Insight

To prove your value to the business you are going to have to align yourselves with marketing and become more accountable. But don’t feel threatened, says Mark Power CEO of Concep, the rewards could be huge.

The greatest asset your company has is its expertise. It is that expertise that pulses through every piece of ‘knowledge’ the business owns and it is that expertise that marks your organisation out from the competition.

The cliché ‘knowledge is power’ will be repeated throughout this book, but overexposure doesn’t diminish truth. Knowledge Managers need to realise the power they hold within the business.

In an age where every part of an organisation has to become accountable and demonstrate its return on investment, Knowledge Managers have the opportunity to prove they are invaluable.

The only way to do this is to work much more closely with marketing and business development.

I think that statement might shock some of you. Most Knowledge Managers I’ve met don’t see themselves existing within the sphere of marketing. I’m here to tell you that’s nonsense. Marketing is precisely where you need to be.

Content revolution
Historically, knowledge management was about building repositories and determining how these could be indexed, how users could mine for information. The primary focus was the internal audience.

The landscape has changed. As with most things, the Internet has altered everything. Not only has it affected the manner in which people access information, it has blasted traditional expectations of content out of the water. People demand the right content is delivered to them how they want it, in a format they want, at a time that suits them. They want their trusted brands and partners to instinctively know their interests and to tailor content accordingly.

The old knowledge banks are woefully out of date; clunking around like Penny Farthings in a velodrome.

Knowledge management is colliding with marketing at a rapid rate. This is not just conjecture. The companies we work with - global leaders in professional services - no longer view knowledge from the perspective of an internal audience. They see its true potential as allowing them to differentiate from competitors. For these leading companies, it is all about investing so that key proprietary information is available to an external audience, helping them develop high-value, long-term relationships with clients.

People want to do business with companies that are seen as experts. The challenge this poses is how to extract knowledge from internal resources and turn it into marketing collateral, and how to ensure you distribute the right information to the right people at the right time.

Evolution of the extranet
Technically, the tools are already here. Extranets are old news, but – thanks to today’s technology - their true potential is starting to shine through. Advancements enable users to extract information relevant to their specific needs. This is the Nirvana of marketing: highly targeted, highly relevant, information that creates true one-to-one relationships.

The trick is in getting your clients to come to the extranet in the first place. You have to tease them with titbits of content, entice them into this repository of rich resources.

All of this drags the client closer to you, which enables you to track their behaviour, learn from what they are accessing and how they are accessing it, and begin to build a detailed picture to help you hone your communications and ensure you are hitting the right people with the right messages.

Knowledge Managers are only just grappling with this concept. They may be getting to grips with email and the web, but are they integrating across all channels? Are they working with the marketing and digital teams to ensure key content – which has so much latent power – is integrated to the overall marketing strategy?

There is an awesome opportunity here. At a time when every part of the business has to demonstrate its value, knowledge managers should step up to the plate. The idea of opening yourselves up to scrutiny shouldn’t worry you. Far from it; knowledge is arguably the business’s most valuable asset, any opportunity to prove this should be grabbed with both hands.

Push to pull
To maximise the potential of all the information you’re sitting on, you need to change the emphasis from push to pull.

It’s not enough to simply distribute content, to email a newsletter to your database of contacts, and hope the phone will ring.

Everything needs to be set up to enable your clients to determine what they want to access, when they want to access it, in a format that suits them best, rather than in a way that’s easiest for your organisation.

Simply slapping out existing content with no regard to audience or channel is lazy and will put people off. Material needs to be repurposed. Email will display differently to a Blackberry, which again will differ to a printed bulletin. Equally, the language and tone used to address colleagues will differ from that adopted to engage clients.

So much time and money goes into producing content that it is a huge wasted investment if the right people aren’t seeing it, if it isn’t being used for the right purposes. It’s time to get serious and prove this knowledge is actually demonstrating a return.

Those businesses that act now stand to gain a lot, which is precisely why the global leaders are working hard to stay ahead of the field.

The next generation of tools will mean that the power won’t just reside with marketing team and knowledge managers. Developments will enable the fee-earners, those figureheads who have an industry profile and a recognised expertise, to quickly and easily get information to key clients.

At the same time, those heads of business will be able – through the utilisation of digital channels’ ability to track and measure – to access reports about what clients are doing with the information they receive.

With access to this valuable data, golden opportunities for business growth will appear. Suddenly, thanks to an integrated approach and some joined-up thinking, you’ve turned a dusty knowledge bank into a fully accountable profit centre, and your role is now integral to the future of your business.

By Mark Power,
CEO, Concep