The benefits of competitive benchmarking are vast and varied. Maybe you’re a start-up trying to get a sense of your place in the market? Or an established brand wanting to keep an eye on the competitive landscape? For both of these and everything in between, there’s something to gain from benchmarking.
It’s a data-intensive process. But with the right tools, you can easily incorporate benchmarking into your brand reporting routine. It's a powerful way to give yourself a competitive advantage.
What is competitive benchmarking?
Competitive benchmarking measures your company’s performance against that of your direct competitors, and against industry standards.
In a nutshell: You choose performance metrics to compare based on your business goals. The resulting data provides real-time insights. These shape your marketing and communications plans and your business strategy. You maintain your competitive edge and keep ahead of industry trends.
What metrics can be used for benchmarking against competitors?
You can benchmark against key competitors using any metric with publicly accessible data. That said, if you benchmarked every possible metric, you’d be completely overwhelmed with data collection alone.
You need to choose the right metrics for your competitor analysis. Track and compare things that can actually change your brand understanding or strategy. That means before you start to gather data, you need to have a plan for what to do with it.
For example, say your goal is to improve your digital marketing performance. You might focus on social media engagement metrics. If you want to improve your brand positioning, you might focus on brand sentiment. Here are some good possibilities to consider when building your competitive benchmarking process.
Social media followers
The number of social followers is an easy way to benchmark the size of your audience against that of your competitors. It’s also important because people who follow your brand on social media are significantly more likely to make a purchase than non-followers.
So, this is more than just a measure of how many people “like” you versus the competition. It can provide some clues about how many people are thinking about buying from you and from the other guys.
Social media reach and engagement
Social media reach indicates how many people are seeing your social media content. This is affected by how many followers you have compared to the competition. But it also indicates how well your content works with social media algorithms.
Social media engagement looks at how much people are engaging with your social content compared to that of your competitors. Be sure to look at engagement rate as well.
Share of voice in media coverage
This is a measure of how much coverage your brand is getting in social media, mainstream media, and niche industry publications compared to your competitors. It helps assess the impact of brand awareness and PR campaigns.
Brand sentiment
This measures the overall emotional tone of conversations about your brand. It can help you understand how people feel about your brand, products, or services.
Comparing your brand sentiment to competitors can estimate factors like:
- relative brand health,
- customer satisfaction, and
- brand affinity.
Audience demographics
Benchmarking audience demographics against your competitors can help you identify new audience segments. Are your competitors connecting with demographic groups that you’re not? If so, you may need to rethink some of your marketing efforts, or try a targeted ad campaign.
10 key benefits of competitive benchmarking
1. Unbiased performance analysis
Looking at your own results in isolation ignores external factors that might impact your results. A competitive analysis gives you a better idea of whether you're really driving the results or if you’re riding market trends.
2. Identifying gaps in performance
You’ll inevitably find areas where your competition is out-performing you. This is not a defeat. This is a clear opportunity to improve your own results. One of the benefits of strategic benchmarking is that it can alert you to potential opportunities you would otherwise have missed.
For example, social benchmarking can help you learn which content types and marketing strategies drive the best results for your brand, and for your competitors. Are there performance gaps you could resolve by modelling their success?
3. Data-driven goal setting and strategic planning
Performance benchmarking takes the blinders off. It helps you establish objective and achievable key performance indicators based on the reality of the marketplace. Using those realistic goals as the foundation of a strategic plan sets your brand up for success. You know you’re making informed decisions at every stage of your planning.
Having the data to back up clear goals also makes it easier to get team buy-in.
4. Sourcing product development ideas and driving innovation
Analyzing the public conversation about your brand in the context of your competitors and industry benchmarks can help you uncover customer pain points that may spark the idea for new products or services.
What features are people asking for? What competitor announcements are driving major engagement? How can you streamline the customer experience? Competitive benchmarking helps you think bigger about your brand.
5. Identifying best practices
Competitive benchmarking can serve as a unique form of market research. It can reveal industry best practices while pinpointing bottlenecks in your own strategy.
What’s working consistently across the industry? Is your pricing in line with others? Are there potential business models you hadn’t considered? How can you incorporate these industry best practices to optimize your own strategy?
6. Learning from the mistakes of peers and competitors
There’s a lot to learn from your competitors’ success. But there’s also plenty to gain from studying their mistakes.
Study how they respond to dips in brand sentiment. Look closely to see what triggered the sentiment change in the first place. Do the same for dips in reach, engagement, or any other specific competitive benchmarking metrics they’re tracking. Studying competitors’ performance flops can help prevent you from making those same mistakes yourself.
7. Improved brand positioning and reputation management
Understanding your real-time market position helps you create effective brand messaging. You’ll learn what kinds of messaging resonate with your target audience, and what they expect from industry leaders.
You can also adjust messaging to support a shift in brand perception. Keeping an eye on the competitive landscape alerts you to any changes in brand reputation just as they start. This allows you to create an action plan right away.
8. Building a culture of continuous improvement
It may not be one of the most obvious benefits of competitor benchmarking, but this ongoing practice sets your brand up for continual reflection and improvement.
Rather than turning inward or accepting the status quo, you’re always looking for ways to improve your performance compared to your competitors. And to improve your position in the industry. This promotes ambitious and creative thinking and prevents complacency.
9. Greater customer satisfaction
This benefit in part flows from the previous one. Continuous improvement can in itself improve customer experience and satisfaction.
