Benchmarking your Core Competencies

All organizations claim to have “core competencies” but few actually benchmark their capabilities to track and measure improvements over time. Take the time to evaluate your business from a high-level, and commit to continuous improvement. Use Demand Metric’s Core Competencies Assessment to set a baseline for your organization, and work to improve your score before your next self-assessment.

What are the Core Competency Areas?

• Strategic Planning & Governance – are Goals, Objectives, Measures, & Initiatives tracked and measured?
• Customer Relationship Management - are you customer-centric?
• Demand Generation – are you satisfied with the flow of qualified leads?
• Performance Measurement – are Key Performance Indicators in place?
• Market Intelligence & Research – do you have accurate market data?
• Product Management – are you satisfied with your time-to-market?
• Sales – are sales what they should be give the state of the organization?
• Organizational Development – are your training programs up-to-date?
• Human Resources – do you have the skill-sets you need for new projects?
• Systems & Technology - are your systems scalable enough for the future?

Analyzing Competitive Ad vs PR Spending

Measuring the effectiveness of your PR process is not a simple task, especially if you don’t have the budget for PR-coverage subscriptions. Just as challenging is demonstrating that your organization is better than the competition with leveraging PR to save on ad spending. Following is real-world method to handle these chores. Use Demand Metric’s Competitive Ad vs. PR Analysis Tool to start tracking your media coverage and benchmark your ad/PR-spending ratio against your competitors.

Benefits of Analyzing Competitive Ad vs. PR Spending:

• Competitive Insight - tracking ad placements and PR coverage provides a framework for discovering ad spending benchmarks within your competitive environment, and allows you to examine how PR is being leveraged. You may discover that one competitor is heavily pushing a certain message, or that another is deploying a pull strategy based on product-feature benefits.
• Save Money – organizations that effectively use public relations can save volumes of money that would otherwise be spent on advertisements.
• Better Leverage Public Relations – by determining how your competitors are leveraging public relations in their media mix, you can learn how to become more proficient in this area of demand generation.
• Measure Ad/PR Effectiveness - the first step in measuring a marketing program is to document the activities that are involved. Proactively monitoring your most important industry publications will provide a basis for tracking leads and sales that results from advertisements and press releases.