Ben Young
Ben Young
November 22, 2021

This is a skill marketers should adopt, continuously benchmarking. benchmarking is identifying older performance from competitors or your own, and then comparing current performance against it.

This creates a tension around finding areas to improve and helps prioritize the changes to get there.

The process to create your own benchmarks is simple.

  • Go in to your analytics platform
  • Select data for the last quarter
  • Write down the average performance
  • Now use this as your benchmark for all new pieces of content
  • once a new piece of content is live, after 48 hours of data, compare to the benchmark
  • If it is below, make adjustments.
  • Rinse/repeat

Other protocols are:

  • Complete this every month, with content going in to a โ€˜reworkโ€™ basket
  • Complete this every quarter

Things to benchmark on

  • Attention
  • Number of visits
  • Social engagement
  • Leads

As a rule of thumb, broader metrics like attention are easier to benchmark, but narrower or lower funnel activity requires a longer duration or scale.

Donโ€™t think about this as limited to the content department. At a macro marketing analytics level, benchmarking should be done across the board.


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