CMOs want to improve marketing performance, achieve goals and reduce wasted time and money. Benchmark marketing teams effectively to reach these objectives.

To efficiently benchmark marketing teams, you first must have a standard by which you will judge success. It’s important not to confuse metrics with benchmarks — the former is a number used for comparison, while the latter is the standard to achieve the highest level of performance.

Discover five benchmarks that are essential to help CMOs measure content marketing performance.

How to begin

There are different ways to benchmark marketing performance. One option is to benchmark against your own performance from a prior period (prior month, quarter or year). For companies that experience seasonality or another type of fluctuation, a year-over-year comparison for the same time period the year before can help eliminate data anomalies.

CMOs can also benchmark against industry standards to determine how well they’re meeting them. This isn’t always an option though.

Some industries are harder to benchmark than others, with limited information about competitors or best practices. Additionally, innovative startup companies may find limited data to benchmark against for a new or unique product or service.

5 key benchmarks for CMOs

These five benchmarks can help you measure your marketing team’s performance and identify areas of improvement:

• Customer acquisition costs (CAC). If CAC exceeds the lifetime value (LTV) of customers, you won’t be profitable in the long run. Calculate CAC by adding costs for marketing activities such as paid advertising, employee time and production costs and dividing it by total new customers acquired in a given period.
• Cost per lead (CPL). This helps you quantify marketing leads from content marketing efforts such as blogging, SEO, social media, earned media (PR), videos, webinars and e-books. You can further segment CPL by content type using unique and trackable CTAs when you publish. The average CPL for content marketing is $92.
• Content creation time. Knowing how long it takes to create content (brainstorming, copywriting, creative, SEO, editing and publishing) can help you calculate CAC and CPL and determine the ROI of creating content internally. Your team should be able to produce, publish and promote a blog post in five business days. Any longer is an indication of a problem. Your team should complete shorter content, like social media posts, within 3-5 business days, and longer content, such as an e-book or infographic, within 8-12 business days.
• Missed content deadlines. Benchmark marketing teams’ performances on meeting content deadlines to gauge their current workload. If your team misses more than 10% of your deadlines, a managed content services provider that works with professional writers and advanced SaaS platforms can streamline tasks and eliminate missed deadlines.
• Manual marketing tasks. The right technology or partner could streamline several content tasks that your team does. That includes SEO and readability to rank in organic search and engage your audience. It also includes plagiarism and duplicate content checks to avoid being punished by search engines and removed from SERPs.

The bottom line

Every CMO knows that benchmark marketing performance is important. Measuring your team on all aspects of the content marketing process can help you determine whether you are achieving good ROI with the internal resources available. If your team isn’t achieving these key benchmarks, explore how a managed content services provider like Tempesta Media can help.

To get started now, take a look at our e-book on the 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs to discover how to streamline your program for success.