When it comes to the world of marketing, too often we compare ourselves to other businesses to measure our success.  This is particularly relevant when it comes to marketing.  I call this process bench marketing. (do you love that play on words)? It’s defined as comparing your marketing communication with your competition just as benchmarking is the measurement of the quality of an organization’s policies, products, programs, strategies, with standard measurement of its peers.

Why bench marketing is not a great idea….

You’re not comparing apples with apples. 

Even your direct competition doesn’t offer or do the exact same thing as you. There are a lot of differences when you break it down > location of clients, industries you work with, what you charge, your process, your communication messages, your marketing channels, your clients.

One example is looking at your competitors’ social media pages. Just because they might have a lot more likes than you doesn’t mean they are translating this to dollars. Likes or number of followers does equal money in the bank so stop comparing how many likes you have compared to them. It really means nothing!

You’ll end up blending in

The whole point of marketing is to stand out not blend it with everyone else. Too much effort is put on focusing in your own industry. I see it all the time when people start with digital and just follow the same formula as the competition. “They’re on Facebook and LinkedIn so we should be too”. So wrong!!

You should always start with where your audience is, not what your competition is doing. How does that help you stand out?

You don’t know what is happening internally with that business. They might seem to be successful in what they are doing but we have all seen seemingly successful businesses collapse overnight.

You’ll stay a follower not a leader

If you want to stay a sheep in your industry then continue with your Bench MarKETing strategy. You’ll be guaranteed to keep following and copying rather than leading and innovating. Stop comparing and start creating.  One of the best ways to get new ideas and to continue to innovate is to look outside your industry (watch the Vlog below to get some more insights on this)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx0UjT9fpvk