Driving performance with content marketing benchmarks

The business world is increasingly saturated with branded content. To differentiate content and engage audiences more effectively, brands and their content teams must focus on identifying and surpassing content marketing benchmarks. Only by outperforming competitors’ content can marketing teams achieve the effectiveness and content ROI their brands are counting on.

Establishing content marketing benchmarks requires in-depth analysis about the details of competitors’ content efforts, themes, and campaigns. That’s why so many CMOs and their content teams have turned to the content intelligence platform from Knotch.

The importance of content marketing benchmarks

Content marketers today have a lot on their plate. As their brands devote more marketing dollars to content, teams are scrambling to generate more content and manage more complex campaigns. At the same time, CMOs are under greater pressure to demonstrate superior content performance and justify the greater investment in content efforts, requiring content teams to spend more time monitoring content success metrics and optimizing campaigns.

When content marketers are overwhelmed by the day-to-day tasks of managing campaigns, it can be hard to take the time to develop content marketing benchmarks based on in-depth competitor analysis. But failing to adequately develop and monitor benchmarks can ultimately hinder content marketing effectiveness. Unless teams have a clear sense of where the bar is set for content marketing in their industry, their work is likely to result in unfocused efforts, wasted resources and carbon-copy projects that fail to move the needle on audience engagement.

Rather than an afterthought, content marketing benchmarks must be the foundation of a successful campaign. Benchmarks help identify the terms of success for content marketing performance and provide the inspiration for more creative campaigns. Ultimately, content marketing benchmarks illuminate what the content landscape looks like in any given industry, so that content teams can produce pieces that truly stand out.

To simplify the process of establishing content marketing benchmarks, teams need solutions that can significantly streamline research and analysis of competitors’ efforts. That’s where the Knotch content intelligence platform offers tremendous value.

The Knotch content intelligence platform

Knotch is a content intelligence platform that helps brands plan, measure, optimize, and benchmark content efforts across all owned and paid strategies. Providing real-time, actionable intelligence, Knotch enables CMOs and their teams to more effectively measure and impact the outcome of their content efforts.

To improve benchmarking, Knotch provides competitor content analysis that delivers in-depth reviews of competitors’ content strategy, publishing cadence, and themes. With Knotch, content teams can effectively establish content marketing benchmarks by:

• Viewing vast historical data about content categories, audiences, and engagement.
• Searching and following competitors’ digital content investments.
• Reviewing detailed information on content investments across brands, publishers, or industries.
• Identifying top creative themes to power content strategy.
• Drawing inspiration from the best content campaigns in a given industry vertical.
• Identifying whitespace and messaging gaps, creating opportunities to refine messaging and reach new audiences.

Comprehensive solutions for content marketing

Along with competitive analysis for establishing content marketing benchmarks, the Knotch platform provides:

• Content analytics that provide a comprehensive, cross-channel view of performance data.
• Metrics that reveal how audiences feel about content and that show content teams how to measure content marketing more accurately.
• Content journey mapping capabilities that let marketers take control of an audience’s journey from one piece of content to the next, mapping content to each stage of the customer journey.
• A content recommendation engine that suggests the next, most valuable piece of content based on intelligence gleaned from proactive and personalized conversations with users.
• A content library where every piece of content ever created can be automatically organized, classified, tagged, and indexed for easy, immediate access.
• Automated content intelligence that surfaces critical insights that marketers might otherwise miss.

Why brands prefer Knotch

Brands choose Knotch for measuring performance and establishing content marketing benchmarks because they know we are the Switzerland of data. We can be neutral because we have no stake in the success of what we are measuring. We don’t monetize from distribution channels, so the data can we collect is completely unbiased and transparently collected, enabling brands to eliminate dependence on unreliable, third-party data that collected through opaque processes.

We deliver data in real time, too. Rather than providing metrics hours, days or weeks later, our data lets marketers pivot on a dime, optimizing campaigns and pieces to improve performance and altering the mix of distribution channels to reach more engaged audiences.

FAQs: what are content marketing benchmarks?

What are content marketing benchmarks?

Content marketing benchmarks are the industry standards that define success for content efforts. Benchmarks help content teams to identify the most effective types of content, themes, best practices, distribution channels, and other elements of a successful content campaign.

What are the benefits of of content marketing benchmarks?

By clearly identifying and keeping an eye on content marketing benchmarks, content teams can build campaigns that employ the most effective practices and that successfully differentiate from competitors’ efforts.

How are content marketing benchmarks established?

Identifying content marketing benchmarks requires a great deal of research into the efforts of competitors, including the themes, types of content, publishing cadences, and distribution channels used in the highest-performing campaigns. Solutions that simplify these efforts by providing in-depth analysis can help teams to manage content marketing benchmarks more easily.