The digital marketing leaders are constantly monitoring their companies’ digital performance over time, and have benchmarks in place to see if the strategies are working, and with those benchmarks, they’re also able to compare their strategies with the best industry brands.
This is how digital marketers can keep track of the overall brand image and prioritize digital investments according to the company’s biggest digital marketing opportunities - whether they are in already established or newly emerging digital channels.
The performance of marketing strategies is carefully measured across the web, mobile and social media, and then it’s compared to the industry competitors or any available challenger brands for the company. There are different benchmarks for every channel, as well as for advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and email.
Social Media Benchmarks
Social media platforms are getting more competitive for advertisers with each passing day; however, instead of stepping back, more and more marketers are joining in. Although some platforms, such as Facebook, have taken some noticeable hits in the recent past, it still continues to be one of the most popular digital marketing platforms. Furthermore, even though apps like Snapchat and Tiktok are on everyone’s radars, not all companies are taking advantage of that space.
With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms, the main benchmark is the engagement that companies get with the content that they share with the target audience. This depends heavily on the amount of content that brands share, as well as the frequency of their posts.
Advertising Benchmarks
Advertising, specifically pay-per-click advertising, is one of the most measurable channels form marketing, and having reliable benchmarks is very helpful to marketers. However, the benchmarks on paid ads are drastically different in different industries. Nevertheless, four main benchmarks are important when measuring the effectiveness of ads, including the average click-through rate (CTR), the average cost-per-click (CPC), the conversion rate (CVR) as well as the average cost-per-action (CPA).
Furthermore, all of these benchmarks do not only differ for each specific industry, but they are also different in terms of the channels where they’re presented, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and even Bing Ads.
Email Benchmarks
Email marketing has been steadily becoming more popular in the past couple of years after many companies have lost the ability to gather data and make targeted ads. It has become one of the best ways that companies can market to the target audience, and is also a great way to see the success of a given marketing strategy.
The main benchmarks for email marketing are the average open rate, the average click-through rate, the average unsubscribe rate, the average click-to-open rate, and the average bounce rate. Combining all of these things together can give marketers a good idea of what kind of email gets the attention, keeps the interest with the target audience, and shows them what can still be improved upon to make them better.