But that’s not the whole story. When you benchmark customer sentiment and drill down to see what’s driving people’s feelings about you versus your competitors, you gain the valuable insights needed to give customers more of what they want. And to stop doing things that cause them frustration.
This can, in turn, create a virtuous circle. You give customers more of what they want, their perception of your brand (and your net promoter score) improves, and you gain even more actionable insights into what they like best.
10. Optimizing budget and resource allocation
Competitive benchmarking works by giving you a clear understanding of your share of the conversation happening in your industry — on social channels, in the media, and in more personal discussions like forums and blogs.
Understanding this mix of coverage helps you plan to target areas where your competitors are currently getting more of the attention. This could mean allocating more budget for social ads targeting an untapped demographic, or maybe a communications campaign in a new geographic region.
How to use Talkwalker for competitive benchmarking
Talkwalker offers a number of ways to benchmark your business performance against your competitors and the industry as a whole.
Quick Search
Quick Search offers a straightforward way to get some basic competitive benchmarking data. Simply enter your name and your competitors’ names in the search. Use the AI tool to build comprehensive search parameters that capture the full picture of the conversation without having to study up on Boolean operators. You’ll find important benchmarking data in the following reports.
Key Metrics
This overview page gives you a bird’s-eye view of:
- Results
- Engagement
- Sentiment
- Potential Reach
For Results and Net Sentiment over Time, you can drill down into any spike or dip to get an AI analysis of what was happening at that time that may have contributed to the change.
Note that this report captures reach and engagement in the overall conversation about our brand versus your competitors. We’ll talk about benchmarking specific social channel performance in a moment.
Themes
See what themes and hashtags people associate with your brand and your competitors. This can help you understand brand perception and reputation.
Media Share
Within the Influencers tab on Quick Search, you can find a report of how your media mix compares to that of your competitors. If they’re dominating the conversation in a certain area, that’s a sign to do some targeted outreach.
Demographics
Get a picture of how your audience compares to that of your competitors. Have they gained market share with a demographic you didn’t expect? For example, the charts above show Pepsi has the lead over Coke with 18- to 24-year-olds. Coke could use this information to create a campaign specifically targeting younger audiences.
World Map
Here you can see where people are talking about you. Again, this gives you a chance to spot areas of the world where your competitors are getting ahead of you. Pepsi is dominating the conversation in Thailand, which could prompt Coke to focus a campaign on that market.
Tip: You can get a basic version of some of these reports using Talkwalker’s Free Social Search.
Competitive Intelligence IQ App
This specialized app within Talkwalker is designed specifically for benchmarking. It offers more detailed reporting to give you a clear picture of your place in the industry. Set your brand, your industry, and your competitors up as topics for easy comparison reporting at any time.
Share of voice
You can clearly see how often you are mentioned compared to your competitors. Drill down to understand what drives peaks and valleys in the conversation, so you can see the impact of press releases, media outreach, and world events. You’ll get an AI overview of what’s happening that could impact your results.
You can also see how audiences engage with your brand vs your competitors. Again, you can drill down to key moments to determine the impact of specific content strategies and campaigns. You’ll also see your total share of engagement compared to your competitors.
Scroll down and you’ll also find a report on reach vs. engagement. This helps provide some context, especially if you’re benchmarking against competitors that are much larger or smaller than your brand. You can see if the conversation is coming from a concentrated group of sources or is more diversified.
Sentiment
Rather than just measuring how much people are talking about your brand, you can see how they feel about your brand compared to your competitors. You can track sentiment over time and drill down into any spikes or sudden changes. Note: Sentiment can serve as a good proxy for customer satisfaction scores.
Themes
This is a much more detailed theme report than you’ll find in Quick Search. Rather than single keywords, you’ll see the phrases most associated with your brand and your competitors, so you get a better sense of the intent behind the language.
World Map
Understand how your share of the conversation varies around the world. Zoom in to find clusters of conversation about your brand and your competitors.
Click on the bubble to see the top-performing content about your brand and competitors in the local area, along with an AI-powered analysis of what’s driving the conversation in the region. This can help you plan targeted campaigns based on local insights.
Social Measurement IQ App
Talkwalker’s specialized tool for social media analytics allows you to benchmark your social channel performance against your competitors. You can track and compare performance for:
- YouTube
- TikTok
- X (formerly Twitter)
The overview report gives you a good snapshot of how your brand is performing against your chosen competitors for key metrics including engagement, potential reach, and followers.
You can dive deeper into any of these specific metrics to get a more detailed comparison and see how things have changed over time.
For example, for followers, you can see how your fans and followers have changed over time compared to your competitors, and look for specific moments that caused significant change.
On the Channel Activity tab, you can gain key insights about how your audience and your competitors' audience respond to specific content. One key chart to keep an eye on for benchmarking is the Most Engaging Post Type. If your competitors are getting more engagement with a specific content type than you are, you might want to take a look at their content to see what lessons you could learn.
Alerts
Alerts offer a different kind of competitive benchmarking. Rather than looking at your competitive performance over time to uncover in-depth insights, they provide an early warning of dramatic market shifts for specific KPIs.
For example, you could set alerts to notify you when your share of voice drops below a certain percentage. This could indicate a product launch or new campaign from your competitors. But if there’s no clear reason for the shift, it’s a good push to revisit your strategic decision-making.
Stay up to date on what your competitors are doing — and understand why they’re doing it. Harness AI to analyze earned mentions, track performance metrics, and identify strategic opportunities.
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