Your prospect just spent three months researching solutions. They’ve visited 12 websites that all promise to “streamline HR processes” or “connect top talent with quality employers.” You’re meeting with them in 10 minutes.
What are you going to say that they haven’t already heard?
With 53,000 HR technology vendors and over 20,000 US staffing firms in the market today, standing out has never been more challenging. Traditional marketing playbooks no longer work like they used to, and prospects are overwhelmed by choice, leading them to tune out the vendors that feel like every other. And artificial intelligence? It’s going to make differentiation even more valuable than it already is.
What You’ll Learn About Competitive Analysis and Differentiation
- The warning signs that you need to work on your differentiation
- The current state of the market and buyers of talent and HR technology
- The value of competitive analysis and advice from top marketing strategists for getting started
- Ideas for bringing your differentiation to life
Warning Signs Your Staffing or HR Tech Marketing Isn’t Differentiating You
Win rates against competitors are declining
If you track your sales wins versus losses (and you should), a declining win rate against specific competitors is a flashing red light. It suggests those competitors are differentiating themselves in ways that resonate with your shared prospects.
It’s especially important to flag this if you are consistently losing to the same 2 to 3 competitors.
You can track metrics such as win rate by competitor, primary reasons for losses, competitor mentions in lost deals, and even how long deals spend in the sales cycle for wins versus losses.
Lead quality is declining despite stable traffic
This is one of the most sneaky warning signs because it so often goes unnoticed. Your website traffic might be growing, your content downloads may be steady, and your webinar registrations could be holding strong, but those leads are never making it across the finish line.
Look out for leads being marked unqualified by sales and a longer lead-to-opportunity conversion rate to see if lead quality is dropping.
Prospects seem confused by who you are
What are you hearing in sales calls?
If your prospects are saying:
“So, you’re basically like [insert your top competitor here], right?”
“Walk me through what you do again…”
“I’ve looked at a few companies, and you all seem pretty similar…”
You’re not differentiating yourself, and your messaging isn’t resonating.
Your messaging could apply to any competitor
Generic descriptors cover nearly every talent and HR tech website, making it difficult to distinguish one vendor from another. Think words like “innovative,” “proven results,” “people-first,” “best-in-class,” etc.
While on their own, there’s certainly nothing wrong with those terms. Your brand and messaging need (and deserve) something that tells a more compelling story.
To see if you’ve fallen into this trap, take a screenshot of your website. Then take a screenshot of your competitor’s. How similar are they? Could you tell them apart if you were a prospect? If the answer is no, it’s time to stand out.
Market Saturation and Buyer Behavior in the Talent Industry
To say that the talent and HR tech industry is saturated would be an understatement. Like we mentioned at the beginning of this post, there are tens of thousands of HR technology companies and staffing firms in the US alone.
Regardless of industry, buyers want the same thing when it comes to choosing a vendor partner or technology. They need their problems solved.
One of the most prevalent issues is a reliance on feature-focused rather than outcome-focused messaging. When it comes to marketing, it’s important to remember WIIFM: What’s In It For Me? Think of your prospects always asking, “What’s in it for me?” By focusing messaging on features, you’re spending more time talking about yourself. Shifting to outcome messaging makes sure that you’re telling your prospects how you can solve their problems.
How Buyer Behavior Is Changing
Today’s buyer is more likely to do independent research. 6Sense found that B2B buyers spend 70% of their buying journey doing independent research before reaching out to vendors. So even getting a prospect onto a sales call is a win and means that you’ve made a short list.
But when you get on that sales call, you may find yourself face-to-face with more and more people. Over 80% of teams include at least 4 people when making technology purchases, and 7% involve 10 or more people.
Longer evaluation periods also come into play, with over 60% taking 3 months or longer to come to a decision. After all, with more options and tighter budgets than ever before, no one can afford to make a mistake.
So how can you stand out in an overcrowded market with buyers who are more discerning than ever? You have to start by understanding your position in the market, and then using it to your advantage.
How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis in Staffing or HR Tech
What Is Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis is the practice of identifying, researching, evaluating, and comparing a competitor’s product, service, or brand to your own. It helps you define where you stand in the industry, but more importantly, it shows you where the white space is that you can fill. White space is expertise or solutions in an industry that aren’t owned yet, signaling an unmet customer need that your company can fill.
We sat down with two of our Fractional CMOs and Marketing Strategists, Heidi Darling and Mandy Walker, to get their thoughts on the value of competitive analysis and how you can make it happen.
What is the Value of Competitive Analysis?
Heidi describes it like this: Since competitive analysis allows you to understand the white space in your industry, it gives you the power to define the category you want to own in the way that only you can win.
Competitive analysis isn’t just about looking into your competitors to have the knowledge. It’s about using that knowledge to differentiate yourself. Pairing competitive analysis with a clear marketing strategy ensures your findings turn into actionable insights that drive brand growth and visibility.
Without that analysis, your marketing and sales strategies are at the mercy of gut feelings and entrenched understandings of a market that may be completely off base.
Mandy recommends pairing competitive analysis with market research: “Which industries are booming based on market research, and where is the competitor white space within those markets? Using the two hand-in-hand gives you a roadmap to standing out and owning your space.”
