Benchmarking — the act of comparing your business processes or performance against other companies — is more important than ever for brands. Why? Because benchmarks can help marketers take the guesswork out of content creation, leading to a more effective and impactful digital marketing strategy.
In the world of content marketing, there has been an explosion of data in the past decade. Last year alone, TrackMaven recorded over 50 million pieces of content and 75 billion interactions with that content. From all of that content, who is publishing the content that is engaging with (potential) customers, educating, building rapport, and drawing them into becoming loyal customers? What does that kind of content look like? This information exists, but it can take an extremely long time to gather and put it to any effective use.
Many content marketing teams end up relying on either a gut-feeling for what content will be successful or what may have worked for their brand in the past. But why put so much time into creating content that you aren’t sure will have any payoff?
Over the past three years, we’ve seen that companies who make benchmarking a regular part of their workflow are much more informed about their current progress, and are able to set measurable goals for how they want their content to perform in the future. Armed with information about how their brand stacks up to their competitors in terms of audience engagement on social media, blog traffic, or email, they can find out who is having consistent success and specifically why. If I’m Target, I can gather a short list of competitors I’m interested in and see how they are all doing side by side in terms of engaging their Facebook audience.
From this graph, which measures engagement ratio (average interactions per post per 1,000 followers) for brands on Facebook in the past month, and now I know where I stand today. Not thrilled about having the lowest level of engagements per Facebook post in the past 30 days, I see Gilt’s results are much higher than everyone else’s. This TrackMaven graph quickly condenses hundreds of posts and the level of interactions each of these posts earned in relation to the audience size of each competitor. Finding out that Gilt consistently had the most engaging content compared to the other companies listed here would have taken hours — if not days — to determine for sure.
I now have real information about how my audience engages with my Facebook content compared to the other companies I care about. From here, I now know to spend my finite time and resources looking at the content from Gilt that is earning the greatest level of audience engagement over any of my other competitors. It’s like being given a map that tells you exactly where to dig to find the buried treasure. I know exactly where it is and can dive right into the information that is working.
Although I know that I won’t be able to ratchet my engagement up to Gilt’s level overnight, but I can set some specific goals in the months ahead to steadily improve my engagement. Based on seeing what posts received the highest engagement from Gilt and others, I can dip a toe into planning my upcoming content to incorporate those themes and similar tactics that were used. I can pay close attention to how my new content is performing, and see if I need to make minor course corrections along the way to reaching my goal of steadily increasing my audience engagement.
Now my content has a clear purpose and a roadmap to fulfilling its ultimate mission: turning potential customers into loyal customers. In a time when there has never been more information floating around out there, benchmarking takes the guesswork out of content creation.