[S2E2] How to find winning angles for your competitor pages
with Federico Jorge, Stack Against
Competitor comparison pages are a must-have for every startup that’s ready to grow. Or are they?
In this episode:
When startups should consider building competitor comparison pages
How to think about framing the conversation
How competitor research can help with future differentiation and product development
Pros and cons of 2 popular frameworks: “Us vs everybody else” and “Why we’re better than {X}”
Stack Against website: https://stackagainst.com/
Federico Jorge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicojorge/
Comparison page samples: https://stackagainst.com/samples/
Federico Jorge
I'm a copywriter, turned SaaS copywriter first and then founder of Stack Against which is a productized service that specializes in comparison pages and competitive enablement. And after working with different SaaS clients, I realized that there was this thing that they all wanted to do, which is comparison pages. And I did a few for different projects, and after doing a couple, I came up with this process to tackle comparison pages from A to Z. Like, here's how to do the research, here's how to do the copywriting, here's how to do the design. Even if I'm not a designer, I wanted to deliver that as well. And at some point I just went, "I should just come up with a specific offer around this idea." And I've been playing with the idea of even narrowing down more than just being a SaaS copywriter, and that's how Stack Against came to be. We started growing, we started doing more of those projects, and eventually we expanded our offer into sales enablement assets and competitive intelligence stuff, which is what we're doing right now, but still not neglecting the comparison pages.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
So let's talk about comparison pages. What is the point at which SaaS companies really need to start worrying about having those?
Federico Jorge
That's a tough question. It's going to be different for everyone, and it depends on your angle, or where you're coming from, when evaluating doing them or not. A lot of people, mostly SEO people, they're gonna tell you, you gotta have them no matter what. That was really interesting for us, and it made our life easier also at the beginning, because we knew a lot of companies just wanted to do those, because it's a standard playbook for SaaS companies right now or in the past couple of years.
It is true that, from an SEO perspective, you want to do them as soon as as soon as possible, ideally, if your competitors are not occupying that space yet, if nobody's chasing those same keywords. And when I say the keywords, I mean like, "Asana versus your brand as an alternative," "best tools for project management," stuff like that. If nobody's targeting those keywords, you definitely want to be number one there, and try to have authority around those keywords as soon as possible. It's going to make your life easier when more competitors come in and they want to start competing for that space in the search results.
But that also means that if nobody's doing those in your category, it probably means that there is no real traffic behind those keywords at the moment, so that's when you need to stop and and think, is it even worth doing this at the moment. When you're a startup, you don't have the kind of budget that you're going to have when you're bigger, like a more established company, so you want to be smart on what kind of content you prioritize in order to make better use of that budget.
And the reality, again, is that bottom of the funnel content is probably where you want to get started with, because it's the kind of content that is obviously going to have lower traffic, but it's going to bring conversions. If you do it right, it's going to bring conversions. So that's one angle to explore, the SEO angle.
From a product marketing perspective, or a positioning/sales perspective as well, you've got to look at your own category, and you gotta ask yourself: "Is there a clear, established brand that owns most of the market share, and the prospects that I'm talking to, they're always evaluating us versus that incumbent?" If yes, you might want to do a comparison page.
If your sales people are constantly coming to you and asking, "Hey, I always see this competitor in our deals, but I don't know what to say when we're up against them." If their confidence is low when you're selling against those competitors, then you want to do a comparison page.
If your customers are constantly asking you, "Hey, but how do you compare against XYZ?" - then you want to do that comparison page, and not just because of the fact that having that asset publicly available is going to help your customers understand your differences even before they jump into a call with you, they jump into a demo. It's going to be a tool that your sellers can use when somebody asks, you can just send them to that comparison page. And your messaging is always going to be consistent, because every prospect reads the same kind of messaging.
