Benchmarking marketing spend can put your business ahead of the competition.
“Benchmark
a: something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged
b: a point of reference from which measurements may be made”
Benchmarking has become invaluable to brands over the past few years, offering a smart line of insight into spend, value and deliverables that allows procurement, marketing and agencies to reshape their strategies more effectively.
But the question remains: does Benchmarking give you a competitive advantage?
With marketing budgets under intense scrutiny, benchmarking shines an intelligent spotlight on data that can be used to make relevant decisions based on measurable value and strategic deliverables.
Let’s explore how benchmarking adds value across multiple areas of the business, from providing a competitive advantage to delivering value and efficiencies, to improving agency relationships and more.
If benchmarking is refined and aligned, it offers significant value to the modern marketing procurement toolbox.
The colour of competition
Benchmarking can paint a picture of what success looks like from multiple angles, particularly when looked at through a competitive lens. Competitive insight and research provides a clear view of market trends around spend, deliverables and competitor strategy. Analytics helps to cut through the noise and stand out.
In fact, the ability to track shifts in market spend can fundamentally impact the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Paying attention to insights, provides an obvious competitive advantage as it enables you to see past the quagmire of ‘this worked last time’ and instead pivot towards new territories and opportunities.
The competitive budget
Benchmarking enables you to assess your existing marketing spend and strategy, allowing you to refine and tune these in line with market standards.
From a procurement perspective, benchmarking provides the transparency needed to ensure spend is relevant and reportable. Ultimately, there is always pressure on procurement to deliver success – essentially that budget meets expectation. This pressure continues through to the other end of a project and delivering a return on investment. If both Marketing and Procurement have visibility into clear benchmarking and insights, they can work together to ensure campaigns are realistically costed and successfully delivering.
The knock-on benefit is, of course, budgets are streamlined, unveiling available funds for additional activity to extend brand reach and engagement.
By changing the way benchmarking is perceived across both teams, brands can curate value across agency spend, campaign strategy and accountability.
The competitive context
An invaluable aspect of benchmarking from a competitive perspective is its ability to provide context – spanning goals, trends, cost, and current performance. From a spend perspective, this translates to – how can spend be optimised to capitalise on it more effectively?
Benchmarking digs deep into multiple facets of campaign spend and the insights it provides allows for brands to create campaigns that align with the businesses measurements of success.
Benchmarking around marketing spend and deliverables helps to create a yardstick against which you can measure performance against competitors and future spend. If applied across multiple markets and countries, it allows brands to create campaigns that are relevantly priced across different territories, potentially producing significant savings, and differentiating campaign spend moving forward.
So, does Benchmarking give you a competitive advantage?
With the right benchmarking data, brands are able to put themselves one step ahead of their competition.
Want to find out more about how Benchmarking can give you a competitive advantage?
