How to Increase and Improve Content in Your Knowledge Management Platform

A knowledge management platform is only as valuable as the content inside it. When contributions slow, institutional knowledge goes undocumented. Teams duplicate effort, customer-facing employees lose the context they need, and the broader digital transformation customer experience suffers.

Fortunately, declining engagement is diagnosable and reversible. Below are seven strategies to reignite content creation, establish governance, and ensure your knowledge management platform delivers lasting value.

1. Define a Content Strategy for the KM Platform

A content strategy for your KM platform is a clear, intentional plan for what knowledge you capture, who owns and maintains it, and how that knowledge will drive specific business results. It should answer three foundational questions:

• What types of knowledge does the organization need to capture?
• Who is responsible for creating and maintaining each type? 
• How does this content connect to measurable business outcomes? 

Without these answers, contributors are left guessing what to share, and the platform fills with inconsistent, low-value content that erodes user trust. Understanding why knowledge management initiatives fail often begins with recognizing this foundational gap.

Your content strategy should also define the audiences for your knowledge base. Internal teams, customer-facing employees, and leadership all have different knowledge needs. Mapping content types to these audiences ensures that contributors understand the purpose behind every article, video, or document they create.

Many organizations launch a knowledge management system with enthusiasm but without a clear content strategy, and that gap is where momentum dies. A platform without direction becomes a repository of scattered contributions rather than a purposeful knowledge ecosystem. Understanding why knowledge management initiatives fail often begins with recognizing this foundational gap.

2. Build a Structured Content Model

A structured content model gives contributors a clear framework for what to create and how to organize it, replacing guesswork with repeatable patterns that keep the knowledge base consistent and navigable. Without a content model, every contributor invents their own format, as some write long-form guides, others paste raw notes, and the knowledge base becomes difficult to search and harder to trust. 

To build a structured content model, start by defining 4–6 standard content types your organization uses (such as how-to guides, FAQs, process documents, and troubleshooting articles), then establish the metadata fields, tagging conventions, and categorization rules that make each piece findable. A well-defined codification strategy is the backbone of this effort.

When contributors have templates and clear structural expectations, the barrier to creating content drops significantly. They spend less time deciding how to format a piece and more time capturing the knowledge itself. This consistency also benefits users, who learn to recognize content patterns and can scan articles faster.

3. Establish Quality Standards and Governance

Quality standards and content governance turn a knowledge base from a dumping ground into a trusted resource. When content is reviewed, maintained, and retired on a schedule, users develop confidence that what they find is accurate and current.

Content quality erodes trust faster than content absence. An internal knowledge base with outdated procedures, conflicting answers, or unmaintained articles trains users to stop looking there — and once that habit forms, it is difficult to reverse. Four ways to help content governance of quality standards of your knowledge base include:

• Assigning content owners: Every article or knowledge asset should have a named owner responsible for accuracy and timeliness. Ownership should be tied to roles, not individuals, so accountability survives turnover.
• Setting review cycles: Establish review frequencies based on content volatility.  Review quarterly for fast-changing topics (product updates, pricing), and annually for stable processes (HR policies, compliance guidelines).
• Defining retirement criteria: Content that is no longer accurate, relevant, or accessed should be archived or removed. Stale content is worse than no content because users may act on incorrect information.
• Tracking governance metrics: Monitor content age, review compliance rates, and the percentage of articles with assigned owners to measure governance health over time.

Organizations that skip governance often end up addressing common knowledge management challenges reactively, cleaning up after trust has already eroded. Building governance into the platform from the start is far more efficient than retrofitting it later. As generative AI increasingly draws from internal knowledge bases, governed content also ensures that AI-powered tools surface accurate, reliable answers rather than outdated information.

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4. Create Repeatable Content Workflows

Repeatable workflows remove friction from the content creation process and ensure that knowledge moves from someone’s head to the platform consistently, without requiring heroic individual effort.

Most knowledge management content never gets created because documenting and publishing feel burdensome. Repeatable workflows solve this by defining the steps from idea to published article so contributors can follow a predictable path. 

A typical workflow might include: identifying a knowledge gap, drafting content using a standard template, routing the draft to a reviewer or subject matter expert (SME) for accuracy, and publishing with the correct tags and metadata. When this process is documented and supported by the platform, contributors spend less time figuring out logistics and more time sharing what they know.

5. Increase Contributions from Subject Matter Experts

Subject matter experts hold the most valuable knowledge in any organization, but they are also the busiest people. Increasing their contributions requires enforcing efficiency rather than adding to their workload.

The biggest barrier to SME contributions is rarely a lack of willingness; it is time. Most subject matter experts are embedded in operational work, and writing a formal article feels like an additional burden on top of their core responsibilities. 

The solution is not to demand more from SMEs, but to make sharing knowledge as effortless as possible. Organizations focused on obtaining high-impact content from subject-matter experts find that removing structural barriers yields more content than any incentive program alone. Here are a few simple ways to make it easier for subject matter experts to contribute knowledge.