But I think one of the critical aspects of why you should go through that experiment, and that means do it in-house, you don't need to hire us to do that, just the fact that you need to go through that research stage and understand, "This is who we are, and this is our competitor, and this is how we compare, and this is how we win, and this is how we lose," and understanding all of those different ways to see your relationship versus each competitor, that's going to give you so much insight and so much knowledge that you can spread throughout the company.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
At this point, you may be slightly skeptical, just because research sounds like extra work. Instead of putting up a table, comparing features and showing once and for all that your product is awesome, everybody else's is not. As you can imagine, I don't really believe that this approach works, and I don't really think that tables are a way to sell on using your product. And we'll get into what's a better approach later. For now, here's a list of questions that you will be able to answer if you approach building your competitor comparison pages with a researcher mindset.
Federico Jorge
How do we close the gap? If you're losing versus these competitors, how do we close the gap? What kind of features do we need to launch? What kind of messaging do we need to prioritize? What is our positioning versus this particular competitor? And if you're winning, you're gonna validate and understand what to prioritize: we're winning because of this, so we need to make sure that we double down on that messaging. We need to make sure that we double down on those kinds of features, enabling customers to do this in a different way than what our competitors are doing for them.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
So to follow up on that there are "Us versus a specific competitor" pages, and then there is "How we're different" page, basically us versus them. So when does it make sense to go for the wider lens, as opposed to naming [competitors]?
Federico Jorge
That's a good question. I think I always try to think about comparison pages from both angles, SEO and the marketing perspective. It allows us to think about these more strategically. And the way that we build comparison pages, hopefully are optimized to be successful for our clients when we think about both sides. And I would say for this question, it's also important to think about those two perspectives.
I think the clearest signal is, again, the keyword research that you might conduct. So if somebody is always searching "how to do X with Google Sheets," or "how to replace Excel for X task," or whatever, they're coming to the problem from a very clear solution that is not helping them anymore. They've outgrown this solution. A big part of the market is still hanging on to that alternative solution, and you want to convince them to choose you, as opposed to every different competitor. And when you can clearly detect the faults of that alternative solution, but it makes sense to have this “us versus them” alternative, and it always needs to be validated by customers.
And this brings me to the other perspective, which is product marketing, which is positioning. When you regularly see or hear customers talking about the shortcomings of this alternative solution, why they want to change [providers], why this is not helping them anymore. Then you validate these from both sides: people are searching from these, it means there's an actual interest and there's actual traffic that you want to capture, and also, customers are telling you: "This solution, all their solution, most of the time, all their solution doesn't work for us anymore," and they're eager to know how your alternative is going to solve their problem.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
That makes sense, and in a relatively stable market with not too many competitors, that seems even manageable. But what if your particular market is about to explode and there are multiple competitors, not to mention competing solution categories. How can you manage this complexity without getting mired in developing pages that will ultimately not lead to sales? Fortunately, you don't have to guess. You are about to find out.
Federico Jorge
What a lot of product marketers do and competitive intelligence folks, they have a way of creating tiers from different competitors. They have the A-tier competitors that the ones that are stealing most of the revenue, the ones that they're maybe regularly losing deals against, and then they have B-tier competitors, C-tier competitors, ankle-biters, competitors that they know that exist, but they're don't impact sales, they don't really impact revenue for them. For all of those competitors, you can forget about them at the moment, you don't need to prioritize every single competitor and have a comparison page against all of those. But if we're talking about A-tier ones, then absolutely.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
Hopefully, our conversation up to this point has given you some ideas of how to decide whether or not you need to have a competitor comparison page or several pages, as well as some ideas on how you can structure that conversation on the page and which angle to choose. However, there is always a gap between planning and execution. So for the rest of the conversation, we are going to talk about different approaches chosen by companies based on their competitor comparison pages in the wild, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each of them.
…
I just want to start with "Us versus them," because we've already been talking about this.
Federico Jorge
Yeah.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
So what, if anything, are the elements that you would like to highlight for folks that are thinking that this is the right approach for them?
Federico Jorge
Okay, so I believe - I'm not in this space, Bella + Canvas, none of those are a customer of ours - but I do believe that they're building this comparison page because there's this general annoyance from customers with a clothing industry, I am sure that you could build a similar page for jeans. I follow a couple of fashion subreddits, and I see people on those subreddits talking about "My T-shirts don't last more than a couple of uses anymore, my jeans all break, I get holes in my in my knees after a couple of months, my boots don't last anywhere as much as they used to 10 years, 15 years, 20 years ago."