How To Get Started with Competitive Analysis
“Competitive analysis is all about deep curiosity,” Heidi shared. “Who keeps coming up on sales calls? What are those competitors saying on their website and social media? And most importantly, what are they missing? Then you can turn that curiosity onto your audience. What do they want to see? What will make them feel like they’ve made the right choice in choosing you?”
When you’re ready to embrace that curiosity, there are so many tools to use and activities you can do to help.
- Start small: Free tools like Google Alerts, social media, and email lists can help you see what your competitors are doing and sharing about themselves on both their owned channels and what’s being said about them in the market as a whole.
- Analyze homepages: Do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of your competitors’ homepages and solution pages on their websites. It doesn’t need to be super thorough, but it can help you clearly see where there is an opportunity for you to lead.
- Listen to sales calls: Hear directly from your prospects about who your competitors are. Who else are they working with or researching? Do a few names keep coming up repeatedly?
- Utilize AI: Mandy suggests AI as a still under-valued resource. Your prospects are likely using AI as a search tool in order to share more of their personalized needs and get more direct suggestions. To use AI for your competitive analysis, prompt with questions like, “Who are the top ten staffing firms in [your location] who serve [your ICP]?” and then follow up with questions like, “Why did you name these ten firms?” or “What firms were not named and why?” You can even put in prompts as if you are your ICP searching for vendors like you. For example, if your staffing firm places healthcare professionals, try prompting something like, “I work at a healthcare facility in Phoenix, AZ. I need to hire 100 nurses in the next 6 months. Who are the best staffing agencies that can help me?”
Both Mandy and Heidi highlighted the same top mistake that people make when doing competitive analysis: Focusing more on watching competitors so you can copy them, rather than differentiating from them. Remember: This is a practice in standing out from the crowd.
For example, as the Vice President of Marketing, Mandy was instrumental in the success of a community for technology professionals to gather and learn from each other. In a time when no one else was doing events, Motion Recruitment decided to go all in. Starting with just a few meetups a year, the community has grown to doing 120 events in a year for over 350,000 people across North America. As Mandy shared, “We would have never ended up creating this incredibly lucrative program if we had just been looking for ways to do what everyone else was doing.”
Using Competitive Analysis to Differentiate Your Brand
It’s time to take what you’ve learned and use it to differentiate yourself. Through all of this work, remember WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). It’s not enough to just define how you’re different. You have to frame it in a way that shows your audience that you’re exactly right for them. Once you’ve identified your white space, a strong brand strategy helps you translate those insights into messaging and visuals that make your differentiation unmistakable.
Define Your Difference with What, How, and Why
What do you do differently?
What methodologies or processes do you use that are unique to your company? Do you have proprietary tech, relationships, tools, etc. that aren’t available from anyone else? Maybe you’re the only HR tool that has real-time salary benchmarking, or maybe you have behavioral scientists on staff who helped build your candidate matching process. Whatever your difference, now is the time to claim it.
How do you make clients feel?
People want solutions to their problems, but they also want to partner with companies they can feel proud to be in community with. What’s the emotional outcome that clients experience after working with you? Are they confident? Secure? Less stressed? Excited? Shared values and a focus on feeling appeal to the human side of marketing.
Why do you do the work you do?
Your unique market approach, opinions, philosophies, and more all build out your why. What do you think about the evolution of the talent industry? Are there best practices you follow and some you avoid? Highlighting your why and sticking to it can help your company stand out as a thought leader and a value-driven business that people want to work with.
Bring Your Competitive Advantage to Life Through Messaging & Branding
Mandy highlighted that your differentiation is simply an elevation and evolution of where you are now, not a change. When you’re ready to bring your differentiation to life, you can start small.
Test out your value propositions and messaging
When you’ve defined what makes you different, you need to put it out in the world. A/B test your new messaging against your old version in ad campaigns or on social media. You can see how your audience responds in the real world and make sure it’s helping you grow.
Invest in thought leadership
LinkedIn posts, blog posts, podcasts, webinars…all of these content pieces are your chance to help your leaders and team shine. Putting faces to the brand and allowing people to learn from you before they even meet you helps make you memorable. It’s also incredibly valuable to invest in proprietary research and studies, like surveys. It establishes you as an expert in your space and can help improve your marketing efforts, like SEO, by establishing links to your content.
Build a distinct visual brand
There’s a reason why numerous software companies use blue in their brand colors. Color psychology suggests that blue makes people feel calm and stable – exactly how you want people to feel when partnering with you.
But bucking convention and choosing colors different from your competitors can help you stand out before you even start speaking. Unique colors, fun fonts, and distinctive visuals like photos are all clear ways to ensure your uniqueness.
The Bottom Line on Competitive Analysis and Differentiation in Staffing & HR Tech
In a market with tens of thousands of HR tech vendors and staffing firms, generic messaging won’t cut it. Use competitive analysis to identify white space opportunities, define your unique “what, how, and why,” and bring your differentiation to life through strategic messaging, thought leadership, and distinctive branding that makes prospects choose you.
Get Expert Help
Competitive analysis is the foundation for differentiation. You need to know what the industry currently looks like so you can stand out. Using tools like AI, Google Alerts, social media, and websites can help you get started, but the real magic happens when you bring in an expert team to analyze and build the roadmap you need to grow. Get in touch with us and let’s get you growing!