YouTube Competitor Research for B2B SaaS

If you’re looking to create a YouTube channel for your B2B SaaS, this post is for you! In it, I’ll share how you can use YouTube as well as a free tool called TubeBuddy to find and research the most popular YouTube channels in your industry. If you want you can also check out my list of the best B2B YouTube channels.

How to Research Your B2B Competitors on YouTube

Part of a good YouTube B2B strategy is knowing what your competition is up to. I’m going to share how you can use YouTube to check competitors as well as a free tool called TubeBuddy which is a great YouTube competitor research tool:

Process

Direct Competitors:

First you should look at the channelks from other similar products serving the same niche as you.

  • Get a list of competitors – you can use Ahrefs to do this by entering your domain name in their competitor analysis tool
  • Find which ones have YouTube Channels
  • Evaluate their content and compare to yours
    • How well is their channel doing?
      • Don’t focus too much on total views and subscribers, as these could all be from an ad they published years ago
      • Use TubeBuddy to check how many views their channel got in the last 30 days. This is the closest metric to Watch Time, which is what YouTube itself uses to see how well a channel is doing.
    • Content gaps: what topics do they cover that you aren’t?
    • What keywords are they targeting?
    • What are the comments saying?
      • Are people happy with the videos, or do they still have questions / frustrations?

Content Competitors

Now it’s time to look at other people creating content that competes for attention within your niche.

They are likely to have more content which is interesting to people in your niche, has a wider audience than some of the more product focused content, and can be a really good way to see what kind of topics your audience are likely to want covered.

  • Make a list of search terms that are relevant for your product – e.g. for tax software it could be “how to scan expenses from reciepts” or “how to file taxes automatically”.
  • Search for some of these terms on YouTube and see what comes up
Example of using TubeBuddy to check a competitor’s YouTube channel views over the past 30 days.