So I think there's this regular distrust about how the clothing industry and how they're building products lately. So in this case, Bella is leveraging that to build their messaging around that. And it comes even before that, I'm sure the way that they built their product and the process for actually building their T-shirts and creating their T-shirts has different technology decisions and processes built in to make sure that they differentiate from everything else that is out there. So if they build their company to do that and their T-shirts to offer that to customers, then why not tell that story? It's a critical part of their positioning and their strategy. And because they understood that, and they found that pain point from competitors, they created this page.
But if you start scrolling down, what is really great about this comparison page is that they break down the process of how they make their T-shirts, and they attach every part of that process to a benefit or a differentiation point. How soft this T-shirt is going to be, how durable is it going to be, how it's going to fit the same after 100 uses, how sustainable it is, and they went through this whole process of recording a video for each one of these differentiation points.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
My immediate follow up question is: '"the best in the world," really? That seems like a very big claim to make. And especially for SaaS, I'm pretty sure it's something that would be very hard to pull off. So let's talk credibility,
Federico Jorge
[Outside of] the Apples, the Coca Colas, the Mercedes Benz of the world, you can't really claim that without really, really strong proof to support that claim. And I think the biggest risk is what you said. You say, "We're the best in the world," and people are immediately going to get defensive, and they're going to go, "Okay, prove it." You've literally painted yourself into a corner, because now you have to provide a lot of proof to actually sustain that claim, and in software, that is downright impossible, unless you're one of the top 10, like top 50, well- or better-known brands in software, there's absolutely no way that you can claim that and get away with it.
And mostly because software changes so fast that maybe if you are the best one today, that doesn't guarantee you're going to be the best one tomorrow. So it's a claim that you can even sustain for a long time.
What I believe is a better approach is just tell people what you are better at, tell who you're built for. What is the number one thing that makes you different? What is that one functionality or feature that differentiates you, as opposed to just these empty platitudes of, we're the best, we're the number one? Which is actually one of the biggest, or the most recurring mistakes that I see on comparison pages, because it's easy just to say what the best alternative to and you could probably find 100 different comparison pages, and that headline is going to be at least in 30% of those, "We're the best alternative to Zoom / to Asana / to ClickUp / to whatever." And that just doesn't hold up. I think the best approach to that is "Tell me exactly what you do differently, and why should I care?" Which is what we try to do.
This is one comparison page that we wrote for a client, which is ProcessKit. And in this case, ProcessKit is a project management tool. But at the same time, it's not really as broad as Asana or Trello or ClickUp. They've built ProcessKit for companies that are productized in a way, and what that means is that for every single project, their process looks the same every single time. That's why it's called ProcessKit, and we identified that a lot of people were searching for keywords like "Asana recurring tasks" or "Trello recurring tasks," and that kind of gave us the signal that these are people or customers that are struggling to do this in Trello, and this is exactly what we do: help you manage these recurring tasks, and we build a whole narrative for this comparison page based on that single idea. And when Trello feels like not the right tool to do that, then you should come or you should choose ProcessKit instead.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
While this approach does not have the oomph of "We are the category leader," or even "We are the future of the industry," I think you will agree that it is much more credible because it focuses on the one thing, on one specific use case that this particular product can do better.
And at the same time, I think you will agree that looking at two different pages and analyzing those approaches is probably just the first step towards building pages of your own, especially pages that are designed to deliver on conversions.
So what's going to happen next is Federico and myself hosting a live event, in the "Ask me anything" format where you can bring your pages or your questions about how to create pages that position your product in the best possible light while staying credible, and that will help you convert website visitors into demos or users.
Thank you for listening, and I hope that I'll be able to see you at the Ask Me Anything event in a couple of weeks. I will post the specific date in the show notes and in my LinkedIn feed, so you should be able to sign up right after you've listened to this episode. And, of course, once it's over, I will post the link in the show notes, so that folks that haven't been able to make it will be able to take a look and see what they can apply in their own work lives.
Thank you and see you soon.