Importance of Competitor Benchmarking
Leveraging competitor benchmarking to achieve business growth
Competitor benchmarking is an essential technique business must adopt today. In this dynamic world staying ahead of the competition requires consistent result-oriented marketing efforts. Competitive benchmarking helps in achieving this business goal.
Competitor benchmarking helps in streamlining your marketing efforts by emulating your competitor’s success elements.
Let’s say you have a customer care center that is performing well. Though the number of complaints addressed daily amount to a significant figure. There is a dip in the customer satisfaction ratings.
Many customers were not happy with the support services. They were complaining about the delays in processing the requests.
In such cases, competitor benchmarking helps in learning industry best practices and apply the same to enhance customer satisfaction.
Call duration, response time, agent behavior, satisfaction rating, etc., are the key performance metrics for a call center. Identify few of your competitors and conduct a mystery shopping exercise.
A mystery shopping exercise on competitor service centers will identify different tactics followed by them. It helps in developing an actionable strategy to yield a positive business result.
Where to start competitor benchmarking?
Identify the focal point for the benchmarking. Study your current process and find out parameters to improve. Make sure the metrics are quantifiable and easy to benchmark.
For example, Let’s consider a brand ventured into the digital space. The brand executed a set of campaigns as part of the brand promotion. They advertised across social platforms but did not yield the desired result.
Competitive analysis provides the possible reasons for the campaign’s failure. It analyzes real-world situations like competition performance, market dynamics etc to arrive at conclusions.
The competitor benchmarking results reveal the following – the engagement rates, content type, time and frequency of posting, etc.
These insights help in devising a new strategy and campaign process flow. It enhances the campaign performance by targeting the right audience.
How to do social competitive benchmarking?
Identify your competitors
Find out other business who offer similar products and services and look for them online. Explore their website, social media pages, other channels like YouTube, SlideShare, online forums, etc.
There are a couple of competitive analysis tools that provide insights on:
Which content performs well?
and
How are your competitors content performing?
Examples: SEM Rush, Buzzsumo, Social Mentions, etc.
Analyze and compare the content
Find out what your competitors post on their website and social pages. Analyzing their content will help in identifying the industry trends and what exactly is the audience looking.
Identify various content types like blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, guides, videos, Faqs, etc.
Determine the content quality and compare it with yours. Look for information like how frequently competitors blog, update content, type of topics discussed, etc.
Now you can know where to put in efforts to build similar content.
For example, if your competitors are consistently publishing white papers, this could be a reason for quality leads getting shared with your competitors.
Hence, a competitive audit that examines the social media and website posting trends of your competitors would help in benchmarking your position in the digital space.
Analyze the SEO structure
Identify the SEO structure of your competitor’s content. Look for the following:
How are they using the keywords?
Are they included in:
- Title Tags
- URL architecture
- H1 Tags
- Content
- Internal Links
- Image ALT tags
Also, check on what type of keywords they are using, don’t compete for high ranking keywords. Always, look for long tail keywords and keywords with lower search volume to start. Generate a list of keywords to work the content plan.
Look at their social media interaction
Skim through your competitor social media pages or use online tools like Social mentions, Social Blade, etc. Create a spreadsheet with the tracking parameters and compare with your social media efforts.
Capture the following insights from your competitor social pages-
How your competitors are using social media and integrating it into the marketing?
What do they post? – topics/industry trends
What content type – blogs, webinars, case studies
What ad type – paid social promotions, google ads, etc.
How do they engage with their audience? – Social media posts, website live chats, social chatbots, content marketing – blogs, whitepapers, webinars, etc.
Do they have a huge fan following? – Social media Page likes, comments, shares, followers, etc.
How frequently they post? – Time of posting, number of posts per week, etc.
Identify areas of improvement
After studying your competitors. Identify the positive cues, analyze your shortcomings, and identify areas of improvement.
Competitive benchmarking is a completely objective process. It helps in quantifying business operations/processes to measure the performance.
It is a data-driven approach and does not let subjective opinions influence decisions. The logical problem-solving ability helps in validating and invalidating assumption made. It helps in assessing the various business scenarios and drive growth
The insights from competitive benchmarking and current state analysis help in revamping your digital strategy and content marketing plan.
Thereby, streamlining your marketing efforts to drive relevant traffic to your website and generate ROI from all your marketing efforts.
Stay tuned for similar content! Meanwhile, you can always check out our insights page for more articles on a wide range of marketing topics.