--- title: Strategically benchmarking competitors for WBCSD date: 2024-11-18T11:16:56Z modified: 2025-01-16T15:45:23Z permalink: "https://empower.agency/case-studies/strategy/strategically-benchmarking-competitors-for-wbcsd/" type: case_study status: publish excerpt: How Empower accurately benchmarked WBCSD against multiple competitors to help inform their strategic thinking.  wpid: 3285 case_study_cat: - Analytics - Audits - Strategy featured_image: /wp-content/uploads/2024/11/WBCSD-Banner-image.jpg featured_image_alt: WBCSD Banner image author: Ben Matthews --- ![WBCSD Banner image](https://empower.agency/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/WBCSD-Banner-image-600x338.jpg) # Strategically benchmarking competitors for WBCSD How Empower accurately benchmarked WBCSD against multiple competitors to help inform their strategic thinking. - ![WBCSD 2024 Social Media Benchmarking Final](https://empower.agency/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/WBCSD-2024-Social-Media-Benchmarking-Final-70x39.jpg) ![Ines Silva, WBCSD](https://empower.agency/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1701205148777-200x200.jpeg) > _“Thank you for the insightful and great piece of work. The WBCSD team got very excited by the work and we’re now looking forward to implementing your strategic recommendations.“_ Inês Silva Global Marketing Manager, WBCSD ## The Brief [WBCSD](https://www.wbcsd.org/) – World Business Council for Sustainable Development – wanted to gain insights into what certain peer organisations were doing well (and not so well) across social media marketing, so that they could use these learnings and insights to strategically position their own social media activity. Empower previously used its partner tools, including Brandwatch (formerly Falcon.io), to complete an initial benchmarking project for WBCSD in 2022, and then again in 2023, to update the learnings and insights. As a result, WBCSD tasked Empower with an additional benchmarking project that would be relevant in 2024. ## The Challenge This piece of work brought some unique challenges. Firstly, WBCSD’s primary social network is LinkedIn, and the platform’s closed API meant that obtaining key partner data for LinkedIn was more of a manual process than it might have been for other platforms. Likewise, although X (Twitter) has an open API, the timing of this project coincided with an overhaul of X Analytics, meaning that strategic data was harder to obtain on this occasion than it had been in the past. Finally, we did not have access to competitors’ internal data with regard to their content, and so this meant that we were unable to access their true (internal) engagement rates for specific posts. ![Screenshot 2024 11 05 at 15.29.02](https://empower.agency/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Screenshot-2024-11-05-at-15.29.02-1400x787.jpg) ## The Approach Social media benchmarking looks at key performance indicators of competitors to see how you stack up against them. In this way, it enables you to pave an informed way forward. We used partner tools like Brandwatch to carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 10 competitors provided alongside a deep dive into WBCSD’s social media channels. Where relevant, we cross-compared findings from this project against those within the previous benchmarking project carried out in 2023. To overcome the challenge of not having access to competitors’ true engagement rates, we provided external engagement rates based on the data that we _could_ obtain. ## The Results ### 10 peer organisations benchmarked ### 6 months' worth of data ### 70+ slides of strategic information delivered ## Start your training project Contact the Empower team to discuss how we can meet your digital training needs. 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