These days, standing out in a saturated market has become a real problem for product marketers. Consumers are inundated with countless options for similar solutions in so many categories — just think of how many different cell phone service providers are available, for instance. Creating a competitive marketing strategy in the face of market saturation can seem nearly impossible. How can you cut through the noise when consumers are being bombarded with marketing content showcasing similar solutions to their pain points?
The best way to beat the competition is by leveraging your customers and using customer evidence throughout your marketing strategy. In fact, companies who use the voice of the customer had 9.8x greater year-over-year revenue than their competitors. Understanding how to utilize your customers’ voice in your marketing strategies can make your product stand out from the competition (and even win over their current customers ). Below, we’re sharing how you can use customer evidence to turbo-charge your marketing strategies in the face of market saturation:
Collect customer evidence to determine why your customers chose your brand over competitors
Customer evidence is a persuasive form of content that communicates the value of your product through the voice of your customer in content, such as testimonials, statistics, and more. Collecting large amounts of evidence to build a library of customer testimonials and statistics to pull from is the first step to create an effective customer marketing strategy. Adding customer evidence to your competitive marketing strategies allows you to underscore the claims you make across sales and marketing. For example, leveraging a real customer quote saying “We saw a 3x ROI using this product,” vs. making your own claim that your product yields a high ROI. When it comes to customer evidence, the proof is in the pudding, or rather, the social proof.
With evidence from your consumers, you can determine precisely why your customers choose your brand over the competition — and highlight those reasons throughout your competitive marketing content. For instance, by capturing the right data points, you could learn which competitors your customers considered before ultimately choosing your product. Yellowbrick did just that by sending out a simple survey to their customers:
With this information, Yellowbrick can create content showcasing which competitors their consumers typically consider — and still ultimately select Yellowbrick. Statistical evidence allows Yellowbrick to show just how much their product stands apart from the competition.
Like Yellowbrick, Wrike and GitLab collect customer testimonials, explaining why consumers choose their product over the competition. With these quotes, both Wrike and GitLab can emphasize precisely what features of their product distinguish them from the competition:
Now, GitLab and Wrike can use these quotes throughout their marketing to showcase the benefits and improved customer experience they offer over their competitors. These quotes can be used to corroborate the marketing claims they make about their product’s features, highlighting what GitLab and/or Wrike has that the competition doesn’t.
Using statistical evidence to emphasize how frequently buyers select your product can also emphasize your product’s superiority over competitors. Take a look at the example below to see how Wrike uses customer survey responses to do just that:
By asking consumers what competitors they evaluated before selecting Wrike, the marketing team at Wrike is able to utilize powerful statistics that showcase how frequently users choose their products. To combat your biggest competitors, this type of evidence can make a hefty impact on your buyers. Not to mention, this social proof is strong enough to persuade a competitor’s customer to switch to your product. Pretty cool, huh?
Distribute this customer evidence throughout your competitive marketing collateral
With a robust library of consumer evidence available, you can easily disseminate statistics, quotes, graphs and more throughout your product marketing strategy. This competitive marketing approach allows you to highlight why consumers consistently choose your product over competitors through the real-life experiences and opinions of your buyers.
Utilizing social proof throughout your marketing collateral increases the likelihood that your buyer will make a purchase. In fact, utilizing customer evidence in your competitive marketing strategies directly impacts your bottom line — 95% of people say that customer reviews influence their purchasing decisions. When customer evidence is so vital, it would be silly not to add it to your competitive marketing strategies!
For instance, let’s say you own a company that offers a SaaS content management solution. One of your key pieces of marketing collateral is a targeted LinkedIn ad that reaches sales leaders in companies with a sales team of 30 or more members. Right now, you’ve got snappy copy and a visually captivating graphic — but so do all of your competitors. By adding a brief quote from a happy customer with a similar use case to your target audience, you can underscore all the sales claims you make in your ad. This bolsters your claims, making your product more trustworthy, and helping you stand out from the competition.
Final thoughts
Using customer testimonials, statistics, graphs, and more throughout your competitive marketing strategies can be the key differentiator that makes you stand apart from the competition. When you’re surrounded by similar solutions in a saturated market, showcasing precisely where you outpace the competition can make all the difference.
With UserEvidence, capturing this customer evidence is easier than ever. UserEvidence allows you to quickly and easily survey your customers and enables you to automatically turn their responses into usable statistics, graphs, and more. See how UserEvidence can help you grow your business through competitive product marketing and book a demo today.
