Positioning and messaging analysis of Hubspot versus Folloze using SmokeLadder
One of the most important things you need to figure out in terms of your positioning is where you can win in the market.
In this video, I’m going to use our new app SmokeLadder with a real world example to see where a particular brand might have some opportunities to win in their space. I started off by taking a look at product review site G2. I picked a category a little bit at random – focusing on account based marketing platforms.
Brand positioning example analysis
HubSpot is number one in this particular category. HubSpot is obviously a giant brand, everybody knows them.
HubSpot is so confident about their position that the headline on the landing page for their product is just: “Marketing Software”.
They don’t feel the need to say much of anything here. They do have additional supporting messaging talking about their product, but they’re not saying much up front. Because of this you would assume there’s some opportunity for other brands.
While Hubspot is number one I wanted to see who’s number ten in this list?
Number ten is the brand Folloze.
They’ve got some reviews and obviously there are customers who are happy with them. But I’m curious to see how they’re positioning themselves. How could they move up the ranking ladder to create a stronger position to win over some of those customers that default to HubSpot.
If we take a look at their landing page, their lead message is: “Reimagine account based marketing for the buyer-centric era”.
This says a little bit more than HubSpot, but “reimagine” is a tricky word because it’s leaving it up to the reader to figure out what that actually means.
They have some supporting messaging here to flesh that out a little bit, but I think there’s some opportunity for them to to further accentuate their strengths, and highlight some of the things that they do particularly well. So we ran their landing page and also HubSpot through SmokeLadder.
The Folloze page scored well. They have some some good key strengths specifically around simplifying and scalability.
In the differentiation tab, we can see they they do have some some standout points. If we come down to the bottom, we see strengths of:
- Scalability
- Configurable
- Simplify
- Saving time
But if we do a head to head comparison with HubSpot’s landing page, it’s not quite so clear cut. There’s a lot of overlap with HubSpot in terms of the points of value that they’re also focused on.
Where we had a big gap around scalability and simplify, that gap is somewhat closed up.
Meanwhile, with blue line representing HubSpot, they have some big advantages around variety of solutions, reputation, and integration.
The question here is where could Folloze double down? Where could they further emphasize their their value to create a real identity and find some places to win within this this landscape going against such a strong incumbent like HubSpot.
There’s still a little bit of a an advantage for Folloze with configurable, flexible, and form, but it’s pretty small.
Meanwhile, HubSpot still has advantages with variety, innovation, integration, lowering costs, reducing risk.
Identifying where a brand can double down on its positioning
Folloze has some strengths already, specifically around scalability and simplifying, Could they emphasize this even more? Rather than having a headline about “reimagining account based marketing”, could they double down on being a really simple solution for marketers to implement within their workflow?
On their landing page they talk about things like “Personalized buyer experiences in minutes. No coding required.” Having a no code solution, is big. They also lean on AI to help uncover some of these insights. “Empowering their sales team, orchestrating campaigns.” I think they could take the essence of what they’re talking about here from both an innovation perspective and a simplifying perspective, bubble that up to the main message.
There’s an opportunity to position themselves around being the easiest to use, the simplest solution to uncover these powerful benefits for customers.
If we think about a product like HubSpot (or Salesforce) they have a reputation for being bloated, more complex, and harder to get up and running.
There’s an opportunity there for Folloze to slip in and build an identity around being the easier solution, the simpler solution. Folloze is extremely powerful too but doesn’t have these big hurdles to jump over in order to get going.
Decision maker insights within a buying process
Next we have the decision maker insights feature where we we use generative AI to reveal what decision makers would say about this product if they were in a buying process.
From the CEO perspective Folloze score fairly well but with the CFO it only scores a 6 (out of 10). It says, “Though promising I need more concrete information on potential ROI prior to making such an investment.”
If you look again at the Folloze page, they have some case studies, but they’re baked into a little carousel at the bottom which makes it harder to see what some of the either cost savings or revenue generation benefits are.
On the CTO side, they bring up “the no-code customization use of AI for for ABM is compelling, but need to verify robustness of security.”
Again it calls out the benefits of having a no-code solution, but it’s not emphasized very much. It feels more like a secondary supporting point as opposed to the main focus.
Last is the value proposition evaluation.
In the value improvements section, we can see some opportunities here:
- More explicit demonstration of ROI
- Show concrete instances of use cases
- Emphasize the speed and agility of the tool more
There are some real opportunities there to focus on speed of implementation, simplification, and all the power that you’re getting from the AI insights.
That’s a quick run through of how you can use our app, SmokeLadder, to practically look at your positioning in the market and compare and contrast against market leaders.
By running an analysis like this against direct competitors you can find some opportunities to emphasize your unique strengths and improve your ability to win.
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