Table of Contents
Introduction
Marketing encompasses so many functions that it can be difficult for marketing leaders like us to get an accurate picture of how we’re doing. Are we crushing it? Or are we falling behind? Since marketing is multifaceted, it can be hard to gauge success — unless we’re deliberate about objectively evaluating our performance.
One way to do that is with sober, data-driven benchmarking exercises to level-set our understanding of how we’re doing in different areas.
Benchmarking is not the same as overall measurement. It allows you to zoom out and see how you compare to the overall industry. Measurement, on the other hand, looks only at your own performance compared to past performance and current or future goals.
Benchmarking is an effective way to gauge your success at a granular level so you can see what you’re doing well and where there are opportunities to improve. It also provides a trove of insights into your market and how you’re investing compared to others, which can help inform how you prioritize your marketing resources and efforts. Sometimes it can even expose weaknesses you weren’t aware you had.
If you aspire to be a Chief Market Officer — i.e., the voice of the market within your company — benchmarking is essential. Without it, you can’t accurately develop a market point of view.
As a Chief Market Officer, your investors, your CEO, your board, and the organization as a whole look to you to know how your marketing stacks up against the rest of the industry. So it’s essential to stay in front of that — and to be able to communicate what you’re doing well and what you need to work on. The best defense is a good offense, after all.
It can be hard to benchmark everything you do in marketing, and even harder to find good benchmarks that are relevant to you. But my team and I have learned some important lessons from our regularly scheduled benchmarking exercises, and I’m sharing them here in the hopes they’ll help you uncover insights to drive and fine-tune your own marketing efforts.
Drill way down
In order to get a complete picture of how you’re doing, you need to break down the many functions of marketing. And then you need to atomize all those functions into sub-functions so you can measure your performance in each.
This level of drill-down empowers you to get clear on what’s important to you and your strategy. Is your competitor super active on Twitter but you’ve tested and found that a Twitter presence doesn’t move the needle for you in important ways? This benchmarking exercise is an opportunity to explore and understand that. Some of the measures are straightforward — like comparing your follower count to that of your competitors. Others are more subjective, including insights gleaned from reading review sites, listening to win-loss calls, and doing customer interviews.
Sometimes your direct competitors aren’t the ones you want to benchmark yourself against. For instance, if events are a huge source of pipeline for you but your competitors don’t do events, you need to look outside your immediate circle.
Ask yourself who inspires you. Which companies are knocking it out of the park? Maybe you’re not going to put on the next Dreamforce, but by taking inspiration from how Salesforce executes its main event, you’ll see what success looks like and use that to elevate your own events.
In other words, there is no one way to benchmark. So depending on the category, you may choose to use a mix of different comparative sets, such as:
- Competitive benchmarks: How you compare to your immediate competitive set.
- Ecosystem benchmarks: How you compare to the general industry — sales and marketing tech, for example.
- Best-in-class benchmarks: How you compare to the companies that are leading the pack in a particular area.
- Functional/industry benchmarks: Benchmarking reports from analyst firms or research firms.
- Vendor-provided benchmarks: Benchmarks published by relevant vendors show how you compare to other customers using the same functionality.
- Investor-provided benchmarks: Investors can help you benchmark against companies of similar size, stage, and growth rate.
- Subjective benchmarks: Mystery shopping and judgment calls are sometimes the only/best way to make a comparison.
Using these different measurements where appropriate, you can drill down into each marketing function. This will differ by organization, but here’s what we benchmark:
In each of these functional areas, we honestly assess how we’re doing compared to benchmarks so we can learn and improve. We create a presentation deck to share with our team and executive leadership that includes comments explaining how we came to our conclusions.
Taking a closer look at your marketing functions
Let’s unpack the importance of these key functional areas, and how to best benchmark them.
Analyst Relations
This is the number of times you’re coming up in inquiries with analysts. Not all analysts provide this, so be sure to ask and get quarterly reports from those that will.
In addition, benchmark your report placement, rankings, and review site standings. Look at which reports and grids your company appears in compared to your competitors and ecosystem to ensure you are represented everywhere you should be.
