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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In the last two decades, the creation and enablement of knowledge as a source for an organization’s competitive advantage has been highly emphasized.  There has been a paradigm shift in how an organization's knowledge is now viewed and nurtured.

Knowledge Management is all about knowledge creation and the activities that support the creation and dissemination at various organizational levels. It starts from instilling a knowledge vision, building a collaborative culture, facilitating conversations, globalizing local knowledge, and encouraging creativity and innovation. The integration of the above processes leading to the generation of new sources of knowledge is the key to the success of any organization.

Knowledge can be both explicit and tacit. The knowledge that can be quantified and documented is explicit knowledge. It is tangible and can be conveyed through processes, documentation, books, videos, etc. However, this just forms only a fraction of any organization’s knowledge while the rest of the knowledge bound to peoples’ experiences, intuition, insights, expertise, and personal conclusions is the tacit knowledge. Recognizing the importance of this tacit knowledge and capturing it in a methodical way to make it explicit is a challenge for most organizations. The tacit knowledge may seem too fluid and inconsistent, but its fluidity is what makes it a powerful innovation tool. The conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge known as externalization is critical for an organization’s long-term success.

So how can organizations capture it?

Instilling a collaborative culture to encourage discussions and socialization among employees to get people talking about their experiences and observations, is how tacit knowledge can be assessed and used for the creation of new concepts and products.

How to do it:

Instill a knowledge-sharing culture – As the saying goes, lead by example. If leaders inculcate the culture of sharing their learning and experiences via forums like CoPs, stream, blogs, etc., people are sure to follow.

Create Best Practices directory – Encouraging a culture where people share best practices, not only enables collaboration but also saves the organization both time and money.

Nurture Community of Practices (CoPs) – The foundation of the CoPs is to connect people by encouraging conversation to build and share knowledge. The moderators should periodically reach out to its members to harvest and tag knowledge leading to its dissemination across borders and different organization levels.

Set up a Post-Mortem process – Put in place a process to document analysis and learnings from all team members at the end of each project. This will enable externalization and improvement in processes.

Set up exhaustive exit interview - These are no longer the times when an employee used to join an organization straight out of college and work till retirement. When a company loses its employee, it also loses the accompanying knowledge and experience. The need is to have an exhaustive exit strategy in place where outgoing people capture their experiences, feedback, contacts, insights, and a directory of work that can be passed onto the replacing employee to get a head start.

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Organizations irrespective of whether they have a formal KM function or not, will have to manage knowledge for the four following reasons:

1. Safeguarding & institutionalizing knowledge: Knowledge that an organization has at its disposal decides its competitiveness. The ability to safeguard this critical knowledge and ensure it is institutionalized determines both long term survival and competitiveness of organizations.

2. Addressing information and knowledge deficiency: Employees typically spend around 33% of their time looking for information and knowledge. Finding the right information and knowledge easily has a direct impact on their productivity.

3. Bring down variation in performing key tasks: The way tasks are performed within an organization may vary if best practices are not shared across. Without sharing, we will have silos of highly efficient teams followed with many inefficient teams.

4. Acquiring and creating knowledge to stay with industry: Industry keeps growing by creating new knowledge to improve efficiency & effectiveness. Organizations need to keep track of the developments & inculcate those new learning.

Check if you are doing all this?

COVID-19 has transformed the global workforce. Many organizations, including DAI, have transitioned to almost wholly remote working. And while collaborating across locations has always been necessary at DAI—we work in more than 100 countries—the scale of remote collaboration, with so many staff working from home, has never been this great.

98 percent of staff self-report that they can effectively perform their work from home.

Is remote work working? Our internal surveys suggest that it is. Asked about their experience since the lockdown started in March, 98 percent of staff self-report that they can effectively perform their work from home, and just more than half believe they’re actually more productive in their new remote working arrangement, for reasons we’ll get into later. One of the reasons we’ve been successful in the Nigeria office in particular is a commitment to knowledge management (KM).

KM is a discipline that improves the productivity of organisations by leveraging technology, processes, and organizational culture to better share, apply, create, capture, and store knowledge. Poor KM practices duplicate efforts, compromise quality by following less-than-best practices, waste time searching for existing resources, and jeopardize business opportunities when personnel fail to share knowledge. Good KM improves the generation and flow of useful information for decision making, builds smart organizations by making learning routine, and encourages a culture of trust that fosters innovation and productivity.

In DAI’s Nigeria office, we have focused on deploying approaches, activities, and technology crucial to the delivery of results for clients, meeting the development needs of beneficiaries, and being a successful business. Here’s what we’ve learned over the past four months supporting DAI’s remote work and delivery efforts.

Four KM Lessons Learned

Knowledge Sharing Enables Collaboration and Project Delivery:

Knowledge sharing is always critical to organizational success but even more so when teams are apart. To share knowledge effectively during the pandemic, we have had to tap a deep reservoir of trust, commit to virtual engagement, and energize our communications.

COVID-19 has confirmed that our culture of trust, corporate kindness, collaboration, and collegial care is strong.

Building Trust: Knowledge sharing is helped or harmed by the underlying organizational culture, and that in turn is shaped by senior management and the behaviors and incentives it intentionally or inadvertently encourages over time. DAI’s team in Nigeria was established in 2018 with the acquisition of former partner GRID Consulting and now consists of 40 employees in Lagos and Abuja. From the outset, the management team took steps to foster a shared identity and “One DAI” culture, including group strategic planning and team-building workshops. COVID-19 has confirmed that our culture of trust, corporate kindness, collaboration, and collegial care is strong.

