Competitor Benchmarking
What is competitor benchmarking?
So, you’ve developed a marketing strategy, which is performing remarkably well. Now you’re wondering if it could perform better… With every marketplace requiring a different marketing approach, how can you accurately measure it’s success to see if you could be doing more? Competitor benchmarking could help.
Why do I need competitor benchmarking?
We discussed the importance of understanding your brand, in relation to your competition during the research stage of your marketing campaign. This can be in relation to either the number of mentions an existing brand has within the market or through customer surveys conducted by yourself. This will begin to give you some understanding of not only where you’re positioned as a business but also what you need to do to improve this.
Having knowledge of your positioning, supports growing your awareness during this critical stage of the AIDA model. Therefore, moving more customers through to the Interest, Desire and Action stages of the decision-buying lifecycle and generating more leads and sales.
What benefits will my business see from competitor benchmarking?
Understanding where your business is in comparison to the competition, not only throughout the awareness stage of the AIDA model but also the Interest, Desire and Action stages, will allow you to create a marketing strategy that’s performing better than your competitors.
This is achieved by not only monitoring where you’re already performing effectively in comparison to the competition but also where you can improve through understanding what your competitors are doing well.
How do perform competitor benchmarking?
First you need to use the tools on offer, to obtain some data you can use to understand your current position. The following tools will support you in analysing this:
Google allows you to use a plethora of tools including Google Trends to analyse search volumes for your brand or a competitors brand and Google Alerts to provide an overview of content, your brand and competitors brands are mentioned in online. Other tools include Search Insights and Google Predictive Search.
Social Media Analytics
Facebook Page Insights provides an overview of other competitors performance in your marketplace, versus your own. You can choose which competitors you want to rank against. This feature compares Total Page Likes, Versus Last Week, Posts Created This Week and Engagement This Week.
Consumer Surveys
These are often overlooked. Building up a relationship with your audience, both in person through in-store events or through your sales team, or online through email provides an opportunity for you to compare yourself with other competitors, through carefully worded questions. For example, ‘Comparing the design of our product with the previous competitor brand you purchased, which one did you prefer and why?’
SEMrush
SEMrush is an online SEO tool, which allows you to evaluate the performance of your website and optimize it using data the tool pulls from online activity. Using their Competitive Research Toolkit allows businesses to analyse where the competition spend their time optimizing their site and where they’re currently ranking for different keyword phrases, in comparison to your site.
Moz
Moz is an alternative tool to SEMrush and provides the ability to track existing competitor rankings. This analyses search visibility, rankings and can be split in to weekly and monthly figures. You can even track keywords by location, with the goal of achieving more local traffic.
If you would like us to analyse how your existing marketing campaign is performing in comparison to your competitors, along with producing recommendations to improve your sales and lead generation free of charge, get in touch here.
What else do I need to know?
Although these tools are incredibly useful at analysing the performance of your existing marketing campaign, it’s important they’re analysed in the context of the overall campaign, using the AIDA model mentioned.
For example, if you’re analysing the performance of your brand during the awareness stage of your campaign, what types of queries do you want to be competing for with your competition using Google Alerts? If you’re a premium trainer brand, focusing on comfort, what are your most critical reviewer blogs to feature on and which blogs would you rather not appear?
Likewise, during the interest stage of the AIDA model, what keywords do you want your audience to be finding you for. Ranking higher for the keyword term ‘comfortable shoes’, is a lot more important than ranking for the keyword term ‘stylish trainers’ as you’ll be attracting your target audience.
So, it’s not just about your existing outreach online, compared to your competitors, it’s about what you want to be ranking for too. Plenty of websites attract traffic without converting but with careful consideration of your audience and using the appropriate tools to evaluate your campaigns effectiveness, you shouldn’t have this problem.
At Need to Know Marketing we love providing information for SME’s so they can grow. We also understand this work can be time consuming and difficult to begin with. To assist you, we provide a free of charge one hour consultation, where we have an open discussion about your business objectives and what you’re looking to achieve.
Following the consultation we will provide you with a marketing strategy, advising how we recommend meeting your business objectives through marketing. If you are interested in knowing the cost of our services, you can use our calculator as a guide.
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”
Walt Disney knew telling a story is always always easier with pictures. It crosses all barriers. The best story tellers are always the best at engaging their audience.