Why is it critical to analyze Capterra reviews for SaaS companies?
"Capterra is a free online marketplace vendor serving as an intermediary between buyers and technology vendors within the software industry." says its Wikipedia article. But to SaaS business owners, it's a "must-place-to-be." Capterra was founded in 1999 and was acquired by Gartner in 2015. If you're a software company, Gartner means a lot to you. Being mentioned in a Gartner report is one of the goals of any SaaS company to show their clients that they are trustworthy. So having a page at Capterra as a SaaS company is pretty much one of the good things to do.
Here is a screenshot from the home page of Capterra:
Why does Capterra matter to technology companies?
Capterra is one of the few platforms to find new buyers if you have a software solution. It's also a great way to educate software buyers by sharing peers' opinions. Imagine yourself trying to buy a new gadget on Amazon; what would you do? You would probably check reviews, compare pricing, see if it's fulfilling your needs and bam! You'd buy it! It's similar to a software buyer, with a slight difference: This is B2B, and you had to go to their door to sell your software a couple of years ago! With platforms like Capterra, G2 and Trustradius, now you can reach out to buyers quickly.
Most of the articles would tell you what I've just said; it's a place to be to get to buyers. But actually, there is more: It's a place to keep your enemies close. As a company that is focused on consumer insights, let us tell you that you can even understand the product and sales strategy of your competitors by analyzing the reviews on Capterra.
Now, let's take a look at a product page on Capterra:
From a marketer's perspective, there is a lot to analyze on a Capterra product page. Let's go step by step and try to understand one of the best SaaS products on the market -Slack's strategy as an example.
The Definition of The Product
On the main page of any product at Capterra, there is the definition of the product. These definitions are primarily written or edited by the company, so a person who reads this content can understand which keywords and descriptions matter to the company.
Let's see the definition of the Slack and try to analyze its brand positioning:
The definition of "collaboration hub" is a fancy way to say that you need to have a team to be on Slack. Every brand needs a fancy description, a mission for positioning. With this one, Slack says that they want to be the platform in the middle of any team. Then they talk about the processes of any business to help the consumer to understand how they are going to use it: "When you kick a project, hire a new employee, deploy code, measure A/B test, plan your next office", But actually nobody says that they need Slack for hiring someone new etc. By giving scenarios, they simply say that you need Slack for all of your business operations. And the third thing is they are building the trust by "covering". And lastly, here is the shiny spot: It's a great tool that you can use, and it's free. Voila!
What have we learned from the definition of a product?
It shows your target group, message, brand positioning, and scenarios that consumers can use. If you're a SaaS company trying to understand your competitor, you should always start by defining your company.
Best For
The second thing we see on a product page is the "Best For" area. This one shows the primary target users of the product.
Deployment, Support and Features
This headline might help a product manager find the best ways to beat your competitor since it shows how a product supports its users.
Pricing, Alternatives and Comparisons
From a marketing perspective, comparing your pricing and giving an alternative to users checking your competitor's pricing might also help to get new customers. Being shown in the Alternatives section is also very important since Capterra creates a comparison page instantly if you want to.
Hidden Insights at any Capterra Product Page
Reviews are one of the essential things in the product world as consumers always want to use the best, the most popular, coolest, viable and affordable products.
Now, let's check the reviews page of Capterra:
The reviews page start with the number of the reviews -which definitely shows the popularity of the product- and “Overall Score" of the product.
Capterra has two different angles for products, "Ease of Use" and "Customer Service", so if you're not customer-centric and don't have a user-friendly interface plan, you should start building one. Reviews also show the pros and cons of the product, so if you're a competitor, you should start digging the negative reviews of your enemy and try to target users of them with your "We are Better" messaging.
As you can see, users complain about the interface and how hard it is to log in to different channels and get lost. So if you're a competitor, what would you do? You'd use the "Slack with better UI" message while targeting Slack users.
Too many reviews to read manually? We know.
Analyzing these reviews one by one is a little bit hard for a product company that isn't built for review analysis. From a person working as a strategist, I can say that people use Slack because it's popular, fun, and easy to use. But even if I'm trained to do so, I can't analyze thousands of reviews just by reading them manually. So what would you do? As a company built on understanding the motivations and needs of consumers, Kimola is here to help you analyze those reviews better!
Kimola Cognitive, Developed to Analyze User Reviews
At Kimola, our goal is to help marketing and research professionals understand consumers. However, when it comes to machine learning, which is one of the widely known text analysis applications, most people think they should have coding as a skill. Kimola Cognitive is a no-code machine learning platform that analyzes reviews by dragging and dropping user reviews in an excel file. We have copied and pasted 500 reviews of Slack on Capterra to an excel file and dragged it to Kimola Cognitive. By taking a peek at the data for 5 minutes, you can understand the motivations for switching to Slack from other products.
If you’re into insights like these, you can always sign up to Kimola Cognitive and analyze reviews of your SaaS product easily. Contact us here or sign up to Kimola Cognitive to analyze Capterra reviews easily.