In recent years there has a been a shift from traditional marketing strategies to a much more data-driven approach. With data to inform decision-making now being more readily available than it has ever been, marketers’ challenges have shifted from how to source data, into deciding which datasets to pay attention to.

Whether you have plenty of information at your fingertips or not, measuring the impact of marketing remains difficult. When marketers look to understand how well their marketing is performing, they often choose to reference their firm’s own past performance, or a generic benchmark – such as an overall financial services benchmark.

These generic benchmarks often have limited value, as the financial services sector covers a very broad cross-section of industries and audiences.

Increasingly, organisations are beginning to understand the additional value they can extract when they share their data. When firms share their data among peers, they contribute to a relevant benchmark that’s specific to their own industry and audiences.

Beacon embraces this idea by combining multiple datasets across channels – including website analytics, email analytics and media spend – and allows these datasets to be segmented by audience. These audience- and industry-specific benchmarks help marketers contextualise digital engagement and compare their firm’s performance against key competitors.

Each month Beacon members receive a report that summarises their firm’s performance against the user group’s collective performance. They also have access to an online dashboard where they can login and drill down into detailed data.

Importantly, Beacon offers member firms the valuable networking opportunity – through regular user group meetings – to discuss key trends in digital marketing with their peers. At the most recent meeting earlier this month, we covered:

  • Beacon’s improved report for users
  • SEO & social media benchmarking

Beacon user report

We have recently updated the presentation of our monthly report format to give our member firms their information in a more user-friendly way. As part of the changes, we made visually updated KPIs in the report. We have also introduced a definitions section, which ensures the reports are easily share-able across the business, and understandable regardless of whether the recipient is familiar with digital marketing metrics or not. 

SEO

The introduction of SEO benchmarking piqued much interest among our asset management user group at our recent meeting. SEO plays an increasingly important role in digital marketing, with search acting as a crucial channel that drives traffic to a firm’s website. Search engine algorithms are relentlessly focused on the user, which has been a catalyst for many firms to ensure their site is comprehensively user-friendly. Key SEO metrics to benchmark include:

  • Share of search
  • Brand search volumes
  • Site quality
  • Page speed

Social media

Similar to SEO, social media has become vital to many firms’ success, as it provides a rich platform to connect with audiences, increase brand awareness and shape a brand’s position in the market. Key performance metrics such as followers/subscribers, posts published and engagement metrics for posts present a good benchmarking opportunity for firms to assess how they perform compared to their peers across social media channels.

Data is much more useful when it’s shared and understood as a collective dataset. We believe benchmarking offers a powerful way to:

  • Focus your efforts, as you can see where your firm may be underperforming relative to its peers
  • Rationalise past or planned marketing spend
  • Understand where your firm’s strengths lie, so you can double down on those areas

If you’re interested in Beacon benchmarking, please get in touch with us at [email protected].