research hits different:
- Product intangibility: Your customers can’t admire it on a shelf, give it a squeeze, breathe in its deliciousness – it’s invisible software, floating around in an imaginary cloud. It doesn’t have a use by date, pretty packaging, or colours/flavours/textures to choose from. This is a different kind of sales that needs the right kind of market research.
You need to educate non-experts in how your product ticks off everything on their ‘jobs to be done’ list before they agree to buy. And you’re relying on digital channels to do this. Market research gets you to the heart of what they need and want to know, and where you’ll find them online.
- Pricing: Most SaaS companies offer a tiered system of packages, with a bespoke offering for enterprise clients. Market research helps you define your packages and price point for each level of customer. Want to know if they’ll pay more for your new feature? Ask!
- Churn rate: Unfortunately, we can’t rely on every subscriber being a lifetime customer. Clients are always looking at ways to be more efficient and continue to assess their offering against the competition. A certain level of churn is unavoidable. But market research helps you track your customer retention performance over time and evaluate your monthly financial position.
- The long and winding road: If B2B SaaS customer journeys had a theme song, it’d be this! It’s totally understandable: the higher the investment in your product, the higher the risk – so, the longer the sign-off process. The right market research gives you the knowledge to make sure your prospects have what they need, when they need it. All these carefully crafted and placed pieces of content cement their trust in you as an industry authority and smash down any hurdles on their path to purchase.
What should be the key objectives for your market research?
Each SaaS company will have different reasons for doing market research, underneath the ultimate aim of realising their main business goals. While the specifics vary, SaaS market research gives you actionable insights into key business drivers such as:
Identifying audience pain points
Your audience is likely made up of multiple segments, and buying decisions are made by buying teams. And, ideally, you’d be able to read all their minds! You need to show your prospects that you get them, that you understand their problems, and that you’ve created something spectacular to solve them. Not another ‘innovative SaaS solution for your business’, but ‘an accountancy app that organises your books ready for tax time’.
Market research is your way to find out everything you need to know about how your existing customers interact with your offering:
- What problems do you fix using X?
- How does X help you with day-to-day tasks?
- How does X lighten your workload? What do you get done instead?
Ask them about how else you can help in the future:
- What other parts of your daily job are a massive time suck?
- What’s frustrating you about your processes right now?
- Does anything about using X annoy you?
You might think you already know the answers to these types of questions. But there are often surprising nuggets of ideas to uncover with this kind of market research … ways of using your product you haven’t considered. Even brand-new feature ideas you can get on to first!
And just knowing how your customers feel about using your product has huge potential, particularly for messaging and deepening longer-term relationships. Yes, we said ‘feel’ in relation to SaaS marketing!
Benefits: marketing, sales, product development
Gathering insights for product development
Get granular with the users of your products through SaaS market research. Create a product roadmap full of pre-requested features. There’s no point finding out what they want if you’re just going to make a pretty graph from the data and stop there.
You know you’re basing key product development decisions on reliable data, so it makes sense to prioritise feature requests and improvements you uncovered in your research. Imagine how valued your clients will feel when you actually make the adjustments they’ve suggested! Why would they look elsewhere when you’re delivering exactly what they’ve asked for?
Benefits: product development, customer retention, competitive edge
Understanding customer use cases
You sell a complex product with a variety of use cases. Market research helps you learn all the ways your customers are using your software across their roles and industries. (This is often a different set of people to those making the purchase decisions.)
It’s simple – you can’t make improvements if you don’t know what people are currently doing with it. There’s no baseline. But when you’ve got a plethora of actionable insights straight from the horse’s mouth, you can tailor messaging, support, and features accordingly.
Benefits: product development, customer support, marketing
Competitor analysis
What do your customers think of your competitors? Where does your offering sit in relation to theirs? Why do they prefer one brand over another, when the product is very similar?
SaaS market research gets you the answers to these and other questions about your crowded market. Competitor analysis helps you refine your USP and gives you the edge over your competitors’ products.
Benefits: positioning, marketing, product development
Types of market research for SaaS companies
The most useful market research insights come from finding the right combination of methodologies. Here’s why these different types of market research are useful to SaaS companies.
Primary research
What it is: Primary research means any information you get directly from your current and potential customers. You can collect this information through 1:1 interviews, surveys, and focus groups.
