Marketers are always striving for improvement and benchmarking is one great way to measure their success. However, finding reliable up-to-date industry benchmark data has been an age-old challenge for marketing teams, especially when it comes to B2B. 

If we take a trip in time back to the 2017 Marketo Summit, a unique event where 6,500 marketing professionals gathered in San Francisco to learn about the latest trends, tips, and tricks in digital marketing, Marketo’s Product Team teased the launch of a new email benchmarking feature that was met with gasps and cheers from the crowd. Several blogs even wrote about the announcement in Summit recaps like the Hileman Group (now Global Prairie) and Perkuto. Hat tip to Guillaume Messina who managed to grab a screenshot of the prototype! 

The punchline was that we would soon have the ability to quickly show how our email campaigns compared to others within the industry. Finally an end to the countless hours it would take to research the latest industry benchmarks…if you could even find the data…or so it seemed. 

Cut to 2023 and we’ve still never been able to locate this feature in Marketo and we still hear countless stories from marketers who are stuck in the quarterly benchmarks goosechase cycle. Our hunch is it may have been overshadowed by larger priorities or the distractions of being acquired, but it’s hard to say for sure. 

The struggle to find accurate benchmarks is still very real today, not only for email KPIs, but for KPIs across every channel: paid advertising channels, organic social, form fills, and more. Marketers don’t have a great place to find B2B industry benchmarks…until now.

Introducing Octane11’s industry benchmark insights. In this blog post, we’ll explore Octane11’s solution: dynamic, always-updated benchmark data for marketers.

Before we get into that, we thought it would be worth taking a visit to the Adobe Experience Cloud blog to see their latest thinking on benchmarking.

“Industry benchmarks are metrics a company can use to see how they’re performing compared to other businesses in their industry. Since business largely happens behind closed doors, it’s hard to know if your company is performing at a high standard. Fortunately, benchmarking can give you some clarity.” — Adobe Communications Team (Nov 2022)

The post goes on with advice as to why marketers should benchmark:

1. Outdo Competitors

2. Improve Efficiency

3. Track your Goals

4. Increase Accountability

5. Invest in What’s Working

All great advice! But we were amazed to see what we found in the “how to find industry benchmarks” section. Three sources: The US Census, 3rd-party industry white papers, and local government resources. What?!

Here’s what they had to say about industry reports:

“These are in-depth research studies and surveys from vendors, competitors, or conferences in your industry. Reports are great if you’re in a niche industry where there isn’t a lot of data from the US Census. Just be sure to look at the publishing date — some white papers rely on data that’s a few years old already, so check the author’s data-gathering methods before you rely on the report.” — Adobe

Yes, we definitely agree with checking multiple sources, but this further validates our point that finding accurate, up-to-date information is still a big challenge today. Marketers still struggle to find reliable data, and when they do, it quickly becomes outdated. We know there is a better way!

Octane11 is proud to announce dynamic, always-updated benchmark data for B2B marketers. We’re well-positioned to solve this challenge as we focus on ingesting, normalizing, and transforming B2B data across the full MarTech stack. You can now leverage our anonymized, crowd-sourced, cross-client data alongside your campaigns, making it easy to not only compare your performance to the industry average of your peers, but also to compare campaigns to your own, internal, all-time average and identify areas for improvement!