Why is it essential to analyze G2.com reviews for software companies?

G2, known as G2 Crowd, was founded in 2012, a peer-to-peer review platform for business software. The platform is used by signing up with a LinkedIn account, and users can review the software they use. It's a safe platform since G2 requests the screenshots of the reviewer using the product, and it also has an algorithm to verify the actual users. So far, G2Crowd has published more than 1.5M reviews for software worldwide. 

Here is a screenshot from the home page of G2:

Introduction to G2

G2 is one of the few platforms that entrepreneurs want to be seen. Entrepreneurs create pages for their software business and tell their users to start commenting. Most SaaS companies give away credits, gifts and discounts to get a review on platforms like G2.

Imagine that you're going to buy a brand new washing machine, what would you do? You will read reviews of washing machines on e-commerce sites, ask around to your close friends and family, compare prices and buy it. That is the same cycle for a software buyer; they read all those comments on platforms like G2 and decide which software to buy among thousands of them. So if you're an entrepreneur, you need to be on G2. If you're a marketing professional, it's an excellent platform for you to see the benefits & usability of your own product or the competitor's product. 

First, let's check how a page of a software company looks on G2:

As a company built to understand consumer needs and motivations with technology, we recommend every software company analyze their software and competitors' software reviews. Understanding the motivations and needs of your consumers should be your priority if you own a software company or work for one.

Being a marketing professional in a software company also means that you have to feed your product & development teams and build a communications strategy for your company. So here are some questions that you can answer just by searching a product on G2 and checking their page:

• Which companies are my main competitors?
• What is the pricing of my competitor's products? 
• What are the most popular terms for my/our competitor's product?
• What are the user ratings of my main competitor and my product?
• What are the high-rated features?

The Key to Understand Consumers Is Reviews

Even though checking pricing, popular mentions, and alternatives list will give you a hint about the software, you can do more by digging the reviews. Here are some questions that you can answer by exploring the reviews:

Features to Develop: 

Reviews will instantly tell you the features to develop as it's one of the best things that users like to comment. As someone said before, there are never fewer features! It's also great to analyze the reviews on G2 for your product team since they can organize the product pipeline with those reviews.

What Do People Like Best on My Software?

This one is another valuable review category for a marketing professional because the most liked features are the ones to use in the communication strategy. Start shooting screen videos of your most selected features and share them on social media. You're ready to onboard new users! 

 What Do People Dislike on My Software?

Developers, product managers and founders! This category is coming for you. You might consider improving those features because they wouldn't write about it if your users didn't need them! 

What are The Most Popular Features of Our Competitor's Software?

Learning is a never-ending process. Dig reviews with this point of view, and you will improve your product and communications strategy. While targeting your competitor's users, you can mention those features with a free trial offer! 

Automated Review Analysis with Machine Learning

Reviews are the most essential thing in G2, but because there are so many, it's difficult to manually read the thousands of reviews and conclude about a product or market. And if you're trying to understand a market for your own business, you should check out at least 5 competitors' reviews. So how is it possible to analyze thousands and thousands of reviews without manual work? Surprise! It's a Text Analytics application and it's called machine learning. You can check out our blog post on what machine learning is and how it is used for text classification. If you want to categorize comments on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, they can help you with that using a pre-trained machine learning model!

Need help? Contact us so we can assist you to analyze your reviews!