Why it’s useful: Primary research provides in-depth, qualitative insights that reveal customer motivations, pain points, and feature preferences directly from the source. These insights help you refine product features, improve user experience, and even identify new market segments.
Online surveys help you get opinions from a larger number of people, which gives you a larger source of data. Focus groups and 1:1 interviews let you go into deeper qualitative insights because they have ‘off script’ opportunities. You can listen to open-ended answers and discussions, and ask follow-up questions to interesting revelations. The absolutely crucial element is getting access to the right people.
It’s also the original source material for publishing white papers and reports, based on your own primary research, which contributes to you being a key person of influence in your industry.
Secondary research
What it is: This type of research is based on using relevant secondary sources of material, for example published industry reports, competitor analysis, and other online resources like publications by respected industry bodies.
Why it’s useful: Secondary research allows you to gain a wider perspective on the industry without direct data collection. It’s a cost-effective way to benchmark your product, understand market trends, and stay ahead of shifts in your industry.
Usage analytics
What it is: Use product analytics to see which features are most used by customers and where they encounter challenges.
Why it’s useful: Analytics tools monitor key metrics such as user engagement, feature usage, and drop-off points. By identifying your most and your least popular features, you can adapt your product to remove barriers and build on strengths.
Customer feedback loops
What it is: Your system of collecting, analysing, and implementing change based on customer feedback.
Why it’s useful: Customer feedback loops enable continuous improvement, showing which features or issues need attention in real time. They also demonstrate to customers that their input is valued, which increases their connection to your brand.
Step-by-step guide to conducting SaaS market research
Take these five steps to prepare your SaaS market research project.
1. Define your research objectives: what do you want to know?
You need to set a destination before you start on your market research adventure. What are your goals? What do you want to find out from this phase of market research? What are you planning to do with the information once you’ve collected it? For example, you might want to:
- Understand levels of customer satisfaction with existing clients
- Get an overview of use cases in the industries your clients belong to
- Assess product-market fit for a new concept, before you invest in development
- See where your brand sits in relation to your competitors
Your market research goals must be specific, clear, and measurable at the very start of the process.
2. Choose your research methods: how are you going to collect the information?
To get a comprehensive picture of your market and target audience, use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods. This helps cross-validate findings, which enhances the reliability of your data.
But you need to pick the right combination of research methods to meet your research objectives. Don’t try and do everything all at once.
- Figure out which product analytics are relevant.
- Add in a few 1:1 interviews with the people whose brains you most want to pick.
- Design a survey that gives you robust quantitative data from a wider group of users.
It’s the right combination of methods that gives you confident conclusions to your objectives.
3. Identify your sample audience: who are you going to ask?
In the world of B2B SaaS, you’re usually dealing with a team of buyers to make each sale. The sales cycles are long, and each member of the team has their own perspective on the purchase. For each piece of market research, you need to make sure you’re asking the right people – so you really need to understand your target audience.
In the context of your research objective, you need to consider:
- Basic demographics: Industry, location, company size
- Job role: Product user, project manager, department head, C-suite
- Pain points and needs: What problem are you fixing? How do they feel about these issues?
- Aspirations: How are you helping them achieve their goals?
- Communications: Where are they online – social media channels, industry publications, forums, professional networks, email lists?
This detailed profile will enable you to tailor your research approach so it resonates with your audience’s needs and preferences. And it will help you define how many people you want to involve in the research.
4. Design your research questions: what are you going to ask?
This sounds much simpler than it actually is. Your questions need to elicit the insights that are meaningful to your research objective. Framing them in the right way, for both the method and the people, is crucial.
Top tips for crafting SaaS market research questions:
- Give context: Even just a couple of sentences explaining your why. For example: ‘We’ve got two concepts for new features on the table. We think they’re both brilliant, but we want to know which one you’d find most useful.’
- Set expectations: Let them know how many questions there are at the beginning so they can see how long it’s going to take.
- Start with an easy one: Ask the simple, demographic-type questions first, to put participants at ease.
- Clarity: If your questions are difficult to understand, or open to interpretation, people won’t answer them. Use straightforward, specific language that sounds like a real person!
