Knowing how your content performs is the key to understanding whether your marketing efforts are working, or whether a change in strategy is needed. However, just noting an increase or decrease in certain metrics does not necessarily mean anything if you don’t have anything to compare it to. Understanding what good performance looks like for your content can therefore increase your ability to keep producing content that outperforms its predecessor.

That’s where benchmarking comes in.

Why benchmark your content?

Benchmarking your content is crucial to know what good content performance for your business looks like. It involves comparing your content performance with competitors or industry leaders to gain insights, track progress, and make informed decisions. Here’s why it’s important:

1. Measuring success:

Benchmarking helps you define success. By comparing your content’s metrics – such as engagement rates, traffic, or conversion rates – with competitors, you can set realistic goals and understand where you stand in your industry. It is also worth comparing to your previous performance if possible. What is good for the industry leader may not be attainable for a smaller start-up, so marking industry and company benchmarks is equally important.

2. Identifying opportunities:

Analyzing competitors’ content can reveal gaps in your strategy. If a competitor’s blog post on a trending topic is generating massive engagement, it might signal an opportunity for you to create similar content and capture that audience.

3. Optimizing strategies:

Through benchmarking, you can pinpoint what works and what doesn’t. By understanding which types of content or distribution channels yield the best results, you can refine your strategies and allocate resources more effectively.

4. Staying relevant:

In the dynamic digital world, trends change rapidly. Benchmarking keeps you updated on what’s currently resonating with your target audience, ensuring your content stays relevant and engaging.

5. Continuous improvement:

Regular benchmarking promotes a culture of continuous improvement. It encourages your team to innovate, experiment, and adapt to changing market conditions. Don’t become complacent!

Turtl’s content marketing benchmarks

Let’s take a brief look at some of our findings to show you how we here at Turtl benchmark our content across our Turtl Docs.

Here we compare gated metrics between ungated and gated content. Ungated content, unsurprisingly has a lower bounce rate across all word counts. However, the higher number of readers, and longer time users read the content in gated docs suggest that long-form gated content is valued more highly by the user.

Using these figures, we can see that the effort taken to create longer-form gated content is worth it based on read time alone. We can also see that if an 8000-word gated document is performing at less than a 7-minute average read, that content is not performing as well as it could be.

With this information, editing the content becomes a key task to ensure that we capture the attention of those readers.

Similarly, we can use gated content again to benchmark by industry. This graph seems much more dramatic, but we can see that gated content does not perform as well for retail clients. Not only is the bounce rate higher than ungated content, but the read time is significantly lower. This suggests that for retail clients, ungated content is the way forward.

Using analytics tools like Turtl’s Analytics Dashboard can help you see your content at a granular level and adjust your content to get the best possible results.

Read our exclusive content benchmark research

Click to read Performance benchmarks for online documents

How to benchmark your content

Using Turtl’s Analytics Dashboard you can easily benchmark your content with a wide variety of highly detailed parameters. If you’re concerned that leads aren’t reading your reports (which you can easily make with our online report maker), the read-time feature is a fantastic metric to see how your audience is engaging and whether or not those downloaded documents are actually performing.

If engagement is a key metric for you, knowing whether people are interacting with your docs is essential. With Turtl, you can see exactly where users are interacting most with your content and can adjust your doc or future pieces accordingly. For instance, if people interact with polls lots, it’s worth adding more and using them in a way that gives you even more audience-specific data to work with.