Making Marketing Benchmarking Actionable

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The buzzword "benchmarking" is often used in the business world and it's clear why. It's hard to know how well you're doing if you don't have anything to use for comparison.

Often, sales figures are the first data points used for comparison. This is not only because they are typically made widely available for publically traded companies, but they also provide an easy starting point for benchmarking since they provide an overall assessment of a company’s success. A simple comparison can tell you how you stack up to the competition.

However, what sales figures do not provide is any indication of how that number was achieved and what drove success or failure. This is where benchmarking becomes more difficult. There are thousands of possibilities for benchmarking across finance, operations, marketing and more. Clearly, benchmarking all of the factors that influence your organization’s success, even just in marketing alone, isn’t feasible.

What’s Important?

Understanding what is important to your organization and its success is a good starting point for benchmarking.

As part of Aberdeen’s recent benchmark study report, “Marketing Asset Management: Managing Brand Compliance in Distributed Marketing Environments,” researchers gained insight from marketers into the business pressures that represent the most frequent external forces that impact their organization’s marketing position, competitiveness or business operations.

These included:

• Difficulty managing brand consistency while operating across a wide geography
• Difficultly managing brand consistency due to volume (number of business units, acquisitions, etc).
• The need for faster cycle times on marketing activities due to volatile macroeconomic conditions
• Mandates to improve operational efficiency

Benchmarking

While these pressures were listed by many of the marketers surveyed, Aberdeen’s research determined that there are some very distinct differences in how organizations dealt with this.

Those organizations considered to be “Best-in-Class” were more likely to have an asset management system in place, provide the marketing department with access to all digital assets so that these could be repurposed or reused. Results for these top organizations included:

• Improved ROMI 32% year-over-year, compared to 4% decrease for Laggards
• 18% improvement in brand consistency, compared to 1% decline for Laggards
• Reduced marketing campaign time-to-market by 1%, compared to 3% increase for Laggards

How Does My Organization Compare and What Can I Do?

It isn’t enough to simply benchmark against Best-in-Class organizations if that is the end of the process. Action must be taken for benchmarking to have any significant meaning or effect.

Based on this knowledge, Aberdeen has created an easy-to-use self-assessment tool designed for marketers to not only benchmark against best practices in marketing asset management and managing brand compliance, but also receive personalized recommendations for improvement. In less than 15 minutes, you can start building the case for change in your organization and have the data to help support your case.

Through this process, marketers can realize the true value of benchmarking – going beyond the simple comparison of data to create change and (hopefully) join “Best-in-Class” organizations to set the standard in the future.