Looking across my shoulder
I have come quite a long way since I joined TraceWorks in the middle of March. One of the things I spent a lot of time on in the beginning was reading other providers’ benchmarking reports. All seemed very focuses on technical or at least very specific information with wide disregard to the report as a whole or the message a report is meant to deliver. I imagined being a business executive or an online marketing manager when reading through them and although I had many “ah!” moments, they all left me feeling like a tropical saltwater fish in a freshwater tank.

I simply had to ask myself if it described what I needed and delivered the ability to focus my attention exactly where it was needed to get my ship back on course.

Captain’s overview
Where exactly is the important information. It does seem like much of the information available to companies are reports put together in a hurry and without any focus on readability or purpose. Either the focus areas is too wide or the information within the reports are simply not complementary to each other and leaves your business leader with a “so what?” look on his face while trying to decide if he needs to change his heading. Finding the exact areas that differentiate your boat from the race competition is exactly what you need from a benchmark and you do not want to spend 2 weeks doing it.

Plotting your course
If one is able to find any useful statistic in reports, then usually it is either not segmented towards the market space you operate in and leaves you with no clue on how you should adjust your own operation to meet the industry standard. It is simply not made for your type of boat, size of boat or it is made to cross the Atlantic ocean when you are merely interested in navigating the Bodensee in Switzerland.

We are all ships, we just use different crew and sails
The way I see it, organizations are dynamic entities acting within static environments and rules. All organizations have a structure with leadership and communication standards as well as routines when it comes to repeatable work assignments. Also organizations adhere to using tools and reports to collect data about their performance and capability. They usually compete with other organizations within a well defined market space using standard means of communication channels and selling identical product types. The organization/customer interaction all adheres to general economic laws and marketing models and thus the strategy set by organizations has a similar vantage point.

In short it is the unifying traits that interest me and how these are handled within each organization. We know what our ship is capable of, we simply want to know where the wind is coming from and how the currents are flowing so we can set our sails accordingly.

Navigating the information ocean
Thus I set sail to construct an easily negotiable map of online marketing divided into manageable categories that would each refer to specific static and unifying traits in organizations to display how different they are handled in comparison to their peer industry. This would give business leaders as well as individual marketing managers a well founded idea of exactly where they need to trim their vessel to reach the big red X of marketing excellence.

I am the weather forecast
What I have done is to construct a virtual corporate e-marketing identity profile for your company that you can compare to any industry or segment you wish. Over time this should hopefully become a dynamic trend display tool as well as a focus area identification tool. By updating data within the model over time as well as expanding the circumference of the data set, TraceWorks aim to deliver a trendsetting online benchmarking service that will allow you not only compare your performance in online marketing to your own goals and results, but to any industry segment you might desire.

Your compass & barometer
For each of the areas a comparison between your company and the industry is made and by clicking the corresponding area in the model, you will navigate to the report part that matters to your business management. The model and structure of our report will not only provide information that matters to your organization but also deliver an easy and useful tool to navigate the information ocean for any captain.

Benchmarking is thus as it should be. Helping you compare to whatever segment you want to and identify exactly how you are different. It is then not only possible to set your sails in accordance to your own strategy and plan compared to your competition, but also to identify exactly how the weather is going to look within the near future.