How to evaluate marketing through competitor analysis and benchmarking

Peter Drucker, who many consider to be the single most important thought leader in the world of management is quoted as saying;

“Being at least as good as the leader is a prerequisite to being competitive.”

It follows that, to adopt successful marketing strategies, it is necessary to not only develop marketing insights of your own performance but to also undergo competitor analysis and take an objective view on your competitor’s marketing performance; which is not easy.

Performance data for competitor analysis is rare in the public domain. For the last decade fastmap have been building up a set of marketing insights across a wide range of sectors, brands and campaigns. This data has been gathered through quantitative research. Questions to consumers have been asked in a consistent way and then retained as anonymous, aggregated data to feed into powerful industry benchmarks.

These marketing insights, based on competitor analysis like these, provide brands with not only a measurement of their own marketing performance but also allows them to understand strengths and weaknesses relative to others. These are some of the areas that our competitive benchmarking data has helped with.

• Concept testing and development of new ideas
• Creative testing and marketing campaign development/campaign evaluation
• DRTV creative performance analysis/Advertising testing
• Permissions marketing/Consent marketing and statement optimisation
• GDPR Legitimate interest assessment

The DRTV creative performance analysis below, for three insurance adverts, shows how they are perceived different by consumers relative to each other and the important industry averages. Advertising testing through online research showed that no advert is strong across all areas, but but using benchmarks and competitor analysis marketers can discover their advert’s strengths and weaknesses.

Another discipline that has benefited from benchmarked marketing insights is preparation for the GDPR. Increasingly brands are using marketing insights to guide the development and then communication of requests for customers to consent to receive marketing.

HomeServe, leaders within the home emergency repairs business used comparative marketing insights to dramatically improve the performance of their permissions marketing statement. Richard Merrygold discussed this at the recent Privacy Laws and Business conference held at Cambridge University. Comparison within industry benchmarks allowed HomeServe to identify weaknesses in the earliest statement around ‘Trustworthiness’, ‘Data Security’ and ‘Data sharing’. As you can see in the table below the final statement excelled in most areas which lead to not only more consent but also creates a positive impression for the customer.

To learn more about how we use benchmarking data and competitor analysis to track and improve marketing performance, download our guide Benchmarking: The Power of Comparison.

This article was written by David Cole, Managing Director at fastmap. To find out how fastmap can help you with your competitor analysis, consent marketing optimisation, DRTV creative optimisation and help provide you with marketing insights to benchmark your performance in other areas visit www.fastmap.com or get in touch with David Cole on +44 (0) 20 7242 0702 or david.cole@fastmap.com.