Rethinking Product Benchmarking for Better User Engagement

In certain parts of Africa, it is normally said that “You won’t put your hand inside fire just because your friend is doing so” No matter how much you want to be like someone, there are some things you will not do no matter the amount of persuasion. The same is true for user engagement.

Product benchmarking may seem like a good idea, but it’s essentially putting your hand inside fire because your competitor did the same. While product benchmarking can help to measure your product’s performance and functionality against competitors' to identify areas of improvement, as a long-term product strategy, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Understand that of course not all sorts of product benchmarking are detrimental. For example, internal benchmarking is one of the most efficient strategies for boosting user engagement. However, performance benchmarking, where you compare your product’s statistics with your competitors’ data, is a poor approach to optimizing your product experience.

Given a best-case scenario, using product benchmarking, you’ll be able to make good decisions by accident; and in the worst-case scenario, it could drive your user engagement off a cliff, wasting your time, money, and effort.

If you are looking for a reliable marker of what keeps your users glued to your products, then you should find out from your users who are using your product. That is one of the best ways to boost your user engagement with your products. Focus on your users to know what they need instead of focusing on your competitors!

Competitor Numbers Don’t Influence Your Numbers

In performance benchmarking, companies attempt to compare their KPIs with those of their competitors. To do this, you will need to conduct hours of research in order to collect reasonable data from your competitor. However, after putting in so much effort to do so and expecting a lot of value, at the end of the day, you don’t get anything of value. Unfortunately, it feels like you have just wasted your time, resources, and effort- these things that could have been better focused on your users for more effective results.

Let’s perform a thought experiment. Imagine you have a SaaS product and want to increase your customer service. So, you decide to measure your NPS scores and average resolution times against your business competitors. You spend time acquiring data on these companies, as they won’t just share it with you and when you finally compare your statistics, you think the route forward will be evident but it is not! Instead, you're faced with either of these two options:

• You’re either better than the competition, so you decide to keep improving to maintain your edge.

• Or you’re worse than the competition, so you vow to improve to overcome their advantage.

Do you see the problem? Either way, the solution would be to keep improving regardless of how everyone else is doing. So why go through the stress of finding out?

Some are of the school of thought that the value of benchmarking is in it being able to show you that you have a problem in the first place. However, this also seems false as you have Internal data to tell you that.

For example, if you have a sales problem, your product MMR data will reveal that. Or if you have poor user engagement, your churn rate will make it evident. Your customers and internal data can show you that you have a problem without needing product benchmarking to do so for you.

If you would like to know how to enhance your user engagement, consider reading more about effective digital signage strategies.

Benchmarking Leads to a Follower Mindset

Alright! Maybe we have been looking at Product benchmarking a little too harshly. Perhaps, the data isn’t necessarily going to point you in the right direction, but maybe you can still use it to look at what others are doing well and copy their good ideas.

Well...not so fast. A danger of relying on benchmarking is that it can lead to you following what works for others while ignoring the needs of your customers. You end up doing exactly what they are doing to grow their user base but you forget that what works for them may not work for you.

It is usually a rare event that any two user bases will be equivalent. This is because geography, demographics, and interests vary widely, even across organizations in the same industry.

For instance, if we look at a Walmart shopper and a Whole Foods buyer, the user engagement strategy that would work for the Walmart shopper may be disruptive to a Whole Foods buyer and vice versa.

Also, gamification is a huge engagement approach that is being employed in numerous apps. Seeing its success elsewhere, you may want to implement it to enhance your platform’s engagement.

While there are possibilities that It could work, there are also high chances that it may not resonate with your product users. This would lead to your product having an amateurish feel and your user engagement will plunge.

It is important to note that we are not saying that keeping an eye on competitors is inherently bad. However, making decisions based on the fact that it worked for them and so should work for you, can lead to issues. Instead, search out new ideas, while focusing on internal benchmarking to truly succeed with user engagement.

To gain deeper insights into user preferences, check out our article on digital signage analytics

Internal Benchmarking Is the Path to Growth

Instead of focusing all your energy, time, and resources on what other businesses are doing, it’s way better and more resourceful to look inward and find growth paths through your product data. Let internal benchmarking be your product’s path to its growth.

Find out what excites your users and what makes them come back. If you are able to answer these questions with hard facts from the internal data obtained from your product, you will always be able to come up with new ways to improve and boost your user engagement.

To carry out internal benchmarking effectively, you should start with setting a baseline of KPIs and data with which you can compare against later. You can do this by:

• Choosing relevant KPIs to track.

• Segmenting users to find insights.

• Collecting data on user engagement.

Now that you know how different segments engage, generate assumptions based on this data and test them using A/B testing. This data will demonstrate if your adjustments had the expected outcome. Then, repeat this procedure regularly, and over time, you will be able to produce an optimized experience for each user, engaging them in ways they would find personally interesting.

Look Externally for Inspiration, Look Internally for Data

Even though internal data will always be the best way to improve engagement, seeking inspiration from the outside world is also quite important.

You can look at what other companies are doing, not simply because you want to copy what they are doing exactly, but so that you can see new trends and consider what to try that would help to enhance your users' experience.

However, whether to implement a new idea should depend on your user base and not on external data from competitors. Always run new ideas by your users and prioritize what your data shows.

You can consider exploring our article on great examples of content for digital signage to gain more insights into effective digital signage that you can use to boost your user engagement.