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The Importance of Knowledge Management in Marketing

February 10, 2021

Knowledge management should be a common practice in all businesses, no matter the field and purpose. It’s useful for both the internal and external development of the company. Benefits include optimizing teamwork, teaching newcomers, improving sales, and reviewing results.

And in the age of raging pandemic, knowledge management gains a new form and becomes more essential than ever. KM techniques and strategies become more flexible and adapt to the changes COVID-19 brought. After all, the inability to travel and attend meetings forced organizations to change most of their tactics.

The marketing field isn’t an exception. Knowledge management used to be helpful for optimizing commerce in the past. But nowadays, the connection becomes closer.

Why Is Knowledge Management Important for Marketing?

In brief, KM enhances efficiency and leads to faster, more constructive decision-making. Here are several benefits of implementing knowledge management practices:

●      Smarter specialists.
Your workforce learns from one credible source and becomes smarter. Consequently, it offers better ideas and potential marketing strategies.

●      Quick adaptation of newcomers.
New employees join the collective with ease and start working for the company’s benefit in shorter terms.

●      Lower turnover.
Employee turnover drops due to quick learning, thus increasing your reliability and authority.

●      Increased chances for beating the competition.
An intelligent company that works like one organism is always ahead of the competition. All teams, including marketers, detect and analyze vulnerabilities and find solutions to problems with lightning speed.

As market conditions are changing rapidly due to the new way of life we’re leading, a knowledgeable marketing team can:

●      React quickly to new trends;

●      Make fast, data-driven decisions that will make any situation beneficial for the company;

●      Offer better support and customer experience according to buyer’s needs;

●      Increase overall intelligence and efficiency of the team.

If we draw an analogy with a car maintenance service, then all the tools mentioned above represent a kind of a mechanic tool set. Each element of the set is responsible for a certain category of effects, and in the hands of a skilled craftsman, this set turns into a powerful "weapon".

It is quite understandable that each tool must be used to gain experience and hone skills. Try it and you will see the result.

3 Ways in Which Knowledge Management is Useful for Marketing

Marketing is all about knowledge. You need to know every detail about the market in general and the audience you want to get attention from. Customer data creates profiles leading strictly to the people who can benefit from your business. Further research helps to understand buyer’s intentions and demands.

As a result, small adjustments will create a strategy catering to the core of your target audience.

These three ways of incorporating KM in any marketing strategy will draw more attention and leads to your business.

1: Knowledge of Company Operation

Creating a KM system with the data about your company’s teams, hires, fires, feedback, and reviews will help to manage the marketing team, among all others. You will get valuable insight into your own organization’s work, see marketing results by month, and analyze the team’s performance.

This method allows for an objective view of the inside operation of the company.

2: Research of the Market

While new research must be conducted frequently, the analysis should include existing knowledge. Otherwise, there will be no data to compare the new results to. By adding the information you already have to current research, the marketing team understands the changes more deeply.

Such insights allow for building more adequate strategies and adapting them according to the patterns detected during analysis.

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3: Marketing and Sales Connection

Cross-team communication via knowledge management leads to data flow from one team to another. This method can fill many gaps focused research may leave. This flow has to be up-to-date and consistent to provide the best results.

Marketing and Sales teams are the closest to one another. And if each works in its own bubble, the lack of knowledge is unavoidable. To make data-based decisions, you need to be updated on the latest patterns, trends, and techniques each company uses.

2 KM Systems to Implement

Two central knowledge management systems will increase your marketing team productivity:

●      Shared research information.
While outlining a new project, create a file or a folder with all research data. Include everything about your target audience, partners, current market, and forecasts there. Then, share the folder or file with all teams, including marketing, as a base for further research and development.

●      Feedback compilation.

Gather feedback from all teams that took part in a project and ask customer support to share clients’ reviews. Create an easily accessible database everyone can turn to before making an important decision. Informed adjustments can improve marketing strategies significantly.

Common Issues with Knowledge Management in Marketing

The primary issue businesses may encounter is poor management. For instance:

●      High competitiveness between teams to the point where knowledge sharing is halted;

●      Poor analysis of marketing results and no knowledge acquired for the future improvements;

●      Lack of learning opportunities for new employees;

●      Poor distribution of information.

All knowledge management stages have to work like a clock, from gathering data to analyzing it and using results to make strategies better. Interaction between teams is also a crucial factor.

For example, the marketing team, along with doing its research, should be in touch with customer service. Cooperation helps to tackle commonly reported issues and adapt their techniques accordingly. The stage potential clients are in when approaching the ad, frequently asked questions, concerns, etc., have to be a part of marketing analysis. A good example is a photo processing website. They built the ability not only to communicate, but also to place an order in all convenient ways - a page on Facebook, Instagram, email and website.

The Prospects of KM Considering Tech Development

Incorporating KM and AI in marketing content creation will deliver better results. Chatbots are a great example of a knowledge base that offers answers to potential customers. The range of topics is diverse, from questions about your business strategy, goal, and the benefits you provide to product and service descriptions, prices, and special offers.

Some might think that KM may become a thing of the past due to technological development and the implementation of artificial intelligence and automation services. However, instead of substituting knowledge management, tech enhances it. This combination creates a whole new version of the practice.

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Using Design Thinking for Creating Scalable Knowledge Management Solutions

February 3, 2021

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Innovation is at the heart of any organization. All organizations strive towards:

  • creating products and services for improved customer experiences.
  • overcoming complex business problems using innovative processes and business models for increased impact and revenue.

In this era of digital disruptions and uncertainties, innovation is the key to create a competitive advantage and “design-thinking” is one of the most innovative tools to achieve Innovation and streamline organization knowledge.

So how does design thinking align with KM?

