We are in a highly competitive world that also changes rapidly, so staying attentive to what happens around us becomes a fundamental tactic to keep up with any industry.
If we talk about digital marketing, analyzing our environment becomes an even more crucial matter: while our audience should be the main source of insights, understanding what our competition is doing can also provide valuable information to develop a more effective digital marketing strategy.
The best tool to know what your competition is doing and how they communicate is a competition benchmark, so I’ll explain everything you need to know to do it correctly and integrate it into your digital marketing strategy.
What is a competition benchmark?
The word ‘benchmark’ means a point of reference in English, and that’s precisely what it is about: conducting a benchmark involves analyzing processes, services, products, etc., from other businesses, and even from other areas within the company, to understand their functioning and take them as examples in the construction of future tactics.
A common mistake is to believe that the goal of a benchmark is to copy the competition’s strategy and replicate it. While it’s possible to take references or examples, it’s ideal to focus the benchmark on understanding the experiences that businesses with similar models have had to improve the company’s own processes.
There are different types of benchmarks: internal, which involves evaluating different areas of the company; functional, which implies seeking ways to innovate by analyzing other sectors; and finally, competition benchmark, which, as the name suggests, analyzes the practices of other companies in the same sector.
Advantages of conducting a competition benchmark
When you execute a competition benchmark coherently, you can obtain brilliant ideas that will serve as inspiration to improve processes within your company. Additionally, the use of this tool provides you with benefits such as:
- Recognizing the weaknesses and strengths of your competition to understand your market positioning and compare how you perform within the sector.
- Allows you to stay at the forefront by understanding which topics are trending within the sector, enabling you to develop innovative ideas.
- Comparing with other businesses gives you a broader view of the improvement opportunities your company may have.
5 steps to conduct a coherent benchmark
What often happens is that the benchmark task is reduced to superficially reviewing what the competition is doing: we visit their social media profiles to see their tone, visual style, content axes, advertising tactics, etc. And while it is necessary to do so, it should not be limited to just this review.
Therefore, I’ll show you how to conduct a competition benchmark coherently so that you can use it in a way that provides relevant data to enhance your digital marketing strategy.
- What is your objective?
It is crucial that your starting point is to identify the research objective; you must be clear whether you want to conduct a qualitative or quantitative analysis and understand what you are looking to find, whether it is to improve your communication with your audience or provide them with more valuable content.
- Who is your competition?
It is important to determine who you will compare yourself with because the fact that a company belongs to your sector does not necessarily make it your competition. It is also essential to classify your competitors into those who are direct and indirect.
Analyze the target audience they address, the size of the company, its geographical location, and its business approach to conclude whether it is a competitor and what type it is.
- What opportunities does your competition/your business have?
Now is the time to analyze the tactics of your competition to understand if they are seeing an opportunity that could work for your company by applying it to your business model. It is also important to recognize those tactics that do not work so well, as you could use them as a basis for executing something with a more elaborate development.
- Detect the differences among your competition
You must understand that not all companies are the same, so an excellent practice is to categorize them to determine their degree of competition, whether they are direct or indirect, and even if they are an aspirational reference for your business.
- Apply the information obtained to your strategy
Finally, you should analyze all the information you found to determine which improvement opportunities you will start working on
It is crucial that when conducting your competition benchmark, you select the variables you will measure and the tools you will use to do so. This way, you will be able to establish reasonable correlations between your competitors and your company.
Finally, remember that not everything the competition does is right, and without knowledge of their strategy, you don’t know if it is well-founded. Likewise, there are tactics that work for some companies and not for others, so don’t try to copy what others do: trust your team or your agency, the results of your strategy begin to show as you develop and optimize it.