• Let them record, not write. Allow SMEs to record short videos or audio explanations that a content coordinator can transcribe, edit, and publish. Many platforms, including Bloomfire, auto-generate searchable transcripts from video uploads.
• Send drafts for review, not blank pages. Instead of asking SMEs to create content from scratch, write a first draft based on existing materials and ask them to review and correct it.
• Embed contribution into existing meetings. Dedicate the last 10 minutes of team meetings to capturing one piece of reusable knowledge content. Structured knowledge sharing sessions formalize this practice and generate content consistently. 
• Recognize contributions publicly. According to a 2023 study, knowledge sharing enablers, including recognition and organizational support, significantly influence employee performance and willingness to contribute.

This is where digital transformation customer experience connects directly to internal culture: every undocumented process, every unrecorded workaround, and every insight that stays locked in one person’s head is a gap your customers will eventually feel. When SMEs contribute freely, knowledge compounds — resolution times shrink, onboarding accelerates, and service quality becomes consistent rather than dependent on who happens to be available. The organizations that make sharing effortless are the ones whose customers never notice a knowledge gap at all.

6. Prioritize High‑Impact, High‑Demand Topics

Not all content carries equal weight. Prioritizing high-impact, high-demand topics ensures that limited contributor time produces the greatest return for both internal teams and customer-facing operations. 

For example, a mid-size SaaS company might discover through search analytics that “how to migrate data from a legacy system” is searched 200 times per month with zero results. That single gap means hundreds of employees or customers are hitting a dead end, and likely opening support tickets or pinging colleagues instead.

Platform analytics are one of the most underused tools in knowledge management. Search logs, zero-result queries, and content engagement metrics tell you exactly what users need and where the knowledge base falls short. Instead of asking contributors to create content based on intuition, use data to direct their efforts toward the topics that will have the most immediate impact.

Below are some signals, what they mean, and how your company can move forward to ensure high-impact and demand content is consistently published and shared.

Organizations that treat their knowledge base as a product by measuring usage, iterating on content, and retiring what no longer serves users, ultimately build platforms that improve over time. The companies that consistently outperform on knowledge management are the ones that let user behavior, not assumptions, drive what gets created next. 

7. Engage Users and Close the Feedback Loop

A knowledge base that does not evolve in response to user feedback becomes stale. Closing the feedback loop where users flag gaps, rate content, and suggest improvements, turns passive consumers into active contributors.

The best KM platforms are the ones where users feel ownership, not just access. When employees can rate articles, leave comments, flag outdated information, and suggest new topics, they become participants in the knowledge ecosystem rather than passive consumers. Here are some ways to engage users and close feedback loops in your organization: 

• Enable ratings and comments on every article. Simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down or star ratings give content owners a fast signal on what is working. Comments allow users to flag specific inaccuracies or suggest additions without editing the content themselves.
• Route feedback to content owners automatically. When a user flags an article as outdated or unhelpful, the platform should notify the content owner directly. This closes the loop between the person who identified the problem and the person who can fix it. When customer service leaders who drive digital transformation implement this kind of feedback routing, resolution speed improves significantly.
• Publish a most requested list. Share a visible list of the most-requested or most-searched topics that lack content. This signals to potential contributors exactly where their expertise is needed and reduces the guesswork that often prevents people from sharing. Breaking down knowledge silos starts with making knowledge gaps visible to the people who can fill them.

Feedback loops provide governance data by revealing low-rated or frequently flagged content that needs improvement or retirement. This continuous refinement builds a self-correcting knowledge base and strengthens the digital transformation customer experience through faster, more accurate service.

Example of an Implementation Roadmap to Improve Content

Improving knowledge management content is a phased effort, not an overnight project. This roadmap provides a practical sequence for implementing the strategies above over a 90-day period.

Adjust timelines based on your organization’s size and platform maturity. The key is to sequence the work so that foundational elements (strategy, structure, and governance) are in place before scaling contributions and feedback loops.

Implementing a Sustainable Content Strategy in Your KM Platform

New initiatives and platforms naturally lose momentum if left unmanaged. Organizations that invest in structured governance, SME-driven content programs, repeatable workflows, and visible leadership engagement build knowledge ecosystems that compound in value over time.

Your knowledge management platform is more than a repository—it is the foundation for Enterprise Intelligence, enabling faster decisions, better customer outcomes, and a workforce that operates from a shared understanding of what works. Plan your strategy from this guide, measure the results, and scale from there.

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Note: This blog was published in February 2021 and was most recently updated and expanded in March 2026.

About the Author

Emma Galdo

Emma Galdo is a customer success leader with deep expertise across the full knowledge management lifecycle—from implementation to long-term value realization. Throughout her tenure at Bloomfire, she’s held leadership roles across customer success, product operations, and marketing—giving her a 360° view of what it takes to build knowledge programs that scale.