Competitor benchmarking guide and template

Why a guide to competitor benchmarking?

Whether it's sport or business, you have to know how you rate compared with your peers, to know where you need to improve relative to them. If you want to be "best-in-breed" in digital marketing or just to "do better" you need a baseline to review the marketing effectiveness of competitors.

Online, potential customers will often directly compare what a competing brand or site has to offer. Benchmarking "puts you in the customers' shoes" and gives you insight on where you need to improve. It can also give you the inspiration to try new approaches whether they're related to content, design or the brand communications used.

Benchmarking is vital when you're refreshing a website through a major redesign, but it can also be useful to review more regularly to see how competitors' marketing changes. It's also an essential part of developing a digital marketing strategy to grow your reach where you need to look beyond a site at all aspects of online communications effectiveness, especially for SEO, content and social media benchmarking.

How will the guide help me and my business?

We know you will already be reviewing competitor sites, but when we talk to marketers we see there are some key issues that are often missed and you may also be missing some of the great free tools available to help you.

The guide can help you with:

• A template to follow for the key issues to include in your benchmark report
• A table of KPIs and qualitative criteria for benchmarking in the RACE framework presented as a table - so you can review the whole of your online marketing - not just website effectiveness
• A comprehensive listing of free and paid tools to help with benchmarking structured within the RACE framework including the top 10 tools every 'hands-on' digital marketer should use to improve their SEO, content and social media marketing.