Staying competitive is like taming a beast. It’s a huge challenge and you don’t know what you’re in for.
In ecommerce, it means crafting engaging campaigns, optimizing your online store, and making sure your brand’s presence is felt.
However, that’s not enough in current times where new brands are popping up every day.
You need precise insights into your performance or else you’re navigating a ship without a compass.
How do you know if your efforts are paying off? How can you be sure that your strategies are aligned with industry standards?
These questions are enough to make marketers break out in a cold sweat.
Benchmarking is like a blanket that will envelop you in the comfort that you’re not missing out on opportunities to increase your ROI.
It makes your next steps clear. It shows you your position in the market. It will assuage your worries that you’re not doing enough or as much as your competitors.
Trying to build your business from the ground up could be a futile exercise since you don’t have a way to gauge just how well you are doing. At the same time, running on rails following your competition blind doesn’t do you any favors.
Instead of trying to grow your business in a silo or depending solely on your competition for inspiration, it’s smart to find a middle ground by embracing benchmarking.
Not sure where to start with benchmarking?
Software tools made just for benchmarking have eased the burden of many a marketer.
These tools can transform your approach, providing crystal-clear insights into your performance relative to your competitors and industry benchmarks.
With the right benchmarking tools, you can uncover valuable data, identify gaps, and make informed decisions to drive your business forward.
Software for benchmarking cuts down the time needed to gather essential data you need. It helps you position yourself in the market appropriately, and take the necessary steps to align yourself (poised to beat your competition) in terms of strategy and execution.
In this article, we'll go into what benchmarking is and its benefits to your business, and how to conduct a benchmarking analysis.
We’ll explore some of the best software tools available, tailored specifically for e-commerce brands.
Our goal is for you to kiss guesswork goodbye and sleep like a baby knowing your strategy is backed by real data.
For real-world benchmark with tangible insights, check out Panoramata, an all-in-one competitor tracking and benchmarking platform. It tracks data across multiple brands, including information like email volume, domain rating, overall growth statistics, and more.
You can also create custom benchmarks that apply to your business and monitor performance. Best of all, the stats are updated in real time, keeping your data fresh and your insights accurate.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. First, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it all…
What is benchmarking?
In terms of business positioning, branding, and marketing strategy, where your business stands currently, the data you have available, and the growth metrics you use are a great starting point to know how well your business is doing.
To truly grow your business (and to beat your competition), however, you need benchmarking.
As far as business is concerned, Shopify defines benchmarking as follows:
“Benchmarking is a process of measuring the performance of a company’s products, services, or processes against those of another business considered to be the best in the industry, a.k.a. “best in class.”"
Benchmarking–applies to everything, but we are focusing on the marketing and growth aspects of business for now–relates to defining a set of metrics, growth slabs, conversion rates, KPIs, and other measurable aspects to help yourself grow.
What is strategic benchmarking?
You can use benchmarking to improve your growth strategy. The main goal here is to make sure you can derisk your own growth marketing strategy.
What does that mean?
Well, when you’re planning your strategy and planning growth experiments, you lay down hypothesis and goals to make sure to can grow your business, improve your conversion rate, and generate more business.
By benchmarking, you can have a understanding of what’s happening on your market, how your competitors are behaving and what their own marketing strategy looks like.
By doing this, you can identify some areas your competitors are doing well and you can replicate or adapt for your own use case the elements that are working for them. This way, you can back your own strategic planning with data, take less risks, and be reassured in terms of your own strategy.
For example, for e-commerce brands, strategic benchmarking might involve analyzing the main proposition values your competitors are using for bestsellers, the acquisitions channels they’re using for each kind of product, the retention tactics they’ve put in place, and the kind of discounts they’re repeatedly using.
Knowing how your competitors behave regarding these topics will help you shape your own strategy.
What is a benchmarking tool?
A benchmarking tool is a platform that will help you, backed with data and artificial intelligence, to gather information about your competitors and help you make sense of it so you can easily apply learning to your own business.
You can get insights, trends, and metrics and spot opportunities you can use to improve your own position on the market, generate more sales, improve your proposition value, easily plan your content calendar, and avoid missing opportunities to generate more revenue for your store.
Why do you need benchmarking?
If you don’t know where you are going, you’re lost at sea.
Benchmarking is crucial to go beyond the normal growth trajectory, to position your business for success, and to give you a set of varied goals to beat consistently every time.
Modern-day benchmarking depends on not just data, information, deep knowledge about your competition, and the general state of your industry but also your own business, your metrics, your KPIs, and more.
What is SEO benchmarking?
SEO benchmarking is KEY!
There’s a good reason for this: there’s not an infinity of people looking for solutions on Google, Bing, etc.
So, to improve your rankings on Google and other search engines, you need to understand your competitors’ strategy: what kind of content they’re writing, which products they’re highlighting, which keywords they’re ranking for—basically, what their SEO strategy looks like.
Are there getting more backlinks?
Are they specifically targeting keywords you’d like to rank on?
Are they regularly updating their blogs & product pages to improve their rankings?
