Today, leading business leaders benchmark their brands’ digital performance over time and compare it with the industry and best-in-class brands. This helps them prioritize digital investment based on their brand’s most prominent digital marketing opportunities across all digital channels. Marketing leaders who use digital benchmarking achieve tangible results and profits.
If you are a forward-thinking business leader, you should regularly measure the performance across the web, social media, mobile, and digital channels compared to your competitors. Many automation tools and applications provide marketers with the metrics they need to improve their digital marketing initiatives. If you are benchmarking your digital marketing performance with respect to your industry standards, here are some insights to improve your digital marketing efforts.
How to do Digital Benchmarking
#1: Identify the digital marketing efforts you want to focus on
There are various digital marketing initiatives undertaken by an organization. For digital benchmarking, you must understand the processes that you want to focus on. Also, you may consider different metrics for benchmarking. This includes the number of page views for blogs, total downloads, or articles’ bounce rates.
In addition to this, if you are starting with digital benchmarking, we suggest you focus on two or three initiatives. Moreover, identify digital marketing efforts to focus on. This will help you have a clear vision and achieve your goals.
#2: Choose the right metrics
If you are looking after many social media channels, you must choose the correct parameters. So, don’t get tempted to select all the digital channels together. This will lead to adverse effects. We would recommend going to two or three. Here, we have mentioned some of the right metrics that you can choose:
- Page views and engagement for your blogs or articles
- How users engage with your content
- Location of your end-users
- How users interact with your click-through-actions
#3: Assess Marketing Maturity against Competencies
With digital benchmarking, identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business compared to others in the market. Also, understand the areas where you lag or lead compared to your competitors. This is in terms of digital marketing initiatives. Also, identify the gap between you and your key competitors. In addition to this, assess your marketing maturity against all competencies.
Some of the main competencies include innovation, resources, customer experiences, multichannel marketing, social, mobile, digital commerce, marketing analytics, and operations. In addition to this, regularly analyze the marketing initiatives of your competitors and evaluate their business outcomes.
Benefits of digital benchmarking
By accurately doing digital benchmarking, your business can:
- Identify areas for improvement
- Evaluate lucrative business opportunities
- Develop roadmaps for improving capabilities
- Highlight investment priorities
- Benchmark against competitors in the market
#4: Do initial benchmarking against these metrics
There are various powerful tools to help you do the benchmark. Before starting your benchmarking process, choose the period for which you need to carry out the benchmarking. We would suggest you carry out benchmarking for the past three months. Marketers must have heard of the tool, Google Analytics. This tool helps you identify the total traffic and visitors to your website. Also, you can identify the areas where you’re receiving maximum traffic.
A/B testing helps you understand the campaigns that are performing well. In social media channels, you will see an analytics section where you can track the engagement received for your posts.
#5: Create a digital marketing strategy
Once you have identified the areas that need improvements, focus on creating a digital marketing strategy around them. For instance, if you are getting fewer page views for your articles, your plan must revolve around increasing page views by 50% or more. Creating a robust digital marketing strategy can be done by evaluating the processes of your competitors.
To increase the click-through rate for your ads, you can consider including languages that communicate a value proposition and resonate with your target audiences’ preferences.
#6: Review and repeat
Your work is not entirely done if you devise a robust digital marketing strategy. You must make sure to review your plan and make improvements continually. Checking the outcomes and constantly revamping digital efforts can help businesses thrive in the market and outpace their competitors.
Summary
If you have not started with digital benchmarking, don’t wait for more. Start today itself. Identify and prioritize the best digital investment and revamp them if required. Also, you must actively measure your digital performance across websites, social media, phone, and much more. We can help you with some powerful business automation tools. Therefore, use ONPASSIVE’s business automation solutions and measure your brand health.
