The expansive number of marketing channels is an apparent ruff task to monitor and to track. Then as most of our equations go, adding in your competitors into this monitoring contributes even more subsets of channels you need to look after.
Ultimately though, the biggest question that most of us always ask in varying portions of our lives and for the sake of this post, in our marketing campaigns, why is this important? Why do our competitors matter and why should we track them?
You’re not alone in your industry and there are competitors lurking around every corner looking for one false step in order to bring their own triumph to take your customers away. Paranoia could probably start to ensue, but that shouldn’t be the number one reason why you are tracking your competitors. Yes, it’s increasingly important to keep an eye out on what they are doing, but tracking your competitors helps set up one of the most important things in your marketing — benchmarks.
The 3 Important Facets of Marketing Benchmarks and How to Set Them Up
Marketing Benchmarks are important because of the three following things:
Your Overall Performance
That blog post helped boosted your SEO, which then in turn brought you in an extra 1,000 monthly uniques.
That’s great, but how do you know how great it is? What do you have it to compare to?
Benchmarks give you a measurement of success, where to aim, and how you stack up in your industry and against your competitors. Without these marketing benchmarks, there is this dark area where you won’t exactly be able to tell how successful your campaigns performance is.
Benchmarks can include a previous campaigns performance, but they also need to be inclusive of what your competitors and peers are doing. Otherwise, it will be hard to tell where to move forward or if you should even do that campaign again. Benchmarks are clear indicators of your marketing performance and help to quantify just how well you need to do to perform well in your industry.
Gauge of How Well Future Campaigns will do
As a marketer you want to aim before you shoot — you want to be proactive about your marketing.
Marketing benchmarks enable you to do just that, by helping you to gauge how well future campaigns will do. Look at the previous performance of your last marketing campaign. Were you able to hit your target goals? Can you improve on the performance this time from the observed benchmarks? Now based on the projected benchmarks, is this future campaign worth doing?
Benchmarks provide a gauge on how well your campaign should and will do. They paint a clearer picture rather than a fuzzy one that you could get by shooting first and hoping it hits the bullseye.
Opportunities
In 2014, 74% of B2B Marketers identified that Lead Generation is one of their top organizational goals for B2B Content Marketing. It’s sandwiched in between Brand Awareness and Customer Acquisition, in which all three have something in common — opportunities. Benchmarks help to identify particular gaps your marketing can fill or golden opportunities to take advantage of. From finding where you can get the best leads to increasing brand awareness, benchmarks are your go-to resources.
Besides seeing areas for improvements, looking at benchmarks will show easy identifiable goldmines in your marketing to mine for marketing successes.
How to Set Up Actionable Benchmarks
Proactive Analytics
Having some sort of proactive analytics helps to set the standard for your benchmarks. You aren’t mapping out unknown territory and gambling on a positive reaction to the results, instead marketing as a marketer you need to be proactive. I mentioned before that for any marketing task, you want to aim and then shoot. Aim at the bullseye, rather than trying to arbitrarily throw something at the wall to see if it sticks.
Having these proactive analytics helps you to set up actionable benchmarks in order to move forward.
Shameless Plug: TrackMaven has custom marketing benchmarks to show you exactly how your marketing channels are doing vs. your competitors.
Reports and Graphs
Every week at TrackMaven, I send out a weekly update with the number of MQLs that we brought in that week, our traffic numbers, and the marketing spend for the week. I use this weekly report to also benchmark previous weeks and to show the growth of the previous month as well. It outlines our performance and even holds us accountable for weeks that we need to improve on for the week after.
Setting up this basic weekly benchmark standard is simple and very informative because it gives you a week by week look into how your marketing is doing.
I would even go the extra mile to plot this growth on a graph, so you can actually see the benchmarks in a more visual way.
Infogr.am is a sweet tool to quickly spin up infographics and interactive graphs that you can use to visualize your benchmarks.
Quarterly Wrap Up
Quarterly Reports, to be honest, sound daunting and really dull.
Until you insert your benchmarks that helps your actionable plan to move marketing mountains in the next quarter. At our Competitive Summit last September, Joe Payne said that as a CEO he would really hear where you need to improve and how you are going to do it. There would be more negative consequences if your marketing strategies were severely lacking in areas and you had no course of action to make them more successful.
Quarterly reports are excellent sources to call out where your biggest weaknesses are, as told by certain gaps or decreases in benchmarks, and then how you can resolve to make them better. Benchmarks help to set your performance for the next quarter and show you where your targets should be.
Try setting up a SWOT analysis and then answering how you are going to adjust your weaknesses with the benchmarks you have in place.
Data is vital for your marketing and setting up benchmarks in your marketing breaths life into your marketing campaigns. These benchmarks show your performance, allow you to become proactive and find the best marketing tactics that are right in front of you.