Benchmarking: a resource to measure your competition

Regardless of whether your brand has been around for a while or is new to social networks, it never hurts to benchmark to analyze the strategies that your competitors are implementing.

If not considered, it could be that your brand is not one of the best positioned among consumers, which could affect the objectives that the business is pursuing.

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What is benchmarking for?

Carrying out a benchmarking has many advantages for the digital communication strategy that we are complementing, since it will allow us to know:

• Who are our established competitors and those who are emerging
• What channels they use to communicate with their audiences
• Their archetypes and tones of communication
• Its positioning and growth in social networks
• The content they share
• The type of conversations they generate with audiences
• The amount of interactions they generate
• Trends
• Your strengths and weaknesses
• And much more…

How to benchmark?

Organically, benchmarking is a laborious but possible task, for this we need: a computer, an internet connection, a spreadsheet and a presentation program.

• Identify the competition: look for 3 to 6 brands that have the same products, goods or services on the market that you are offering. If your brand does not have identified competencies, you can consider brands that serve as an influence (as you would like your brand to be).

• Find their digital channels: you can enter their official websites to find there the links that take you to their social networks. When you search directly on social media, you may not be analyzing an official account.

• Evaluate their graphic identities: pay attention to the construction of their identity as a brand, the colors they use, the fonts, the logos, the images.

• Analyze their content: check what services they offer on their website, what types of content they share on social networks, if they use videos, stock images, their own photographs, cartoons, infographics.

• Compare metrics: for websites you can use tools such as Alexa Rank or Similar Web that will allow you to have access to some statistics, for social networks, it is advisable to evaluate a period of time established some metrics such as number of followers, publications and interactions, for example.

Locate best practices

The intention of benchmarking is not to make a copy-paste of what the competition is doing, but to identify the best practices to tropicalize them towards our brand and do it even better.

Even a benchmarking will allow us to know what are the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats that they have to know how to take advantage of them.