- Focus on one thing at a time: Each question should be about one thing. This keeps the meaning clear and gives you much more granular data. For example: ‘On a scale of 1–10, did you find interactions with our customer service team to be efficient and friendly?’ This should be split into ‘efficient’ and ‘friendly’ in two separate questions – they’re two different concepts, requiring two different courses of action.
- Speed: Keep the interview or survey as short as possible to achieve your aim.
The content of your questions entirely depends on your objective, but these tips are a good rule of thumb for all methodologies.
5. Collect data: release it into the wild!
During your SaaS market research planning phase, set a date for executing your plan – and stick to it!
Set up the interviews, gather the focus groups, email the surveys to your segments, and publish the lead magnet landing pages! Go, go, go!
The sooner you collect the data, the sooner you can learn from its insights.
6. Analyse results: what did you find out?
This is where market research software such as ScoreApp adds a wonderful layer of automation to your process. You want your quantitative responses organised to show averages, outliers, and trends. It’s also much easier to understand and share these insights if they’re translated into visuals, like graphs and tables.
If you set up gathering qualitative data through a ScoreApp quiz, these more personal, open-ended questions will also be analysed automatically – through careful categorisation of the original question sets.
You’ll need to invest more time in analysing the results from 1:1 interviews and focus groups. But given the goldmine of information they contain, when you ask the right people, it’s totally worth it.
However you decide to process your findings, you’ll be able to identify patterns of buyer behaviour, pain points, and areas for improvement – and maybe even uncover some unexpected surprises!
7. Implement findings: listen and share
Now you know the answer to your research objective, what are you going to do with that information? It’s only worthwhile doing market research if you’re prepared to listen to the outcome.
Your market research insights are based on robust data that can inform decisions about:
- Product development
- Messaging and marketing strategies
- Entering new markets
- Improved customer experiences
- Competitive positioning
It’s up to you to share your insights across your organisation so that everyone can benefit.
Tools and resources for SaaS market research
There’s a host of tools available to make the whole market research process much less time-consuming and more efficient.
Here are four tool types, with examples, which help with elements of data collection and analysis.
- Survey Tools: Survey tools are online platforms designed to gather responses from a target audience electronically. They offer question types such as multiple-choice, ranking, and open-ended formats – giving you flexible and targeted data collection.
Popular examples: ScoreApp, SurveyMonkey, Google Forms.
- Product Analytics: A product analytics tool is software that tracks and analyses user interactions with a product or service. This helps you improve user experience, spot untapped potential, lower your churn rate, and increase conversions throughout your sales funnels.
These tools track user actions such as clicks, form completions, page views, and swipes.
Product analytics tools differ from web analytics tools by tracking user experience (UX) data at the user or account level, rather than by session. Your product managers and teams get essential insights into digital experience performance so they can optimise functionality, diagnose issues, and link customer behaviour to long-term value.
Popular examples: Amplitude, Mixpanel, Google Analytics.
- Feedback Management Tools: Feedback management software gives you a framework to collect, organise, and respond to customer feedback. This system puts customer requests, suggestions, complaints, and reviews all in one place.
By unifying this knowledge, feedback management tools help you get a deeper understanding of your users, prioritise product roadmaps, and test new ideas. This strengthens your customer relationships, improves their experience, and may even usher them into brand advocate status!
Popular examples: Qualaroo, Feedback Loop.
- Competitive Analysis Tools: Competitive analysis tools give you valuable insights into your competitors and the overall market. These tools gather and analyse data across platforms such as social media, SEO, and paid ads. So you can efficiently assess your competitive position and refine your strategies accordingly. The right tools will save you tons of time by automating the data collection process – leaving you to focus on applying the insights to your marketing practice.
Popular examples: Semrush, Ahrefs, Crayon.
Successful SaaS market research with ScoreApp
With ScoreApp as your SaaS market research partner, you’ll get valuable survey insights that inform business-critical decisions in key areas including:
- Product development: align features with real customer needs.
- Messaging and marketing strategies: develop strong, long-term relationships with your clients.
- Entering new markets: investigate thoroughly before investing in market expansion.
- Improving customer experiences: Happy customers buy more and stay put!
- Competitive positioning: Get in ahead of the curve.
Create your first B2B market research quiz on ScoreApp for free and start making data-informed decisions today!
