In theory, analytics can tell you anything you want to know about your last digital promotion - except whether or not it was successful... For example, analytics may tell you?
You won't get these insights from your digital marketing analytics because all they can give you are your numbers, which are meaningless unless you have something to compare them to. Benchmarking tools provide answers by plotting your data against the industry-specific averages for hundreds of metrics. You'll know what objective success looks like. You'll know if you achieved it. And you'll know how your promotion fared versus the competition.
As more brand managers and agencies seek competitive benchmarks, they're seeing value in the context brought to their entire digital marketing strategy beyond promotions. Some customers use benchmarks in the planning stages of a campaign to set challenging yet realistic expectations. Others use benchmarks as an HR tool to evaluate their marketing managers. Most commonly though, agencies will utilize competitive benchmarks to demonstrate how successful their work was, where a brand may leverage benchmarks for compliance and budget planning.
But they all want their Qoints benchmark score because, like Eisenberg and Zuckerberg said, "we all want to know what our friends are up to."
Develop a formal rating system based on competitive benchmarks! Indexing is the easiest and most objective way of measuring success. It's one number that will tell you everything you need to know about the rest of them. If you are running a digital campaign right now, get a better understanding of how your competition is performing; The definition of success and where you can improve will be a lot more obvious.
Thanks to Cory Rosenfield for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Cory is the co-founder and CEO of Qoints, a digital marketing intelligence (DMI) and competitive benchmarking tool for enterprise marketers. Previously, he held the role of Technical Director for multiple small-to-medium sized marketing agencies in Toronto as CSO of InfiniteSM, a social marketing consultancy and development house. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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