We are all familiar with benchmarking. It’s an important part of any marketing strategy. Understanding how your business compares to others in your industry can help you not only gauge your business, but also understand areas of improvement for your own strategy.
Benchmarketing, however, is a process that elevates your benchmarks to actionable insights. This article will delve into this new concept.
What is Benchmarketing?
Benchmarketing is a process where companies compare their performance against best practices in their industry to identify areas of improvement, enabling them to understand their position in the market, identify gaps in products/services, and establish goals to improve competitive advantage.
Benchmarketing combines benchmarking with marketing, utilizing comparative data to shape and optimize a marketing strategy. This method involves analyzing benchmarks to inform and refine strategic marketing decisions, ensuring a business adopts the most effective practices for success.
Benchmarketing in Practice: Business Applications
Basically there are 5 steps in implementing benchmarketing:
1. Identify your area of focus
Identify the strategic KPIs you plan to measure based on strategic business goals. Depending on your industry and your team’s remit, you may be tasked with influencing revenue growth, customer pipeline, lead generation and conversion, or even the entire sales process. Choose a set of KPIs that map to the key business goal you’re trying to achieve.
2. Benchmark your performance
In addition to comparing against your historical performance, industry benchmarks are a great way to see how your marketing stacks up, and provide the bones for your strategy. Depending on your area of focus, industry reports like Customer Loyalty Indexes and advertising performance reviews can give you a good sense of how your industry and the market at large are performing.
Learn More:
Customer Loyalty & Retention: Key Differences and Strategies
3. Build your strategy
Once you’ve identified a strategy you want to improve, now is the time to begin thinking about your tactics. For example, an e-commerce brand decides on replenishment campaigns as their core tactic. You can use purchasing data from your existing repeat buyers to understand how often customers purchase this product and create a replenishment timeline that can trigger once a customer has reached the point of needing to repurchase.
4. Track your performance
Be sure to leverage tools like Google Analytics or customer engagement platforms to track your progress against your benchmarks and KPIs.
5. Measure and iterate
Develop a feedback loop with your benchmarks so you can always stay ahead of the numbers. Establish a consistent schedule of reviews so you’re evaluating things on a time horizon that makes sense for what you’re tracking.
Aligning Benchmarketing with Business Goals
As marketers, we understand how important it is to gauge our success against competitors and the market at-large. But too often we focus too heavily on channel-specific metrics that don’t tell us much about our business. For instance, our competitor may have a higher eDM open rate, but that doesn’t mean that their customers are purchasing more than ours or that their emails are helping impact the bottom line.
In today’s marketing landscape, marketers must shift our attention from traditional benchmarking reports to connecting with high-level objectives that matter most in a business.
This article is originally published by Emarsys:
Emarsys, an SAP company, is the omnichannel customer engagement platform that empowers marketers to build, launch, and scale personalized, cross-channel campaigns that drive business outcomes. We partner with more than 1,500 companies from global enterprises to fast-moving mid-market brands across industries.
