A Comprehensive Guide to Benchmarking Analysis

Wouldn’t it be nice to see how your competitors are outperforming you? With the help of benchmarking analysis, you can compare your marketing strategies against competitors and industry best practices to see where your marketing might be falling short. In this guide, we are going to go through the main types of benchmarking, how to get started, and the main marketing strategies that you should be benchmarking. First, let’s go over what benchmarking even is.

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process of comparing your business metrics to industry best practice and the best practices from other companies. It involves identifying the company’s best practices and strategies and the metrics that go along with them. Then, you can use this information to improve your own marketing tactics. Essentially, benchmarking helps organizations understand where they stand in relation to competitors and identify areas for improvement.

Types of Benchmarking

Benchmarking can be categorized into several types, each serving a different purpose. Here is an overview of the most common types of benchmarking.

Strategic Benchmarking

Strategic benchmarking focuses on comparing different business strategies and how they align with long-term goals. This type of benchmarking often involves looking at how leading companies achieve their strategic objectives, their market positioning, and their approach to innovation. For example, a company might compare its growth strategy with that of a market leader to identify new opportunities and potential threats.

Process Benchmarking

Process benchmarking involve analyzing the processes that drives a business. The goal is to identify and implement the most efficient and effective processes in other companies. This could include anything from customer onboarding sequences to customer service processes. As a result, you are able to find inefficiencies in your own operations. Then, and adopt practices that improve productivity and reduce costs.

Performance Benchmarking

Performance benchmarking is the practice of comparing quantitative data such as key performance indicators (KPIs) with those of leading competitors. This type of benchmarking is focused on outcomes and results. Metrics could include sales figures, customer satisfaction ratings, or free trial sign ups. Performance benchmarking helps companies set realistic performance targets. And, help your team understand the gap between their current performance and that of top performers.

The Benchmarking Process

The idea of benchmarking sounds great, but there is a lot more that goes into getting started then you might think. And, it’s best to have a strategy in place so you know exactly what you’re tracking. To effectively benchmark your marketing, follow these steps:

1. Identify What to Benchmark: Determine which processes, performance metrics, or strategies are critical to your business success and would benefit most from benchmarking.
2. Select Benchmarking Partners: In this step, choose the companies or organizations to benchmark against. These can be direct competitors, industry leaders, or even businesses in different industries that you look up to. For example, as a software company, you could benchmark against other software like HubSpot or Mailchimp. They may not be in your industry, but they produce great content.
3. Collect Data: Gather relevant data on your own processes and performance metrics as well as those of your benchmarking partners. Use tools like surveys, benchmarking software, and market research reports.
4. Analyze Data: Compare your data with that of your benchmarking partners. Identify gaps and areas where your business is falling short.
5. Develop Action Plans: Create strategies and action plans to close performance gaps that you identified in the previous step. Then, implement best practices and monitor progress for a specific amount of time.
6. Review and Refine: Regularly review your benchmarking efforts and refine your strategies as necessary. Continuous improvement is key to maintaining competitive while still making data driven decisions.

How to Benchmark Different Marketing Strategies

Benchmarking can help you identify opportunities to improve performance on your own marketing campaigns. Here’s how to benchmark your marketing strategies effectively.

Overall Website Traffic

Benchmarking your overall website traffic and performance is a great place to start your benchmarking analysis. With the help of Visitor Queue, you can compare your total traffic, organic, direct, referral, CPC, email, and other sources of traffic. This can help you gain insight on whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off. And, if you’re attracting the right audience or not. Keep on eye on all of these numbers to ensure that you’re growing consistently and staying competitive with other companies on the market. If you see that your email marketing traffic is consistently lower than your competitors, then it may be time to re-think your email marketing strategy.

SEO

SEO benchmarking involves evaluating how well your website ranks on search engines compared to competitors. Key aspects to compare include keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and on-page SEO practices. My favorite tool to do this is SEMrush. Within your SEMrush account, you are able to crawl your competitor’s websites. Then, you can pull up information on their top keywords, best ranking blog articles, authority score, competitive positioning, and much more. If you’re looking to improve how your company ranks organically, SEMrush is a great tool to leverage.

SEM

Benchmarking SEM, or search engine marketing, involves comparing the effectiveness of of your paid search campaigns. Key metrics to compare include cost per click, click through rate, and conversion rate. Tools like Google Ads and SpyFu can help you gather data on your competitors paid strategies. By knowing what your competitors are paying for results, you can better gauge how much you should be spending. Additionally, this can help you understand if your ads are enticing enough if they are not getting the same results as your competitors are.

Social Media

Social media benchmarking involves comparing your social media performance with your competitors. This includes metrics like follower growth, engagement rates, and content performance. It can be helpful to have a spreadsheet of your monthly metrics compared to your competitors. Since a lot of the metrics are visible, it’s easier to track this benchmark analysis than others. Additionally, if you’re focusing on LinkedIn, you can view your competitor’s metrics under the analytics tab on your page. This section includes new followers, total post metrics, total engagement metrics, and trending competitor posts. As a result, you can see what types of posts perform the best. Then, create similar content with your own company’s twist.

Final Words

Benchmarking analysis is a great way to help identify best practices, improve competitive positioning, and enhance marketing performance. By comparing your marketing strategies and performance to industry leaders and competitors, you can find unique opportunities that you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. Keep in mind that properly conducting benchmarking analysis will take some trial and error, but it’s well worth the effort. If you have any questions about using Visitor Queue for benchmarking analysis, do not hesitate to reach out.