Competitive brand benchmarking compares your own brand’s performance metrics with those of your competitors and respective market. This process helps businesses understand how they stack up against the competition, identify best practices, and strategize organizational goals to gain a competitive edge. Competitive brand benchmarking can involve metrics associated with traditional and digital marketing strategies; however, the two can go hand-in-hand if an organization is looking to paint a holistic view of its entire competitive landscape and positioning within.

To understand competitive benchmarking effectively, it’s essential to know that it differs from competitive analysis, although the two utilize a similar approach. With competitive analysis (competitive research), organizations can’t paint a detailed picture of each competitor. The competitive analysis uses a narrower scope to investigate messaging, strategies, and tactics to understand what the daily operations of a competitor look like. With competitive benchmarking, it’s best to picture your competitive landscape from a birds-eye view – looking at other brands’ long-term strategies from a high level to evaluate their performance over time and analyze overall market trends.

Competitive benchmarking always starts with the identification process – what goals are an organization trying to accomplish, who are the relevant competitors, what metrics will tell the right story? In these initial steps, an organization must identify its relevant competitors based on brand priorities. As with any market, there will be competitors closer to a particular brand and those leading the industry. With brands closer to a specific organization, it can be easy to identify easily accessible opportunities to gain a competitive edge. Because these brands are often similar in market size and positioning, benchmarking metrics against theirs should require less effort than comparing with an industry leader. To benchmark against close competitors, organizations should look at industry trends, growth potential, competitor traffic sources (through online digital marketing tools), and competitors’ top products and offerings.

When benchmarking against an industry-leading organization (as a minor player), it’s best to utilize insights gathered from their competitive positioning to build a roadmap toward that level of success. Analyzing historical data, past strategies, marketing campaigns, and current positioning will help identify organizational goals that your business can strive towards as it moves along the pipeline. Digital tools to analyze web traffic and SEO content can be compelling in this benchmarking strategy. They offer insights that are often unavailable to the public without significant effort or high cost.

Another form of brand benchmarking involves comparison with industry disruptors. These organizations are shifting the way business is handled in your respective market and can be a mighty area to benchmark against if the entire industry is heading that way. It’s essential to understand whether these disruptors have a sustainable business model to avoid benchmarking along the wrong path. Still, failure to do so against successful disruptors can make or break any business if the industry normalizes its offering. This is especially true in technology segments where industry-wide adoption of solutions could shift buying patterns for decades (think smartphones and electric vehicles).

Competitive brand benchmarking enables a clear image of market opportunities and current market positioning. While there are several ways that brands can track their market position amongst their competitors, the experts at SIS Global Marketing have identified three strategic competitive benchmarking procedures that have led numerous brands to heightened success.

Procedure benchmarking

involves the examination of internal business practices against competitor strategies to identify and adopt areas of improvement. By examining how competitors execute business operations, a brand can find new processes for optimizing operational excellence and improving product pricing.

Strategy benchmarking

aims to amplify specific business strategies by examining competitor strategies with proven success. For example, an upcoming social media organization may try to emulate Facebook’s success by digging deep into its business model and adopting some of its strategies.

Performance benchmarking

is probably the most common form of benchmarking utilized by organizations today. This is particularly true in the realm of digital marketing, as the metrics involved in performance benchmarking can be accessible through a variety of online platforms and applications. Performance benchmarking is all about the analysis of competitors’ KPIs to evaluate your successes and failures.

In addition to the competitive positioning that benchmarking can provide to a brand, analyzing industry growth and trends can help organizations find niche markets and unique opportunities for differentiation. Keeping a close eye on social media movements, digital trends, and emerging technologies can help organizations stay proactive in their competitive strategies and inform business development teams on products or services that can establish better market differentiation.

Every competitive benchmarking strategy will require its own set of metrics because organizational goals will influence the applicable metrics greatly. Your brand should start any competitive benchmarking procedure by assessing the metrics that will answer the following questions:

What does your organization’s growth rate look like?

Using metrics like site traffic and click-through rates for advertisements will help evaluate growth rate over time versus competitors.

How does your brand rank in SERP?

SERP, or Search Engine Results Page, involves a ranking system that displays the most relevant information to a user based on the relevancy of your website’s content against what that individual searched for. Analyzing the competitions’ traffic, keywords, affiliate links, and SERP ranking will help benchmark your brand against theirs in the digital landscape.

How is your brand leveraging social media?

A solid social media presence can do wonders for an organization of any size and helps gain consumer interest. Tracking metrics like follower count, social media reach, post engagements (likes, comments, or shares), and overall traffic to your website helps build robust social media strategies that drive success.

Do people know your brand?

Brand awareness indicates the number of individuals familiar with your brand and associate it with a particular product, service, or attribute. Measuring direct traffic numbers in conjunction with engagement rates across physical and digital solutions can inform this brand tracking metric and provide a complete picture of how your brand stacks up to the competition.

At SIS Global Marketing, we offer various services to put your brand on the right path to sustainable growth. Your business is our business, and we pride ourselves on building long-lasting strategic partnerships that enable success for all parties involved. Our team of industry-recognized experts has decades of experience behind them establishing proven, effective, and readily adaptable methodologies for competitive brand benchmarking. We offer several services that can help your brand stand out in even the most crowded market:

• Competitor Selection and Metric Gathering
• Industry Trend and Growth Analysis
• Competitor Traffic Analysis and Market Channel Auditing
• Product/Service Benchmarking
• SERP Ranking, Keyword Tracking, and SEO Optimization

Whether your organization has an established competitive benchmarking processor is looking to initiate one, our professionals can enable heightened success for your brand. Contact us today to see how SIS Global Marketing can transform your competitive brand benchmarking strategy.