You might have heard ‘Data is the new Oil’ as it gives your business a sustainable competitive advantage. One must get hold of internal as well as external data on competitors, peers and industry leaders with respect to your business enterprise. The exercise or process of collecting information on their processes, pricing, performance practices and data in the public domain is called benchmarking. At Arslok India, we enable you with best practices on how to benchmark your competitors, adapt their best practices, grow your business and improve operational efficiency by regularly imbibing the same into your systems:
1.Annual Reports
They are the richest, most authentic source of information on a public or listed company. As a local business or an SMB, it is inevitable to learn from the industry leaders on sustainable business practices, CSR policies, multimedia campaigns and shareholder management. When studied exhaustively, it helps in setting targets and goals for your business’ future.
2. Website Resources
For any organization, a website is its digital twin which speaks volumes about them. To benchmark their practices and performance, one must focus highly on the resource center which includes:
ABCs – Articles, Blogs, Client Testimonials
PR activities and its channels
Industry Partnerships and Accreditations
Case studies or white papers
Social Media Integration with website for various customer touch points
3. Social Media Benchmarking
Digital footprint of your competitors or peers enables you with ideas on content marketing, industry trends, engaging posts across social media handles and actionable insights on keywords for SEO. To study that, managers must look for:
4. Reviews on Listing Platforms
Availability on listing and search engine platforms isn’t enough. A local business gets boosted with credible reviews across Google Maps, Glassdoor, LinkedIn and other job portals. A lot of pain areas, grievances and process inefficiencies can be identified via these reviews for your business peers.
5. SWOT Analysis
Strengths-Weakness-Opportunities-Threats is a fundamental framework for holistic understanding of the competition. It can be done by secondary research or exit interviews of employees by hiring/audit firms or consulting agencies. It gives a bigger picture of practices, performance and processes followed by the competition as a part of secondary marketing research.
How to conduct, use and implement benchmarking practices:
Benchmarking is an age old practice which was done in old-school ways by retailers when data punching was manual. For a newly opened outlet, the retailers used to purchase twice in a day to get their printed bills. It gave them the unit price of common products stocked, difference in the order number of morning and evening bills gives an indication of daily footfalls in the store. It was an ingenious method but an elementary example. For any business, the following steps can be religiously followed to benchmark:
Start early, define a timeline and predefined goals in mind
Finalize your metrics on 3Ps: Performance, Processes & Practices
Select your data collection methods – Secondary research, data oriented primary surveys, field research etc.
Identify a peer group to be studied from your industry
Focusing on leaders from other industries’ frameworks – Kaizen, TPM, JIT, VAVE, QA practices etc.
Using the data collected to your advantage by slicing-dicing it with respect to defined metrics
Implementing the best practices to improve on your business goals
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