The best way to enable your marketing team to outperform is to create a line of sight across your department, that informs content and campaign strategy. Monthly reports combining search traffic, web visits, news and editorial, social, and ad spend performance do just this. Take a look at our Digital Marketing Insight Reports, the newest solution for automating reporting of your Marketing internally and benchmarking against the competition.
How does your brand stack up against the competition? While it’s essential to track your PR & marketing ROI, you also need to monitor and perform a comparison of your competitors’ progress just as closely.
Contents
What is Benchmarking?
10 Benefits of Competitive Benchmarking
Different Types of Competitive Benchmarking
Why Do You Need to Monitor Your Competitors?
What Metrics Should You Benchmark?
How to Perform a Competitive Benchmarking Analysis
It's Time to Start Benchmarking
FAQs about Competitive Benchmarking
What is Benchmarking?
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing your performance to the industry standards and metrics from other companies. You can choose to benchmark your performance against your industry, competitors, or your own past performance.
If you’re not benchmarking your progress against your competitors’ results or industry, then you risk being left behind. For example, you could fail to know about a competitor’s newest game-changing product launch, continue to overspend on a marketing channel, or even miss a major shift in your industry.
In today’s world, there is a wealth of information available to help you understand your position in the market, and where you can improve your messaging as a marketer. Our automated reports provide access to this information all in one place, allowing you to filter competitive data and use key figures to see how you stack up against the competition.
10 Benefits of Competitive Benchmarking
There are many benefits of benchmarking, beyond specifically tracking your immediate competitors. The strategy reveals opportunities for growth, trending industry topics, and can spur innovation. Here are 10 key benefits of competitor benchmarking:
1. Get an objective view
2. Increase sales and revenue
3. Keep pace with competitors (or surge ahead!)
4. Stay on top of trends
5. React quickly to market shifts
6. Improve company culture
7. Find opportunities for improvement
8. Spur innovation
9. Reinvigorate your brand
10. Improve LLM visibility
1. Get an objective view
Most marketers have a good idea of their brand’s position in the marketplace. But marketers can sometimes be too close to the situation. It’s better to back up your own understanding of your market position with data. That’s exactly what benchmarking aims to do. Get an unbiased look at how you stack up in the market, regardless of how great you think your product or service is.
2. Increase sales and revenue
As you uncover new opportunities to improve, your sales and revenue should get a boost, too. That’s the whole point of making improvements, right? You want to create a product that’s better than what your competitors offer. When you do, you’ll be able to capture more of the market as well as retain existing customers so they don’t go to a competitor. Improvements are likely to lead to more sales, greater customer satisfaction, increased referrals, and even more media coverage.
3. Keep pace with competitors (or surge ahead!)
You might have an edge over your competitors for now. But what happens if they start gaining on you? What about when new competitors enter the arena? Or a competitor shifts course completely?
While you might not follow suit, it is a good idea to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing. If they’re growing faster than you, getting more media opportunities, have stellar content marketing performance, or are otherwise besting you in certain areas, that’s a sign you might need to up your game.
4. Stay on top of trends
Benchmarking data helps you find ways to improve your brand’s position in the market. This has become more important than ever over the last few years, given how quickly market conditions can change. With ongoing benchmarking, brands can stay on top of trends that might upend their current position and give them more time to react.
Case in point: the global pandemic. Marketers threw their strategies out the window as lockdowns took place and supply chains were turned on their heads. They had to adapt their messaging, content, and offers quickly to cater to a new normal. This is an extreme example, of course, but it does underscore the fact that marketers need to be prepared for the unexpected. The sooner you can see new challenges coming, the more quickly and fluidly you can adapt (ideally before your competitors do!).
5. React quickly to market shifts
Aside from trends, market shifts happen that can create new opportunities for brands to grow. Fads and trends come and go, consumer preferences change, and things become popular in different markets all the time. These shifts can help you connect to new audiences that weren’t on your radar before.
6. Improve company culture
Competitive benchmarking not only helps companies find areas for improvement, but also encourages them to take action. It shows you’re committed to keeping the company moving forward, which can help instill confidence among your employees. Helping to future-proof your company increases employee happiness and well-being, productivity, and a desire to continuously improve.
7. Find opportunities for improvement
As the old saying goes, when there are two businesses just alike, one is not necessary. Every organization has strengths and weaknesses. Learning about your competitors’ weaknesses can help you identify gaps in their strategy that you might fill with your own products and services. And knowing their strengths can encourage you to improve on your own offering.
And naturally, you’ll want to know about the same areas in your own company. Improving your weaknesses and building on your strengths can help your company keep growing and maintain an edge over competitors.
8. Spur innovation
As you uncover new strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities, new ideas and innovation become natural byproducts.
