Marketing your core competencies

Firstly, what are core competencies? They are the essential ingredients that make a company what it is. They are those key abilities with which the company achieves great things; not just abilities they aspires to do well at, these are the literal foundations of the customer’s experience.

Understanding core competencies has a number of benefits. It sets out a clear list of strengths and inversely showcases areas that fall outside of these competencies. These insights potentially highlight areas that may be better off outsourced.

Focusing on core competencies means investing in and throwing resources at the areas of the business that are already proving to be the most profitable and influential. It can help decision making around whether to pursue ventures that fall outside of the core competencies of the business.

Identifying core competencies gives a business a set of pillars to start basing their marketing around. They paint a very clear picture of how the business should be positioning itself in a market, what the unique selling points are or if not quite “unique” qualities, they are abilities that a company excels at when pitched against their competition. Everyone can claim to have great technical capability, but if it’s your core competency, you’ll trump your competitors with your technical skill.

So how do you create a marketing campaign around competencies? The first step of course is to dig deep into the company’s psyche to determine exactly what they are. This may be an exercise that the directors or leaders of the business do either by themselves or with their entire team.

Once identified, the next step is to determine how your clients benefit from these competencies. For example, a consulting practice may identify that their core competencies are keynote speakers, consultants, coaches, project managers and educators.

How might each of these factors benefit their clients? Keynote speakers may instigate change, their consultants may improve processes, their coaches may challenge behaviours, project managers assist in achieving successful outcomes and educators enable skill sets to be mastered.

Entire campaigns could now be generated around these competency > benefit concepts, further strengthening the focus in these areas and giving potential clients clarity about what to expect the company will do for them.