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In the increasingly noisy world of marketing, it’s often difficult to capture your audience’s attention. Without a tangible “What’s in it for me?” benefit, your audience has little incentive to interact with your team in a meaningful way.

Strategies for communicating with potential clients often rely on being the “noisiest” rather than focusing on providing value to an audience before they become clients. Outbound marketing tactics like paid advertisements are becoming less effective as companies try to make more noise than their competitors.

Inbound strategies, like content marketing, capture mindshare and convert readers into clients by offering something valuable but require a long-term game plan fueled by ongoing research, development, and promotion efforts. While content marketing is enormously valuable when your audience is broad, diverse, and not easily identified, what if you already know your audience, the number of prospects is relatively small, and you can engage them periodically? In this situation, strategic benchmarking can deliver quicker, more cost-effective wins than other strategies.

What is Strategic Benchmarking?

Traditional benchmarking techniques measure a company against competitors or industry standards. This type of benchmarking can be used to improve upon specific functions within the company or to identify gaps and gain a competitive edge.

What we’re calling “strategic benchmarking” is a more specific approach that positions you as the facilitator of the benchmarking study rather than (a) an outside observer viewing already-compiled data or (b) a study participant contributing to the end result. Facilitating a strategic benchmarking study means that you determine what types of information to pursue and who you want to participate. Instead of relying on outside research or your team’s judgment, strategic benchmarking allows you to cultivate the observations and background you need while increasing your company’s visibility and offering value to your audience.

What are the Benefits of Strategic Benchmarking?

While a significant output of this strategy is specific, actionable data on the key market areas you’re interested in, the primary benefit of strategic benchmarking is access. When you facilitate a benchmarking study and share insights with participants, you gain access to companies who might not otherwise interact with your business.

Strategic benchmarking also provides a non-intrusive way to remain visible to your key clients and other contacts. One of our mantras at Pharma Acumen is to add value every time you are in contact with a client or prospect. Benchmarking provides a method to add value and remain top of mind to your existing audience.

You can also use strategic benchmarking to identify customer needs. This is done through interviews using guides strategically designed to get responses from prospective and current clients who have a vested interest in the topic of your study. Offering your target benchmarking audience the results when the study is complete provides an incentive for them to participate and gives you an additional point of contact.

What goes into a Strategic Benchmarking Project?

Strategic benchmarking entails (1) obtaining your audience’s feedback as part of a larger research project on a specific pharmaceutical topic or area, (2) analyzing the results to create insights, and (3) sharing insights with participants. This strategy works because it invites your audience to become part of the development process and gives them a stake in project outcomes. They will care about the final results because they had a hand in producing them.

While it may seem daunting to create and execute this type of project, our team has deep experience developing and implementing strategic benchmarking efforts within the pharmaceutical industry. We tailor our involvement to complement your existing capabilities and capacity. Whether you want a complete benchmarking study created from scratch, would like help interviewing participants, or could use a sounding board for existing benchmarking projects, we would love to discuss how we can best meet your needs. Contact Brian to learn more about the value strategic benchmarking can provide your company.