Staying in tune with competitors can help you come up with ideas to improve and innovate, often in ways you couldn’t even imagine. Stay positioned for success at all times, even if you don’t always know what success will look like. It can at least point you in the right direction when you notice your competitors are doing something differently.
9. Reinvigorate your brand
The effect of not innovating can be devastating for a company. It could mean letting your competitors take the lead in the market. Or worse, you might end up edged out altogether.
Take Polaroid, for instance. The company was once the gold standard in instant film photography. But digital technology eventually took over, rendering Polaroid products nearly obsolete. Consumers’ penchant for vintage technology and film in recent years has led to a resurgence for Polaroid, but not before the brand suffered serious damage due to failure to innovate.
Other brands haven’t been so lucky. Kodak, Nokia, and Blockbuster have all nearly gone the way of the buffalo because they couldn’t keep up with the times.
10. Improve LLM visibility
As AI-powered search and large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how users discover information, competitive benchmarking can help you understand how and where your brand appears in AI-generated responses. By tracking which competitors are cited, referenced, or summarized in LLM outputs—and for which types of prompts—you can refine your content and PR strategies to improve visibility. This ensures your brand is not only competitive in traditional search, but also in emerging AI-driven discovery channels.
Tip: Where can you find industry benchmark information? Take a look: The State of PR Report, State of Social Media Report, Influencer Marketing Statistics, 70+ Social Media Statistics, Global Digital Report
Different Types of Competitive Benchmarking
There are several types of benchmarking you can use to evaluate your competitive position. Each serves a different purpose depending on your goals and the areas you want to improve:
Performance benchmarking
Performance benchmarking focuses on comparing key performance metrics such as revenue growth, market share, website traffic, or engagement rates. It helps you understand how well you’re performing relative to competitors and where gaps or opportunities exist.
Strategic benchmarking
Strategic benchmarking examines how competitors approach high-level strategies, such as positioning, messaging, pricing models, or go-to-market plans. This approach is useful for identifying what’s driving their success and how your strategy can evolve to stay competitive.
Process benchmarking
This involves analyzing how competitors execute specific processes—like content production, customer support, or campaign workflows. The goal is to uncover more efficient or effective ways of operating.
Product benchmarking
Compares features, functionality, quality, and user experience of your products or services against competitors. It helps inform product development and innovation priorities.
Marketing benchmarking
Marketing benchmarking looks at how competitors approach marketing, including content strategy, SEO performance, social media presence, PR coverage, and campaign effectiveness. This provides insight into what resonates with your shared audience.
Digital benchmarking
This type of benchmarking evaluates your competitors’ overall online presence across websites, search engines, and digital channels. It includes metrics like keyword rankings, domain authority, traffic sources, and conversion performance.
LLM benchmarking
LLM benchmarking focuses on how brands appear within AI-generated responses from large language models. This includes tracking which competitors are cited, referenced, or recommended for specific prompts. Tools like GenAI Lens help you understand emerging visibility trends and optimize your content and PR strategies to improve inclusion in AI-driven discovery experiences.
Why Do You Need to Monitor Your Competitors?
Put simply – to win! If you aren’t already doing this process, it should be at the top of your to-do list. Monitoring the competition can help you ensure that your campaigns are going to stand out in a crowded industry and/or resonate with your customers.
And especially in today’s AI-driven landscape, competitor benchmarking goes beyond traditional channels like search and social media. Large language models (LLMs) and AI-powered assistants are increasingly influencing how people discover brands, products, and information. By tracking where and how your competitors appear in AI-generated responses—and which prompts trigger their visibility—you gain valuable insight into emerging content gaps and opportunities. This allows you to create more relevant, authoritative content and refine your PR strategy so your brand is more likely to be surfaced in these high-impact AI experiences.
Additionally, one of the easiest ways to win in the market is to remain cost-effective. When deploying your hard-won marketing budgets across ad spend, content creation, and third party syndication efforts, you need to be as efficient as possible—the benchmarking process can help with that.
For instance, many digital marketing channels run on a bid-based platform, meaning marketers must have the highest bid on a certain keyword or audience for their ad to be shown first (or at all). Using competitive intelligence you can determine the keywords your competitors are bidding against (or are not) to improve your PPC bidding strategy.
can automate the process of competitor benchmarking so that you can spend time improving the efficiency of your campaigns, and much more.
What Metrics Should You Benchmark?
To benchmark effectively, focus on a core set of metrics that clearly show how your brand compares to competitors across visibility, engagement, and performance:
- Share of voice (SOV)
The percentage of total industry mentions or visibility your brand owns compared to competitors.
Why it matters: It shows how dominant your brand is in conversations across media, social, and search. - Media coverage and sentiment
The volume of press mentions and whether they are positive, neutral, or negative.
Why it matters: Helps you understand brand perception and PR effectiveness relative to competitors. - Website traffic and sources
The number of visitors to your site and where they come from (organic search, social, referral, etc.).
