The right marketing benchmarks indicate how you’re tracking on the decisions and performance that feed strategies.
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How Tech Marketers Use Marketing Benchmarks to Drive Impact
Use marketing benchmarks to rationalize your marketing strategy and plans
Benchmarking is a critical part of assessing your competitive positioning. What your peers are focused on tells you if you’re on the right track — or not.
Download this infographic and dive into the results of the Gartner 2025 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Survey, and:
Analyze key marketing investments
Unravel the marketing mix trends of 2025
Explore the impact of GenAI within technology marketing organizations
How marketing benchmarks drive optimization and effectiveness
Using benchmarks, the right metrics, data and tools to assess your function’s performance and progress helps you identify what and where to improve to deliver on strategy.
Assess Performance
Pick the Right Metrics
Elevate the Right Data
How benchmarking fits into your performance monitoring
Benchmarks are just one type of performance monitoring tool that functions use to assess their budgets, capabilities, operations and strategy. Other types of performance measurements are critical for marketing, especially to justify spending as year-over-year marketing budgets continue to diminish.
Although tech marketing supports teams that generate and retain revenue, it’s hard to measure what you’re not directly responsible for. To illuminate the marketing function’s true impact, track your performance with marketing benchmarks and a combination of strategic, operational and tactical performance indicators:
- Strategic performance indicators reflect the organization’s top business goals and objectives (e.g., revenue growth rate, customer retention rate). This reveals how well marketing activity is supporting business goals.
- Operational performance indicators, like marketing-qualified leads and sales cycle time, demonstrate how operational plans align with marketing strategy to identify, reach and convert target segments at the right cost. They track core target-versus-actual performance across specific campaigns and channels. They drill down into sales performance, media effectiveness and ROI, broken out by region, campaign and channel.
- Tactical performance indicators are associated with the detailed execution of campaign or program tactics (e.g., impressions, downloads, leads), and show target-versus-actual performance to inform optimization in as near to real time as possible.
Some common marketing benchmarks include comparing against peers in:
Marketing investments
Brand strategy and activation
Brand awareness and demand generation
Account-based marketing
The impact of AI and machine learning
Pick the metrics that matter to your organization — and ensure access
Tracking the right set of metrics helps you understand if your marketing strategy supports the overall objectives of the business, and translating that strategy into measurable operational marketing plans helps you align to those objectives. Deciding which metrics to use and where the metrics and data should be pulled from should be a collaborative effort with cross-functional teams, including sales, customer service, strategy and operations. After all, if you are not using similar metrics to ultimately determine performance, teams will be siloed and behave more like internal competitors trying to validate their own performance than teammates working together toward common objectives.
Whether the marketing resources are in-house or outsourced, work with your team to define:
What data is available to construct marketing metrics
Which metrics are appropriate to each level of decisions being made in the organization (e.g., tactical, operational or strategic)
How those tactical and operational metrics align to your organization’s strategic metrics
What actions need to be taken as indicated by our marketing metrics performance
Take both a top-down and bottom-up approach:
Define the metrics that reflect strategic goals. Metrics must reflect the organization’s business goals, translating them into actionable measures. Choosing metrics that can be impacted by marketing activities — both directly and indirectly — should be the focus.
Appraise your ability to deliver the metric. Before committing to a metric, perform a bottom-up appraisal of the data points that contribute to it. Is the data you need available? How frequently is it available? How reliable is it?
Assess your ability to track, access and analyze key metrics. Also consider manual data collection processes you need to furnish those metrics. Do you have technology that will allow you access to the data? Also, do you have tools and/or talent that can provide insights into that data? Is this an area that requires monetary investment for you to marry operational-level detail to more strategic objectives, or to understand the impact of your marketing activities to the broader strategic objectives?
To define the marketing metrics that matter to your organization, follow these five steps:
Build consensus. Work with other senior stakeholders, including sales and services, on expectations of marketing performance. Be specific about how marketing operational plans support the marketing strategy, as well as how that strategy supports business goals.
Socialize the metrics and identify functional contributions. Assemble your marketing team, as well as representatives from sales, service and other key areas.
Audit and stratify available data. Build an understanding of the availability and quality of operational and tactical data. Working with your marketing team, start to map out the metric taxonomy. Know who should see what data and how often.
Plug the gaps. If key data is missing, determine whether it can be substituted in the immediate term and sourced in the longer term.
Edit ruthlessly. Too much data impedes decision making, so be ruthless in the selection of metrics. Ensure that only those metrics material to decision making are chosen.
Improve your influence with stakeholders by establishing which data to highlight
What is the right data that demonstrates marketing ROI and impact on the business? Developing storytelling capabilities within the marketing organization is critical to proving marketing impact, which is essential for securing marketing budget and improving marketing’s reputation. Whether the problem is a lack of access to data or a lack of integration or supporting processes to create a robust and complete view of the data, data issues will always exist in some form.
Tech CMOs too often use marketing-centric data to demonstrate marketing performance to other functional teams and executives. Using “marketing speak” while talking to nonmarketing colleagues usually proves ineffective, since synergies between functions and broader company initiatives aren’t well-defined. This often results in more questions and fewer insights.
To craft meaningful business narratives, you must start by knowing your audience and selecting metrics with supporting visuals that illustrate marketing’s value on the stakeholders’ objectives. Then, craft a narrative that includes references to the stakeholders’ challenges and priorities.
Use a data-centric storytelling approach to improve credibility when meeting with key stakeholders. This requires three elements:
Visualization: The visual format for presenting information. Selecting appropriate metrics and then determining the most appropriate visualization to present the information is key. Examples of different visualizations include:
Connected slideshows
Annotated dashboards
Infographics
Flow charts
A combination of visual aids, such as dashboard metrics along with slideware to distill key takeaways
Narrative: The plotline used to frame the story. A good story needs a plotline where you:
Define the situation with key data points and metrics
Discuss the impact of said situation on stakeholders
Offer a possible outcome, a set of options or questions to prompt action
Context: Contextual information provides a realistic frame of reference for your target audience. Typically, context will draw from management experience and opinions or situational awareness of the audience’s challenges and objectives. Contextual information can include:
Corporate objectives and strategy
Key business transformations occurring
Future M&A plans
Competitive threats/opportunities
Shifts in buyer behavior
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Frequently asked questions on marketing benchmarks
How do I set up marketing benchmarks for marketing campaigns?
By establishing benchmarks, marketers can track and evaluate their performance, identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize future campaigns. Here are a few steps to take:
Define your campaign objectives.
Identify KPIs.
Research industry benchmarks.
Analyze historical data.
Set realistic benchmarks.
Monitor and measure campaign performance.
Adjust and optimize.
Learn from competitors and industry leaders.
How can marketing benchmarks help in making informed decisions?
Marketing benchmarks play a crucial role in making informed decisions by providing a reference point for evaluating performance and identifying areas for improvement, including:
Goal setting
Optimization opportunities
Resource allocation
Competitive analysis
Continuous improvement
What are marketing benchmarks?
Marketing benchmarks are standards or reference points that marketers use to measure and evaluate the performance of their marketing campaigns. These benchmarks are typically derived from industry data, historical performance or competitor analysis. They serve as a point of comparison to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing efforts.
Drive stronger performance on your mission-critical priorities.