B2B SaaS Industry Trends & Leaders of 2021

The Software as a Service (SaaS) industry keeps growing rapidly in the business-to-business (B2B) space, with no end in sight. By 2022, Gartner predicts SaaS will generate nearly $141 billion in revenue. As many as 73% of organizations use all or mostly all SaaS solutions today , and 93% of chief information officers say they’re already adapting or will soon adapt SaaS platforms.

With more than 15,500 SaaS companies worldwide , competitionCompetition
Businesses generally know who their competitors are on the open market. But are they the same companies you need to fight to get the best placement for your website? Not necessarily!
Learn more has never been more fierce. And when companies want to learn more about a particular product, they turn to Google.

So, we decided to find out who’s winning the SaaS B2B tech space in organic search. Using search data, Conductor analyzed 14,300 non-branded searches related to B2B technology. We then broke down the numbers into the five most popular solutions:

• Business intelligence & analytics
• Human resource technology
• Marketing solutions
• Workplace collaboration tools
• Fintech

Let’s look at topic trends with the largest increase and decrease in search from April 2020 to April 2021:

Business intelligence & analytics: OLAP tools are in high demand

A whopping 97.2% of organizations are investing in big data and AI . To make sense of all that data and leverage it to make better decisions, enterprises are turning to online analytical processing (OLAP) tools.

So it’s no wonder that OLAP tools had the biggest average increase in business intelligence & analytics searches, growing by 49.8% from April 2020 to April 2021. IBM and Microsoft are the top domains for best speaking to OLAP tools.

Topic trends show that companies also remain highly interested in using analytics tools like BI, predictive analytics, data visualization and data cleaning. These tools help companies increase their data trust and keep remote and hybrid workers on track to reach key performance indicators (KPIs).

Human resources technology: Companies seek D&I solutions

Few categories of B2B technology faced the amount of search volumeSearch Volume
Search volume refers to the number of search queries for a specific keyword in search engines such as Google.
Learn more change as human resources technology. When the COVID-19 pandemic closed offices worldwide and led millions of people to work remotely, HR teams searched high and low for video interview software that could help them onboard new employees in a work-from-home world.

Now, as workplaces reopen worldwide, there’s been a seismic shift in the demand for HR SaaS solutions. In the wake of the racial injustice crisis brought to light by the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others, searches for diversity & inclusion recruitment solutions have grown by 119% from April 2020 to April 2021, the largest YOY increase in any category. Interestingly, no one domain dominates the D&I discussion, so it’s a great opportunity for companies to pump up their D&I-related content to gain organic search traffic.

Searches for recruiting platforms for small businesses increased by 62% YOY, showing the concerns SMBs have around finding the right employees to join their teams.

Marketing solutions: CX is king

According to statistics compiled by SuperOffice , customer experience has overtaken price and product as the No. 1 brand differentiator, and companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn an additional $700 billion within three years by investing in CX. Companies turn to marketing solutions to help generate leads, create social media buzz and piece together the ideal CX that will win the day.

Interestingly, every marketer has a different approach, and that’s reflected in our topic trends. Marketing solutions had the most varied topics among all five categories. Organic traffic for “CRM Sales Lead Tracker” topped the YOY increases at 73%, but searches for social media tools—including scheduling software, management platforms, and industry-specific solutions—grew, too.

Work collaboration tools: Project management overtakes video conferencing

Harvard Business School research predicts that at least 16% of American workers will switch from professional offices to working from home at least two days per week as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s fueled continued interest in work collaboration tools.

Video conferencing tools, which were an organic search darling at the start of the pandemic, are falling sharply in demand, likely because businesses have since found the communication tools they need to keep their workforces connected.

Now, companies embracing remote and hybrid work are turning to a different solution: project management. Searches for those technologies rose 91% over the past year, an increase driven by marketing-specific search demand. A deeper dive shows increases in other industry-specific project management searches, including IT, legal, construction, and engineering.

Fintech: Payment, robo advisors and InsurTech are all hot SaaS trends

The Big Data analytics market hit $29.87 billion in 2019 and is set to grow at a CAGR of 12.97% between 2020-2025.

As a result, fintech solutions display an interesting range of highs and lows. What’s up: robo advisors, insurance technology solutions and small business searches for payment platforms. What’s down: interest in telematics, asset management, predictive analytics in insurance, and chatbots in banking.

We’re also seeing a spike in interest for Banking as a Service (BaaS). It’s a B2B software that allows non-banks to give their customers banking services by partnering online with a licensed bank.

How trends affect your organic marketing goals

Now that you know the trending topics in the SaaS B2B Tech market, you can use them to improve your organic marketing capabilities. Our best advice: Prioritize writing content around the topics showing the highest average increase in search and build your domains as a leading source of B2B SaaS information.

Who owns the SaaS B2B Tech market on page 1?

These search trends are just a few of the many fascinating insights we learned in our survey.

Read the full report to learn lots more, including:

• Which top performers are dominating search results across trending topics
• The companies that own the market on the first page of Google for each type of solution
• Categories with the largest YOY change since last year
• Opportunities for you to capture the conversation before your competition does

You’ll even get organic marketing tips and examples of how to up your SEO and content marketingContent Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing discipline with the goal of increasing awareness and scope for products and brands in the desired target group with content published on the web and offline.
Learn more strategy.

Download the report now.

Conductor’s Organic Marketing technology aligns all of your teams across SEO, Content and Web to work better together, move faster in a single platform, and take action informed by insight. The result is increased marketing agility, which creates a competitive advantage for Conductor customers, improving online acquisition, conversions, and market position. Get started with Conductor today.