Keep your competitors close to you and always keep ahead.
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While the manufacturing industry often has its ups-and-downs, it’s usually in-demand. At least, that’s the case for the top-performing manufacturing companies in the industry. When you’re not one of these, you could struggle to grow and make a profit.
That’s where competitor benchmarking comes in. When powered by quality manufacturing industry research, it helps you identify potential opportunities, performance gaps, and more.
At Red Fern, we know how well this can inform your marketing strategy and similar areas.
Let’s look at what competitor benchmarking is, what it offers, and how you can do it.
What is competitor benchmarking and why does it matter?
Competitor benchmarking is the process of evaluating the strategies your competitors use, how they are performing, and then adjusting your strategies to out-do them. In the manufacturing industry, this involves analysing marketing tactics, product offerings, pricing models, and more.
This doesn’t mean using the information you find to copy your competitors. Instead, it means improving your strategy. This goes beyond surface-level data. It includes metrics like advertising spend, supply chain messaging, and overall marketing performance.
Quality competitor benchmarking offers multiple benefits, including:
- Unbiased performance analysis.
- Identifying performance gaps.
- Data-driven strategic planning.
- Identifying best practices.
- Learning from competitor mistakes.
- Improving your brand positioning.
These help you run your manufacturing business better and out-do your competitors. With quality manufacturing industry research, this can be done quite well. Knowing which steps to take is a vital part of doing this to a high level.
How competitor benchmarking links to data-driven marketing
Competitor benchmarking is at its most powerful when it connects directly to your data-driven marketing activity. Rather than focusing purely on perception or “gut feel,” benchmarking allows manufacturers to base every strategic decision on evidence. When combined with digital marketing analytics, it shows why competitors perform better and where your brand can overtake them.
Tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, Ahrefs, and SEMrush allow you to compare visibility, keyword share, traffic sources, and conversion funnels. You can see which channels are producing the highest returns for your competitors—whether that’s organic search, paid media, or referral networks. When overlaid with your own campaign data, the result is a clear picture of strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
Benchmarking data also plays a critical role in improving campaign efficiency and ROI. For example, if you learn that your competitors achieve better conversion rates from technical content or gated assets, you can test similar approaches, measure the results, and refine your strategy. Over time, these insights help you allocate budget to the channels with the best commercial impact, reduce wasted spend, and prove marketing effectiveness to internal stakeholders.
In essence, competitor benchmarking becomes the bridge between raw data and smarter marketing decisions, turning numbers into action.
Steps to conduct competitor benchmarking in manufacturing
The right steps play a vital role in your competitor benchmarking, with these often being referred to as manufacturing industry research. The most important of these steps include:
- Identify Key Competitors – Start by identifying your key competitors in your niche. While there could be indirect competitors, you’re much better off focusing on the most direct options.
- Gather Data Through Research – More intricate manufacturing industry research is the next step. Use various tools to analyse their marketing, outreach, and similar areas. Even customer reviews are worth looking at.
- Analyse Marketing Tactics – Next, look into which marketing tactics competitors are using. Focus on their core messaging, visual branding, and similar areas to evaluate their overall marketing strategy.
- Evaluate Performance Metrics – Armed with this information, measure the more tangible results you can find: leads, conversions, and social engagement, for example. See what’s leading to actual results.
- Review Your Findings – Organise your insights into a SWOT analysis so you can then review your findings. This lets you figure out actionable takeaways and steps you can take in time.
This manufacturing industry research lets you benchmark your competitors and how you measure up to them, letting you inform your strategy moving forward.
Avoiding common pitfalls
Competitor benchmarking is great when done right. But it’s easy to fall into pitfalls, with some being more common than others. These are always worth avoiding. Only focusing on market leaders is one of the more notable of these.
Smaller competitors could be quickly gaining market share; focusing just on market leaders means you’ll overlook these competitors and what they’re doing right. Then there’s data overload and not having KPIs tied directly to clear goals and objectives.
Lastly is blindly copying whatever your competitors are doing well. This leads to your manufacturing company coming across as a rip-off of whoever you’re copying.
You’re much better off using data to figure out what works, and then using this to differentiate yourself.
Turning insights into long-term advantages
The main advantage of competitor benchmarking is it gives you actionable insights you can use to move forward. What you do with these insights is vital. Use your findings to figure out which areas you can work on and to determine what should work best for your business.
This could mean optimising your website for specific keywords, investing in new marketing strategies and outreach efforts, and more. You can even use these insights to inform your resource allocation; if certain strategies should perform better, they’re worth investing in more.
How benchmarking drives SEO and GEO (Generative engine optimisation)
Traditional SEO remains a cornerstone of manufacturing marketing, but the landscape is evolving rapidly with AI-powered search experiences and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). Benchmarking your competitors within this new environment is vital if you want to stay visible.
GEO focuses on how AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity surface brand information within conversational search results. Competitors who invest in structured data, FAQs, and authoritative thought-leadership content are more likely to be featured in these AI summaries. Through benchmarking, you can identify which businesses are already appearing in generative search snippets and uncover the tactics enabling that visibility.
For example, reviewing a rival manufacturer’s blog structure might reveal consistent schema markup, well-optimised metadata, and content written with clear topical authority. Understanding these factors allows you to adapt your own SEO and content strategy to perform better across both traditional and AI-driven search engines.
As GEO becomes an integral part of digital marketing, benchmarking ensures your brand keeps pace with emerging search behaviour—helping you capture qualified traffic from both Google’s SERPs and the next generation of AI-powered discovery tools.
Summing it up
Competitor benchmarking, especially when powered by quality manufacturing industry research, is a great strategy to drive your business’s success moving forward. It’s a game-changer for your strategic planning, as well as your marketing strategy.
By properly analysing your competitors, uncovering high-performing tactics, and finding potential opportunities, you make it easier for your business to move forward. It’s not just a once-off task; it’s an ongoing strategy designed to help with your success.
With the right help, like from here at Red Fern, this doesn’t need to be complicated to do. There’s no reason it shouldn’t drive your future growth.
