3 Reasons to Benchmark Your Online Marketing
Why benchmark your online marketing activities? It’s a fairly simple question and there are a few compelling reasons why every organisation should take the time to regularly benchmark what they are doing.
Three of the main reasons to benchmark are:
1. Is your Online Marketing effective?
It’s the most obvious reason but still worth stating. Benchmarking allows you to measure your online marketing activities and understand your current state; – where you are – against where you want to be, assess how you are progressing against your strategic goals or objectives and determine if you are achieving the expected return on your investments.
Through benchmarking you will gain insight into your strengths and weaknesses and identify what’s working and what’s not in your online marketing activities. You’re then in a position to decide how to move forward.
Fundamentally this is the reason we carry out benchmarking in online marketing, but it’s not the only reason.
2. Insights into your competitors
Understanding your competitor’s performance and what they are doing helps you identify their strengths and weaknesses and therefore helps you decide the best course of action to match or exceed their performance.
Whilst the competition won’t always be doing things right, understanding their performance will give you context and help you in your decision making.
3. Getting buy in from your organisation
It’s unfortunate but true, in some organisations it takes independent external feedback to highlight issues before decision makers or budget holders take notice. Whilst internal staff may understand what is and isn’t working, their advice can often be dismissed.
Benchmarking when carried out by an independent third party can provide leverage by getting stakeholder attention. This is turn can help an organisation with:
• Budget – recognition of the problem can lead to awareness that investment is needed in specific areas to improve results
• Change – highlighting any issues can help an organisation understand that it needs to do things differently to achieve its objectives. A benchmarking activity can be the catalyst that helps an organisation understand that it needs to do something differently in order to improve results.
The web is a rapidly changing environment, with evolving technologies and ways of interacting with your customers.
You need to benchmark yourself against the competitive marketplace, but also arm yourself with the tools to gain buy in within your organisation to ensure you can keep up with the rapid pace of change.
