Articles
All the latest - articles, strategy, stories, videos and more ..
No credit card required
Cancel anytime
All the latest - articles, strategy, stories, videos and more ..
In marketing, it is super important to analyze your competition and study industry references to develop your own style. And this is when we talk about benchmarking.
Let's face it, it's hard to be strictly original these days, so following in the footsteps of other companies can help you out.
Imagine that you want to enter a market that is over saturated. If you want to be successful and set your brand apart from the competition, you need to do strategic analysis to determine which strategies have contributed to your success. Here is the benchmarking!
The truth is that while this definition of benchmarking is accurate and straightforward, it is actually quite superficial. So let's review everything that this analysis strategy implies and how you can apply it to your business.
Suppose you are about to launch a new sales platform to compete with Amazon in this commerce industry. Although it is not a saturated market, there are several options available to users and we can say that many of them offer the same qualities.
Why should you investigate all the options? Because it's important to understand what has contributed to your success so that you can create an improved product and outperform the functionality of your new platform using this information. Basically, it is taking the keys to success and perfecting it.
Football marketing was invented by Beckham, but it was perfected by Cristiano Ronaldo, some say... This is an example of what benchmarking can be in a company. Taking a concept that has worked and perfecting it, because after all, improvement is always possible.
As of now, you can see that benchmarking involves, depending on the industry, examining the competitors. However, the benchmarking strategy actually goes much further than that.
Think that it can be the key to discover possible ideas to innovate your project and review your entire strategy because you can also consider all those potential customers.
Yes, it involves knowing your rivals, but you also pay attention to what your business can offer its customers as part of this analysis. Your understanding of your place in the market has improved as a result of this benchmarking practice.
In addition, you begin to identify your biggest weaknesses compared to your competitors or industry benchmarks. This can help you work to become stronger and become a better option for the target audience, as you will cover those flaws.
Consider that you can discover, through benchmarking, some services that your company does not have available but that your competitors do. Now you can create an action plan that allows you to address this weakness in a certain time to recover your position in the market.
In your business, you will develop several and new paradigms to implement.
They will encourage changes and the evolution of your work teams.
- Research the competition and/or market benchmarks.
- Encourage collaboration within the company.
- For the benefit of customers, the services and products offered are streamlined.
- You contribute to the desire for improvement of employees.
An initial investment capital is required to carry out the development.
This practice can cause your company to lose its identity style and brand.
There are certain different characteristics that you can define when putting benchmarking into practice, like any good business strategy for developing and implementing improvements in different areas of the company:
Since it is carried out according to specific guidelines and is distinguished by its objectivity, organizations should be included for a particular reason.
It requires a frequent evaluation of the most outstanding benchmarks of the related companies market, since they serve as a guide to achieve the continuous improvement of the successful marketing processes that you can carry out in your own company.
Benchmarking offers a benefit to the company that applies it by concentrating on the practices that can bring improvements to a program or department, incorporating mechanisms that help to provide feedback within the work teams.
To decide to apply a strategy, the first thing we have to understand is the utility that it can bring us in the short, medium and long term. Benchmarking is characterized by offering multiple utilities. Let's see some of them:
Let's get to the point, it is not just a simple analysis of the competition, because it uses a deeper methodology that goes beyond just seeing what other companies in the sector are doing.
That is why you have to consider benchmarking as a tactic to determine which are the correct procedures that have led to success in your competitors, although you can also apply it to companies outside your area.
Benchmarking is different from plagiarizing or copying other companies. It is the execution of all the positive aspects of a work model that has already borne fruit and achieved success.
By motivating an organization to improve its work processes, benchmarking against other companies in the industry will also help you to be more productive in different ways.
To achieve this, the different departments and/or work teams must be able to recognize their strengths and weaknesses in order to work on them and build a solid work base if they want to find opportunities to improve and modify the work processes that they have already established.
In a business where there has been a considerable investment of money, failure is something that nobody wants. Long-term benchmarking will be worth it if you decide to invest in it because it will prepare you to deal with internal issues.
It can help you make better decisions to protect your brand and work more effectively towards your expansion and growth if you do a comparative analysis with other major companies in the industry that interest you.
El foco del benchmarking está en adaptar fórmulas efectivas que ya han sido utilizadas por otros negocios, pero conociendo, entendiendo, transformando y adaptando estas fórmulas a la misión y visión del nuevo negocio que utiliza dicha práctica, para evitar perder la identidad de tu empresa.
Establece algunos objetivos comparables si quieres lograr esto. Además, para lograr los mejores resultados, tienes que comprender los procesos empleados por algunas de las principales empresas en la industria de tu interés.
Algunas de las metas que todo proceso de benchmarking debe cumplir son las siguientes:
Hay 3 tipos de benchmarking que puedes implementar en cualquier empresa para tener un éxito considerable al adaptar estrategias de otras compañías o de la tuya misma, pero a nivel interno. Te mencionamos cuáles son:
Who says that benchmarking has to only be outside of your company? It seems that you have not been reading carefully... Let's see, let's see, let's see how you can apply it within your own company.
This methodology can be carried out within the same organization but in various departments to determine what is effective in the design division and ineffective in the finance division, for example.
It's that easy, but a bit more difficult because setting an example can put a lot of pressure on you, and the other department may not handle it well. This is the moment in which the management and use of this methodology is put into practice.
Naturally, you will have a very limited understanding of both your company and the market if you only focus on your own business. This is crucial for its development because innovation has always been the result of collaboration, the exchange of ideas and knowledge with others.
The best way to improve your service, procedures, strategies and competitiveness is through competitive benchmarking, which researches and examines companies to identify their successful methodologies. Also, it helps you identify the weaknesses of your market.
There are success stories so recognized worldwide that it is difficult to ignore them, as was the case with TikTok a few years ago, causing other social networks to implement reels on their platforms to stay current, as was the case with Instagram, Facebook and even the company itself. Youtube.
Inspiration for an idea can hit you in the most unexpected places, so why should you limit your outlook to just your market? This is the time and place to use your creativity if you want your business to succeed.
Functional benchmarking focuses on this because it examines the successful business practices of organizations that are not related to yours.
Even if you don't know how to do it, if you have decided to implement the entire benchmarking process for your business, you don't have to worry. Sit back, relax, and we'll help you figure out all the necessary steps you need to follow at face value to implement benchmarking.
- Analyze your business: start by researching what processes in your company you think could be improved.
- Choose the type of benchmarking: it is important to know which of the 3 methodologies best suits what your company needs.
- Choose who you are going to study: there is no benchmarking if you do not study anyone. This is a fundamental step to carry it out, so you have to choose your competitors or references.
- Narrow down the data of interest: It is time to start collecting data, but you have to be careful about the types of data you need or want, as choosing unnecessary data takes time, effort and money.
- Analyze the data: with the data from other companies, it becomes necessary to study them to find the key to their success.
- Implementing your analytics: It's time for you to start implementing everything you've learned from other successful businesses into your own company.
- Apply again: constant improvement is the key to success. Benchmarking does not have to be applied once when it can be done on an ongoing basis.
It is possible to speak highly of benchmarking, since it is a work methodology that guarantees success in almost any company, since it focuses on the development of improvements at different levels. In addition, being so dynamic and practical, it adjusts to any work methodology.
Of course, we must recognize that benchmarking work is undoubtedly one of the most exhausting tasks in any company.
That is why there are so many specialists in the area and you could be one of them if you decide to train in benchmarking. Who knows? You could be the next example to follow for other people and/or companies.
Do you feel that you have applied benchmarking in your business or company? Tell us, we want to know what you think:
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