Knowledge Management helps organizations retain their experiences and knowledge to innovate, improve efficiency and productivity. However, many a times true KM transformation remains a struggle for many organizations when it is not seamlessly integrated with employees needs and challenges.  KM framework cannot be a success if it is too technology driven, people find it as an extra task, and they do not want to change especially when they do not see any direct benefit out of it.

Knowledge management should not be an abstract concept but should focus on solving concrete issues of employees by providing them seamless access to relevant information round the clock. Design thinking can be the key to meet employee needs and encourage the knowledge sharing culture.

Below are my thoughts on how design thinking can be a lifesaver and help organizations establish a successful knowledge management framework and enable it to thrive.

  • Design thinking inspires innovation by putting end-users at center of the real challenges to be solved.
  • Embracing collaboration by breaking silo culture and bring people together to come up with innovative ideas for increased business value and feedback for evolving KM framework.
  • Empowering the end-users by putting into perspective their needs and creating solutions centered around their problems.
  • Design thinking follows a progressive approach with room and tolerance for failure, making KM an iterative process for designing more appropriate solutions that are aligned to the needs of end-user.
  • Focus on solution: Design thinking is the way to ideate on a solution to address a problem. It is focused on solutions coming from end-users rather than problems. It makes the solutions directly relevant to end users ensuring its absorption and adaptability.  

Follows a bottom-up approach for problem solving factoring 360-degree input from stakeholders from management to the end-user employee.

By following a design thinking centered approach while tailoring KM solutions, organizations can foster innovation, and develop KM solutions that are end-user centric resulting in improved work-experiences and innovative empowerment for improved business results.

Stay tuned for my next article on step-by-step approach on incorporating design thinking in your KM framework.

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Folksonomy for Knowledge Management 2.0

January 20, 2021

One of the biggest challenges faced by most organizations is organizing, finding, and marking information in the knowledge repository in such a way that it is easily accessible as and when needed by the employees. The classical approach used widely is indexing documents to help users in deciding documents relevancy and retrieval. Classical methods comprise classification systems (taxonomies), thesaurus, and controlled keywords (nomenclatures) [Aitchison et al. 2004; Cleveland and Cleveland 2001; Lancaster 2003; Stock and Stock 2008].

Folksonomy is a most recent knowledge management (km) tool of web 2.0 for searching, accessing, and labelling information by the content creator and the user in a way that makes sense to them. Folksonomies include novel social dimensions of tagging [Mathes 2004; Smith 2004]. It is a new model for content indexing based on collaborative tagging with user generated keywords that broaden the spectrum of knowledge interpretation methods. Folksonomy is a valuable addition to the traditional KM methodologies since it facilitates tagging input from the end user, promote the use of active language, and most importantly allows community navigation of an organization’s knowledge base in new ways.

With the introduction of folksonomy end user is no more a passive user but an active contributor to the indexing and retrieval of content. These tags are written in common language rather than the pre-conceived formal list based on the user’s understanding of the content. The tags created by the end-users are searchable for everyone beside the interpreter-created controlled terms and the author-created text words and references (Stock, 2007). Keywords are no longer keywords now, but tags and the collection of tags used to classify content on any different platform forms a Folksonomy. This makes the content scalable and easy to find and use.

The purpose of knowledge management is to encourage collaboration for knowledge sharing and innovation by making internal knowledge available for one and all anytime and anywhere in a structured manner. There are definitely major issues in relying solely on folksonomy in the context of knowledge management. The lack of semantics connections, spelling variation, tags ambiguity, use of acronyms are some of the issues that create problems for documents only tagged with folksonomy. Using parallel indexing strategy on the other hand can create more confusion.

The key is to integrating folksonomy with traditional tagging methodology like taxonomy to knowledge discovery and sharing efficient and easier. It is the only way forward for KM 2.0 to be sustainable and successful in organization wide setting.

Coming up in next article difference between taxonomy and folksonomy... Stay tuned!

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Putting Knowledge at the Heart of our Development Strategy

January 19, 2021

It is heartening to note that discussion is taking place after the release of the 4th edition of the Global Knowledge Index (GKI), jointly produced by the UNDP and Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. Bangladesh ranked low in GKI among 138 countries. Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the ICCCAD at IUB, in an op-ed in The Daily Star on December 30 rightly stressed the need for a "national consensus" to make the necessary paradigm shift to transform Bangladesh into a knowledge economy over the next decade.

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The Role of Community Champions in Fostering a Successful Community of Practice

January 17, 2021
Guest Blogger Ekta Sachania

Communities of Practice are collaborative networks (can be both formal or informal) depending on to foster sharing of ideas and knowledge outside the structured learning environment.

Communities are always developed around a certain skill, profession or learning purpose. In fact, a shared identity is the glue that binds the members of a Community together (Wenger, 1998).

Community champions play a key role in fostering successful communities. Champions are recruited from the practice, so they are deeply aligned to the purpose of the specific community and are best positioned to connect members and the business to better serve their clients. They work as the bridge between the business and the KM practice.  Champions are instrumental in ensuring that the business goals and the associated knowledge programs of the community are well-defined and met.

Listed below are the ground level responsibilities of a smart community champion:

  • Follow the community and relevant hashtags to surface the community activity to the intended audience.
  • Regularly seeds and monitor the discussions on community feed.
  • Initiates, support roll-out and facilitates community activities aligned to the business goal.
  • Monitor and provide input to ensure community content relevancy.
  • Promote community activity, campaigns, and resources across their personal network for better visibility.

Monitor content metrics to determine community health and suggest appropriate actions to update, retire or refresh the community.

The list above is not exhaustive and varies with the changing business priorities. However, they define the basic guidelines for any champion role to moderate an impactful and successful community.

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