Comparison is part of the reality of all companies. Through it, it is possible to know what position the brand occupies in sales and mind share, in addition to bringing numerous other information relevant to the business. In this context, we emphasize the importance of making the benchmarking.
Regardless of the size of the company, this strategy is extremely relevant to map what competitors are doing and, thus, prepare to develop marketing actions that generate more results for the company.
However, many brands still do not use this technique in their business and end up missing great opportunities to stand out or develop more effective planning.
Want to know how to do the benchmarking? So, check out this post that we prepared especially to answer your questions!
What is benchmarking?
so that you understand How to apply this strategy in your business you first need to understand the concept well. Benchmarking comes from the word “benchmark“, which means “reference”, and is an in-depth analysis of strategies and actions from companies that operate in the same sector as you or even in related segments.
Based on this assessment, your brand can use the references to develop more effective strategies and actions. For this, it is necessary to correctly interpret and measure the data and campaign results of the competition.
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How to do a benchmarking?
to do the benchmarking correctly, you can follow these steps:
1. Choose the main competitors in the market to analyse
Ideally, choose up to 3 competitors to monitor. Always try to choose those that are market leaders and they certainly have successful stocks in their history.
2. Establish analysis indicators
A good tip for you to do these analyses is to prepare a spreadsheet to compare and fill in specific aspects of each company. Select the characteristics and metrics that you think are most important to be included in this table.
This way, you’ll have an organized overview of what each company has done, making interpretation and evaluation easier.
3. Get the data
There are numerous tools for you to find the data and results of competitive campaigns.
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The internet, for example, has a multitude of resources that you can use to make this assessment: social networks, websites, blogs, specific tools and even information released by the market players themselves.
The important thing is get as much data as possible facilitating its interpretation.
4. Compare and analyze information
After gathering all the information, it’s time to make a careful analysis of actions and compare with what your company has done.
It is at this point that you will begin to understand how some companies are so successful using certain approaches with the public.
5. Survey the highs and lows
After all the previous steps, you need to highlight the high points of the campaigns, but without neglecting the negative aspects.
In this way, you will use what worked as a reference and take into account the failures so as not to repeat them in your planning.
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How important is benchmarking?
Benchmarking can make all the difference when it comes to highlighting your company in the market, providing process improvement and generating important insights for the development of more effective actions.
In this sense, it is important that you do the benchmarking your company, looking for actions and strategies that worked in the past. In addition to analyzing, mainly, everything that the competition elaborated and that gave excellent results.
By putting all this information together, you will have a “north”, a clearer path to follow. Thus, in addition to optimizing costs and time, the chances of win over and retain the public will be much bigger.
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What are the advantages of this strategy?
Now that you understand what benchmarking is and how important it is for companies, how about checking out some more advantages of this strategy? Check it out below and apply this technique to your business!
1. Analyze the current approach and identify points for improvement
In addition to observing the performance of competitors in the market, benchmarking causes companies to evaluate their current approaches, making comparisons with the main players in the market.
Thus, it is possible to identify failures, actions and even sectors of the company that can be improved and adjusted.
2. Discover successful stocks of experienced companies
Know the formula for business success experienced and market leaders it is essential to understand how the segment works and what are the most appropriate ways to communicate with the public.
Therefore, when use benchmarking in your strategy you will get to know the competitors better and you will know how they developed their successful actions. In this way, you will have excellent references to put together a campaign.
3. Identifies new trends and helps you stand out
When you search and compares its strategies with those of other companies is very likely that you will identify some trends, which will work very well in the future.
By obtaining this information, you will be able to anticipate and get ahead of the competition, developing innovative solutions and standing out as a pioneer brand in the use of certain digital marketing trends.
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For this, in addition to making a intense research workit will also be necessary to mobilize your team and get your hands dirty.
4. Feeds arguments to discuss future investments
One of the biggest difficulties for companies that intend to stand out in the market is to convince the board to invest in their ideas.
When using the benchmarking, you will get a series of information that will serve as arguments to discuss future investments. You can use successful examples from other companies to convince that the proposed action or strategy will have excellent results.
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5. Enables the development of more efficient strategies
Planning the communication of a brand or product involves a series of steps, such as the briefing, the definition of the target audience, the study of the market and competition, and so on. But this information is not always enough to mount a really effective campaign.
By joining all these steps mentioned with the careful analysis of successful actions by the competition, the chances of developing a more efficient planning will be much greater.
In this way, we can say that Benchmarking is very important for the company compare its current position with that of competitors, making it possible to identify gaps and opportunities. Therefore, the strategy must be made by experts in the field, who will conduct the business correctly and lead your company to success.
So now that you’ve learned a lot about benchmarking and on how it can lead companies to a higher level, take the opportunity to subscribe to our newsletter!