Qualitatively, review sites provide a treasure trove of information. Look at the quality of responses in addition to the numerical scores.
Business Development (BDRs/SDRs)
Bridge Group benchmarks are great for assessing overall performance and include:
- Daily activities (total, phone, email, LinkedIn, other)
- Quality conversations ( a connect or response where at least one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information is learned)
- Number of attempts in cadence
- Qualification level by SDR model (introductory meetings, semi-qualified opportunities, fully qualified opportunities)
- Monthly quotas
- Quota attainment
- Sourced pipeline per SDR
Vendor benchmarks from organizations such as Salesloft and Outreach are good to evaluate your cadence design and outreach quality. Are you personalizing enough? Is your mix of channels on par with benchmarks? How many touches are you achieving in what amount of time versus best practice benchmarks?
Content Marketing
Benchmark both the quantity and quality of the content you produce.
Starting with quantity, examine the content produced each month and come up with an aggregate number that represents your content production volume. Assign a point value to each type of asset (e.g., case study = 1, blog = 1, infographic = 1, ebook = 5).
This enables you to see if you’re producing enough content compared to your competition and ecosystem. Then drill into the makeup (e.g., ebooks versus blogs) to understand their content mix and yours.
Quality is harder to gauge, but engagement serves as a handy stand-in. Compare numbers of blog subscribers and social media engagement with your content, session times, and binge rates. PathFactory publishes an annual benchmark of content engagement across verticals that can be very helpful.
Customer Marketing
This is a bit subjective, but compare your public- facing customer case studies to the competition’s. Look at the quantity and diversity of customer stories, age of the stories, and number of customers speaking at events.
Demand Generation
Remember, benchmarking is different than measurement. There are, of course, countless ways to measure demand generation and its effectiveness. But for benchmarking, you want to get granular and compare different aspects of your demand generation efforts against industry and competitors.
Email marketing is still the most widely used demand generation channel, and if you’ve read my book, No Forms, No Spam, No Cold Calls, you know it’s not about volume of email sends, it’s about quality. To that end, email benchmarks include open, clickthrough, unsubscribes, and bounce rates. These are good indicators of whether your email game is on point or spammy.
Digital Marketing
Look at ad performance across industry, role, and sales motion, as well as channel-based performance by industry. Some benchmarking metrics include impressions, clicks, and cost-per-click. TheB2BHouse maintains an up-to-date guide to LinkedIn ad benchmarks that can be very helpful, too.
Events
Many event platforms share typical engagement and dropoff rates. Looking at your averages versus benchmarks can be useful in understanding how compelling and engaging your events are. For virtual events, ON24 put out a 2022 report on benchmarks in different industries.
Mystery shopping is also very useful, albeit subjective. When you’re at an event, tour the booths to compare and contrast. Attend virtual events to compare the end-to-end experience against your own, from registration to content to engagement.
You don’t necessarily need to stick to your competitors for comparison. Think of companies that put on events that inspire you and attend them so you can compare and contrast. But do be sure to compare like to like. A webinar is different from a virtual conference, which is different from an executive dinner.
Product Marketing
This one is highly subjective as well, but it’s critical. I suggest comparing your product naming marchitecture to your competitive set and ecosystem. But more importantly, look outside your direct ecosystem for inspiration. Product pages, pricing pages, persona pages, and use cases all provide important data points in determining how you stack up.
Public Relations
Compare your share of voice, tier-one media coverage, bylines accepted, and backlinks against those of your competitors. A good PR firm should provide you this data.
Also look at announcements from your competitive set, ecosystem, and best-in-class companies to see how you compare. Funding, merger and acquisition, and product release announcements occur all the time, so you can compare their results to yours.
If industry awards are important to your CEO and board, make sure to track major industry awards and who has won what. In addition to being a good benchmarking tool, this also keeps you organized to ensure you submit for all the awards that matter to you.
Social Media
Look at the frequency and mix of posts. Similar to with PR, you can directly compare engagement — including comments, likes, and shares — of similar post types (e.g., a product release or funding announcement).
