Brand benchmarks are increasingly important. They give you the starting point as to where the drive the car and then a layout of where to finish. We’ve mentioned before about the three facets of benchmarks and how to create your own marketing benchmarks; yet, that isn’t that isn’t where they stop.
Marketing channels are without a doubt interrelated and just how these channels are connected so are the underlying benchmarks. Typically, a benchmark relies on other factors to even become a proceeding benchmark.
There is an endless web on how benchmarks are interconnected, but we’ve uncovered the top five most interrelated benchmarks…
1. Social follower growth and monthly uniques
Typically when you are measuring or benchmarking social media channels, you will look at the number of followers you have vs. your competitors. Or looking at the number of engagements on today’s post vs. yesterdays. This doesn’t translate well into a higher level strategy.
The relationship building tactics and personalization of social media channels have a direct correlation to your traffic or most importantly the number of monthly uniques to your site. As social has an impact on reaching users that you may not normally reach through your typical audience there is a distinct interrelated brand benchmark between your social follower growth and monthly uniques.
What if you had a spike in social followers last week? That also could be a direct correlation to your increase in monthly uniques. This benchmark could also be flipped. Did you notice that your competitor had a higher than normal uniques last month? Check to see if they had a spike in new followers as well.
2. Average number of blog posts and time on site
A challenge that we have been trying to tackle recently on the TrackMaven blog is to remain consistent and that is a very important factor for any blog to gain more traction. If you are consistently producing the same average number of blog posts per week that shows reliability and something that your audience can count on to read.
This has a direct effect on the time on site too. What if you post every Wednesday and one Wednesday you decide not to post. Your audience will check to see that post on Wednesday (the Wednesday that has no blog post) and they will immediately leave as they see that their is no post. There is a positive potential on this as if you post on the same days, your audience will come to recognize that continuously visiting, reading the posts and sharing the posts…as long as it’s still the quality content they expect. Time on site can also grow as your average number of blog posts grows too.
3. Domain authority and number of press mentions
We’ve tackled what goes into Domain Authority and how Moz calculates this score in order for you to make sense of Google’s rankings, but this score is also interrelated with benchmarks of press mentions.
For example, if your competitor was mentioned in 4 major and reputable press outlets in the past month, then you should also look at their potential increase in their Domain Authority. Because of the strength in the press mentions they received, they were bound to obtain great links back to their site.
Let’s say you want to surpass your competitors’ Domain Authority, also, take a look at the number of press mentions they are receiving. That can provide you with the connective benchmarks in order to secure success.
Successful Brand Benchmarks
All three of these benchmarks are interrelated as well. Think about it At the end of the day though, knowing how these benchmarks are interrelated improves the overall processes in marketing allowing a marketer to then cut through the noise. Overall, the correlations that each of these benchmarks have within each other show how improving the baseline of these different sectors of your marketing can effect the others positively.
As the number of channels increase the strings connecting the entire web together multiply as well. Now, what happens, without one marketing channel you could be missing an entire portion of the web. This can become an overwhelming thought, but benchmarks do provide the place to start and a knowing path to overachieve that industry benchmark.