Why it matters: Reveals how effectively competitors attract and convert audiences online. - Keyword rankings and SEO performance
How your website ranks for important industry keywords compared to competitors.
Why it matters: Indicates your visibility in search and your ability to capture demand. - Engagement metrics
Metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and time on page across content channels.
Why it matters: Shows how well your content resonates with your target audience. - Content performance
Performance of blogs, reports, videos, and other assets based on traffic, shares, and conversions.
Why it matters: Identifies which topics and formats are driving results in your space. - Social media presence
Follower growth, posting frequency, and engagement across platforms.
Why it matters: Highlights how effectively competitors build and maintain audience relationships. - Backlinks and domain authority
The number and quality of websites linking back to your content.
Why it matters: Strong backlink profiles improve SEO and signal credibility. - Conversion rates
The percentage of users who take desired actions (e.g., sign-ups, downloads).
Why it matters: Measures how effectively your traffic turns into tangible business outcomes. - LLM visibility and AI citations
How often your brand appears in AI-generated answers and which competitors are referenced instead.
Why it matters: Provides insight into emerging discovery channels and helps future-proof your content strategy.
Tip: Use the Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform for automating your competitor benchmarking.
How to Perform a Competitive Benchmarking Analysis
With the above benefits in mind, let’s look at some simple steps you can take to start doing competitive benchmarking:
Define clear goals and objectives
Knowing why you’re benchmarking matters just as much as the process itself. Start by writing down your objectives, which will help to guide the process.
Make a list of your competitors
To benchmark your competitors, you need to know who your real competitors are. These will be direct competitors (those who have a similar product and directly compete for your audience) and indirect competitors (those who share your audience but don’t necessarily offer a comparable product).
If you’re not sure who your top competitors are, doing a quick Google search for what you sell and see who pops up. From there, you can do some digging to see who their audience is, their company size, and other details and take it from there.
Establish benchmarking metrics
Benchmarking metrics help you focus on the right data to measure. This might be sales, content marketing engagement, media mentions, share of voice, website traffic, SEO, customer satisfaction scores, customer churn, or any number of things that indicate your competitors’ success. Tie your metrics back to your objectives. There are lots of things you can measure, but which metrics will help you achieve your initial objectives?
Collect benchmarking data
Once you know the data you want to collect, it’s a matter of putting all of your groundwork into motion. Use competitive benchmarking tools like the to learn more about your competitors using real-time data to save manual hours and effort.
Don’t forget: you’ll need to collect data on your own company to have something to compare competitor data to. Competitor analysis tools help you get the right findings.
Analyze results
After you collect the right data, start comparing it to your own standings. Do a SWOT analysis to see where your best opportunities lie, then develop an action plan for improvement.
Refine and repeat
Competitive benchmarking value grows over time. You’ll learn more about your competitors and how they evolve, as well as see how your own performance changes over time.
It's Time to Start Benchmarking!
Competition is inevitable. How you learn from it can make or break your business. Often the best insights come from outside the walls of your own office, and with Meltwater’s Digital Marketing Insight Reports software you can make sure you are benchmarking yourself against the competition in these four key areas to stay sharp on top of the pack.
FAQs about Competitive Benchmarking
What is competitive benchmarking?
Competitive benchmarking is the process of comparing your business performance, strategies, and metrics against competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.
Why is competitive benchmarking important?
It helps you understand your market position, uncover gaps in your strategy, and make data-driven decisions to improve performance and stay competitive.
What are the main types of competitive benchmarking?
The main types include performance, strategic, process, product, marketing, and digital benchmarking—each focusing on a different aspect of business comparison.
What metrics are used in competitive benchmarking?
Common metrics include share of voice, website traffic, keyword rankings, engagement rates, media coverage, backlinks, and conversion rates.
How often should you conduct competitive benchmarking?
Competitive benchmarking should be done regularly—typically quarterly or continuously—so you can track changes and respond quickly to market shifts.
How does AI impact competitive benchmarking?
AI and large language models influence how brands are discovered. Benchmarking now includes tracking which competitors appear in AI-generated responses and optimizing content accordingly.
What is share of voice in competitive benchmarking?
Share of voice measures how much visibility your brand has compared to competitors across channels like media, social, and search.
How can competitive benchmarking improve marketing strategy?
It reveals what competitors are doing successfully, helping you refine messaging, content, and campaigns to better reach and engage your audience.
What tools are used for competitive benchmarking?
Tools like media monitoring platforms, SEO tools, social analytics platforms, and AI visibility tracking tools help gather and analyze benchmarking data.
How do you improve visibility in AI-generated search results?
You can improve visibility by creating authoritative, well-structured content, earning high-quality mentions, and aligning your content with the types of queries AI systems commonly answer.