Even for ecommerce brands, this is key, as you might have limited high-intent SEO keywords that would be super useful for you, so you absolutely need to understand how competitors are trying to rank on this keywords.
You can:
- Try to outrank them by writing better content and getting more backlinks
- Spotting keywords opportunities not yet taken by your competitors and start to rank on it.
How to Set An Ecommerce Benchmark
First, you need to know your goal. Ask yourself what outcome you want to achieve with benchmarking, then determine the metrics that will let you know if you’ve met your goals.
Next, gather data you have on your business and your competitors. You can get this from platforms you use for your ecommerce store such as Shopify and BigCommerce.
You can also use tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to find out details about things like search engine marketing, content marketing, and keyword research.
Assess your performance and how you stack up against your competitors. What are the takeaways you can get from the data you’ve compiled?
Those are the basics of how to set an ecommerce benchmark.
How to Analyze Your Ecommerce Benchmarks to Get Insights
Data without analysis is like a car without gas. You can’t get to where you want to go with data alone.
So, after collecting data from ecommerce benchmarking, brainstorm how you can improve your metrics.
Keep tracking your KPIs to ensure data is fresh. At the same time, optimize your campaigns, set priorities, and allocate resources accordingly.
Software & Tools Needed For Benchmarking
To start benchmarking, you first need data in two buckets:
- Your business data (across the board)
- Competitor analysis, competitor data, and the averages for your industry.
Your data comes in through a robust analytics and tracking setup for your business.
Competitive benchmarking involves a few strategies, including competitive intelligence, competitor analysis, knowing and understanding the industry averages (including industry practices, product information, and more).
To do this effectively, you need the help of software (also called a marketing stack).
Software for benchmarking cuts down the time needed to gather essential data you need.
It helps you position yourself in the market appropriately, and take the necessary steps to align yourself (poised to beat your competition) in terms of strategy and execution.
Here are the tools and software you’ll need to get started with benchmarking the right way:
Panoramata For Email Marketing Benchmarking
Most of your competitors' content strategies (along with content that are performing well, the keywords they rank for, traffic analytics, and social presence) and paid ads strategy, including their ads and landing pages, are accessible with SEMRush.
However, email marketing campaigns are mostly hidden from view. With email marketing in particular though, competitor emails are mostly opaque.
Unless you use Panoramata.
Panoramata is one of the best email marketing benchmarking tools -- built by marketers for marketers and businesses.
Let’s say you wanted a surefire way to benchmark your email marketing campaigns to do better than your competitors.
Normally, you’d have to subscribe to hundreds of email campaigns (those that your competitors roll out) and see how they are doing.
Instead, you can use a single dashboard to keep track of email campaigns,and check out their email marketing content through Panoramata.
Keep an eye on the email marketing strategy of your competitors (broken down to the last element) to make your benchmark efforts easy.
Similarly, you can also track the changes your competition makes on their respective websites, and grab your hands on competitive insights, competitive reports, intelligence analysis, industry insights, and more.
You can also use Panoramata for advanced competition analysis, competitive growth scoring, advanced monitoring, and even get inspired for your marketing campaigns.
SEMRush For Content Strategy & SEO Benchmarking
When it comes to search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media monitoring, paid ads competitive analysis, and more, you’d seriously benefit from the SEM Swiss army equivalent that SEMRush is.
With SEMRush, it all starts with a comprehensive SEO Audit and content marketing audit.
You’ll get an instant snapshot of the overall health of your site, how you are positioned amongst your competitors, the keywords you rank for, the traffic you get, and more.
You also get to monitor your social media feeds, schedule social media posts, get an instant view of the keywords your competitors rank for, etc.
With a total of more than 16+ different tools inside the SEMRush platform, you get a wealth of data on not only your SEO, SEM, and social media efforts but also keep your ear to the ground on your competition’s content marketing, content strategy, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and more.
SEO Mangools For SEO Benchmarking
Mangools is a comprehensive set of SEO tools (much like SEMRush, but much more affordable) to help you get that SEO booster shot for your SEO strategy and also to keep an eye on your competitor’s SEO strategy overall.
With Mangools, start your SEO strategy with high-volume but low-competition keywords and keep track of your SEO work which includes on-page SEO strategy, off-page SEO execution pathways, and more.
Furthermore, you also get to track your own SERP results, high-ranking keywords that you aren’t showing up for, and SEO rankings, find powerful backlinks, and check your competitors’ website authority.
While Mangools isn’t as comprehensive or as well-known as SEMRush is, the tool is powerful if you are just starting with competitive intelligence, search engine optimization strategy, and getting a foothold in the industry you operate in.
Ready to start your own competitive analysis? Grab your free competitive analysis template below.
If you’d like to learn more about Panoramata, book a demo with us or take it out for a spin by signing up here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the tools used for benchmarking?
Benchmarking tools for ecommerce include Panoramata, SEMRush, and Mangools. The tools you use depend on the aspect of your business you want to benchmark.
What is benchmarking software?
Benchmarking software informs you about how you’re performing relative to your competitors and your industry. Competitor benchmarking software does the grunt work of tracking and evaluating your competitors for you.