Engaging Virtually: Meetings are the bane and bedrock of corporate workdays. While they may take up productive time, when done properly they are valuable vehicles for the creation, recognition, use, and exchange of both tacit and explicit knowledge. Since the lockdown, the Nigeria office has used the video conferencing platform Microsoft Teams to host new, inclusive organizational get-togethers such as our COVID-19 Crisis Response Team and weekly all-staff meetings. Prior to the crisis, the Nigeria office held weekly meetings in the two separate office locations, Abuja and Lagos. The shift to remote work has actually brought the two offices closer together in that respect, helping us to maintain accountability, boost morale, and reinforce connections.

Strengthening Communications: The double whammy of responding to the health crisis and managing a remote workforce has underscored the need to communicate even more frequently, and with more stakeholders. In a weekly internal and monthly external newsletter, for example, we create knowledge flows for project staff, partners, consultants, clients, and beneficiaries. Internally, new WhatsApp Messenger Group chatrooms allow us to sustain immediate, professional, courteous, productive, and supportive conversations among the team. Increasingly, employees and project staff are using the platform to circulate new government directives, announce new wins, share documents, seek collaborators, and check in on colleagues and their wellbeing.

Knowledge Storing Supports Staff Autonomy

Remote work makes it impossible to drop by an associate’s desk to be reminded of a process or shown where a document is. Employees need to act more independently, which entails useful resources being available, personnel knowing how to find them, and systems helping them find resources they may not even be looking for.

Good KM enables “findability” and “discoverability” by leveraging technology such as resource repositories and developing good taxonomies. Our Nigeria KM unit has collated, archived, and shared links to templates, tools, guidelines, proposals, reports, case studies, and image libraries in increasingly rich repositories, and is working to aggregate resources from DAI projects previously stored on disparate websites.

Remote Knowledge Creation Requires a Willingness to Experiment

Much of the work we do developing proposals, conceptualizing technical delivery, and managing projects requires group brainstorming, deliberation, and problem-solving, often in face-to-face incubators and co-creation settings. Remote ideation is a challenge, but we have found that active facilitation by our trained KM unit has yielded productive brainstorming, work planning workshops, after-action reviews, and informal coaching sessions. Over the past 17 weeks, we have leveraged online collaborative platforms to jointly deliver business proposals, technical reports, and even a documentary film.

Effective remote collaboration requires that staff enter the process with the right mindset—primed for openness, innovation, and experimentation—which in turn presupposes a degree of trust in the facilitator and the other participants.

Invest in Digital Technology and Digital Know-How

Needless to say, effective remote working requires the right technology, from Webex and Microsoft Teams to Google Hangouts and Mural. But it also requires familiarity with the technology, and a distinct set of people skills to facilitate online rather than in-person interactions. As we adapt to the landscape of remote delivery, DAI is fortunate that its in-house Center for Digital Acceleration (CDA) and Office of Information Management Technology (OIMT) provide business units and project teams not only with state-of-the-art tech, but with world-class training, support, and experience in the soft skills—the how-to of online training, webinars, and interactive workshops—that make those platforms perform. To take just one example: cybersecurity has emerged as an everyday, every-employee concern as work shifts to the home. DAI’s IT team shares tips and useful reports every week on how to keep systems and client interactions safe from online harms.

Is Remote Work Working?

Can wholly remote teams be as productive as co-located teams? Four months into the experiment, the jury is still out—perhaps the optimal set-up is some kind of hybrid. But it is clear that over the remote-work period, DAI’s Nigeria office has been able to help individual employees work better, help clients respond to the pandemic, and find digital ways to deliver our projects, all while contributing to better public health by curbing coronavirus spread.

Remote work enables increased flexibility and autonomy and frees employees from a rigid, one-size-fits-all work window, meaning that staff are able to work in a more personalized environment.

An anonymous staff survey and anecdotal evidence suggests that the average employee delivers more outputs and is more productive while working from home than onsite. Just over half of all staff reported that working from home has enhanced productivity, partly as a result of having work hours available previously lost to commuting. Colleagues in Lagos have gained up to an astounding four extra hours daily and employees with more flexible schedules are generally working more hours.

In terms of quality, remote work enables increased flexibility and autonomy and frees employees from a rigid, one-size-fits-all work window, meaning that staff are able to work in a more personalized environment: complete solitude for the loners, background music for those who prefer it; working late into the night for our night owls, or the opposite for our early birds. The flexibility to work in optimal conditions—and perhaps an increased sense of personal ownership that comes with working alone—has reduced the need for rework, we find, and led employees to be more accountable.

Ultimately, the measure of remote work will be our success in delivering development results. In the period we have worked remotely, the Nigeria office has successfully started up two new programmes: the European Union-funded Technical Assistance to Strengthen Public Financial Management, Statistics, Monitoring, and Evaluation Systems in Yobe State; and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Youth-Powered Ecosystem to Advance Urban Adolescent Health and Well-Being. We have completed delivery of and closed out two projects, and the office has continued to deliver results on 10 more.

The key point is that remote work does not just happen by default. It requires sustained investments in a high-trust organizational culture, guided by a clear strategy and deliberate execution. Establishing a sound KM culture has been an integral part of that strategy, and thoughtfully creating, capturing, sharing, and storing knowledge has stood DAI in Nigeria in good stead for the stress test of COVID-19.

Check out the full video and more at our KM Showcase 2020 Recap Page...

(https://www.kminstitute.org/content/km-showcase-2020-recap)