The Metrics That Marketers Need from Knowledge Management Strategies

The implementation of knowledge management in organizations is usually measured on one very succinct metric: return on investment.  Of course, the definition of ROI is  dependent on the overall goals of your company, but the best way to determine value is to first ensure your strategy is giving your team members what they need to be successful.

In this blog post, we’re looking at the metrics marketers rely on in order to be successful, grow their knowledge, and what they need to provide to the rest of company, especially to sales teams.

Why Marketing Metrics Matter

No matter the department or organization, metrics are used to drive constant improvements to strategies. Overall, these metrics should reflect the priorities of your team, with a clear picture of performance, engagement, and ambition, and a focus on:

• Where your organization has been
• Where your organization is going
• What is going wrong
• What is going right

When applied to a marketing department, metrics surrounding spend, revenue, and close rates matter, but there is more to it than that. It is your marketing team’s job to create high-quality content and strategies that align with your sales team, and without a knowledge management system that integrates with your CRM in place, collecting the metrics for success poses a set of challenges.

Are Marketing Materials Being Used?

Your marketing team is committed to creating materials that the rest of your team can use to close deals. Ultimately, the goal is to acquire leads for your sales team to follow up with. Reps are either asking the marketing team or creating content themselves to help engage potential customers and encourage conversation, but whether they are using that content is always a topic of debate. There is nothing worse than when marketing realizes how much time they spent and wasted on material that is sitting unread, untouched, and unclicked.

The implementation of knowledge management in organizations means marketing teams can monitor which pieces of content are being used by other departments most often. Seeing the types of content sales teams prefer to use in their efforts allows marketing to more quickly align their strategies to meet the needs of their colleagues in sales.

What Is Closing Customers?

Seeing what the sales team is using is great, but what’s better is knowing which marketing pieces are contributing the most to closing deals. So, while your marketing team will benefit from seeing which documents are being used the most, as described above, being able to get real-time feedback via reports that tie content to deal progression in your CRM is even better.

Traditionally, the implementation of knowledge management in organizations ends with the sharing of documents and data. Collaboration and knowledge sharing strategies open the door to communication around that information. If a sales rep is closing deals after providing a particular customer case study, marketing can measure it, then create more similar content, and even develop play books of best practices based on successes

If reps see the same questions after a lead consumes marketing content, they need to pass that information along.  When these conversations are housed in your knowledge management system, they becomes part of the public record. The result is the creation of a shared knowledge base of information that everyone can access and contribute. All of this can be achieved with the right collaboration software and integrations in place. Communication doesn’t have to be cumbersome — some can even be automated — and with the right tools in place, the alignment of your sales and marketing teams makes closing faster and easier.