Track followers by channel for yourself and your competition. If you’re not on a particular channel but your competitors are, looking at their metrics can help you understand whether you’re making the right decision or if you should consider getting onto that channel.
Example: Organic social competitive analysis
Below is an example of how I use simple, yet actionable, charts to understand the market and my company’s position within it. The social actions we document are straightforward and easy to track.
I usually use “red, yellow, green” assessments for instant teamwide understanding, with a “notes” section for additional context when needed.
Vertical Marketing / addressing TAM
Understanding your total addressable market is central to your job as a marketer.
Benchmarking exercises can be invaluable in that regard. Simply understanding the verticals you’re going after compared to your competitors and ecosystem can be enlightening in itself. But then drilling down and looking at dedicated headcount for a vertical or segment compared to yours reveals how each organization is prioritizing their TAM. Mystery shopping your competitors’ case studies, content coverage, and web experience offers insights into how they’re addressing their TAM.
Investors and analysts are also a good source of intelligence since they often see your competition and ecosystem’s revenue mix.
Of course, they may keep that information close to the vest. But by asking the right questions, you can sometimes get enough information to triangulate and compare.
Your website
Mystery shopping is also key here, helping you evaluate your web experience versus your competitors’. In addition to considering subjective look and feel, examine page load times, response times, and quality of chat interactions where applicable.
SEM and SEO benchmarks can be telling — not only about a website’s performance, but also about the strategy behind the site. Tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and others can provide deep insights on ranking factors, content focus, spend, and more. These tools provide the ability to benchmark against competitive websites, which helps surface potential quick wins.
David vs. Goliath?
Benchmarking is incredibly important for understanding how you’re doing compared to where you’ve been — as well as how your competitors are doing and where you want to be in relation to them. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.
You also need to see how you’re resourced compared to the rest of the industry, including looking at your organizational chart and paid spend compared to those of your competitors. It’s pretty easy to get a sense of a company’s employee count and roles by doing some digging on LinkedIn.
The first time I did this, I realized that my team of 20 marketers was dwarfed by our largest competitor, which had 63. That’s useful to know — not because I used it to campaign my CFO for more headcount, but because it helped me see how much we were accomplishing with a much smaller team.
It’s good to know if you’re David competing against Goliath so you can be clear on what’s possible and realistic for you. You may not be number one in every category, but knowing that will help you get selective about which measures you can excel at so you can stand out in spite of your smaller poolof resources.
Seeing the forest and the trees
The benchmarking exercises I’ve described will yield a big deck of information for each area. Before presenting it for executive consumption, be sure to boil down your insights into an easily digestible matrix so they can get the most important takeaways, quickly.
If you’ve read to this point and are overwhelmed by how much work this will be, I get it. It is a lot of work, especially the first time you do it. But I promise you that once you get your system and benchmarks figured out, it’s both very doable and infinitely helpful. In fact, I’d argue that benchmarking each functional area on a regular cadence is critical to good marketing.
If you’re still not convinced that benchmarking is worth the effort, I’d encourage you to ask yourself, “Can I afford not to do this?” Because if you don’t, you are at risk of getting blindsided with the revelation that you’re not keeping up with your competitors.
The confidence you gain by undertaking regular benchmarking exercises will give you a stronger leg to stand on when advocating for your team and your work. You’ll always be treated to other people’s opinions about your marketing—it’s just the nature of the job. But when you have a deep understanding of how you’re stacking up compared to your competitors, you can address any concerns or criticisms with confidence.
Taking the time to create and share a hyper-detailed view of where you’re winning also gives you a chance to celebrate your team’s specific successes. And it also allows you to see where you’re not winning, which can clarify whether that’s something you want to approach differently — or if it’s something that just doesn’t make strategic sense for you.
It’s okay to not be excelling at every line item, as long as those lagging line items aren’t ones that matter to your strategy. More importantly, benchmarking helps you avoid the worst- case scenario: Thinking you’re leading in an area when in fact you’re at the back of the pack.
For all these reasons, it’s worth it to push through the overwhelm to institute a regular, deep benchmarking process for your marketing team.
