The Role of a Knowledge Base for Your Marketing Strategy

Managing and updating your marketing strategy is a challenge (46% of brands can’t say they have a defined marketing strategy), even if you have a lot of experience helming high profile campaigns.

Thankfully, with the aid of a knowledge base, you can achieve a lot more when stratifying and augmenting your marketing efforts. But what roles does a knowledge base play in this context and are there any other benefits to consider which might further sway your decision to adopt one?

Supporting Customers

There are lots of knowledge base examples which provide you with a foundation for understanding the broad spectrum of benefits that such a system can provide. However, when it comes to marketing strategy, supporting customers effectively is perhaps the most important purpose of a knowledge base. The reason is simple - if your customers need help, they are more likely to start with your knowledge base first. And you don’t want to spoil their experience. See some examples of really nice knowledge base examples here to see what it means to feel satisfaction from just visiting the page.

By maintaining customer satisfaction and streamlining support, you can expect to boost retention rates and bolster the reputation of your business as a result. This means you can focus your efforts on winning over new customers, safe in the knowledge that your current crop will not become disgruntled. When paired with efforts to drive down cart abandonment and improve conversions, your provision of exceptional post-sales support will stand you in good stead.

If you are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of a knowledge base, at this point you may be wondering how such a system can live up to the apparent promises laid out so far. This comes down to two key things; internal training and customer-facing information.

With a high quality knowledge base at your disposal, support agents will be able to swiftly access the relevant details to help customers tackle a specific problem they have encountered with a product or service on the fly. This reduces the amount of esoteric information that agents are expected to acquire in training and retain afterwards, allowing them to be put into action faster and subsequently perform more effectively.

Likewise if you offer customers the opportunity to access relevant knowledge in a digital format, they will be able to ask questions and get sensible answers far more comprehensively. A knowledge base can act as a round-the-clock support solution that is not beholden to office hours or agent availability. This in turn leads to almost endless scalability, letting you grow your user base and accommodate larger numbers of customers without becoming overburdened.

As a marketing strategy, the long term benefits of a knowledge base should be obvious in this context. Compelling, high quality customer support is not a technique that delivers immediate, tangible results, but over time will help you build a much stronger business and make a success of your start-up. It is also cheaper to make sure that current customers stick around, with inadequate support the biggest reason for dissatisfaction.

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Making Data-Driven Decisions

Like any digital system, a knowledge base is not just a passive vault of information, but a solution that can actively monitor how it is used and deliver actionable information through integrated analytics.

To put this another way, if you know how customers are using your knowledge base, you can use this info to shape your marketing strategies and ideally increase sales.

Identifying a trend in searches for content covering a particular feature, or focusing on a specific problem with a product or service, will let you respond appropriately and establish how to best serve the needs of your customers with any future updates, successors or new innovations.

Likewise, if you find that people are trying to look for knowledge that does not currently exist in the database, this is a major signal that you need to adapt and add it. Search terms which currently deliver no results, or link to articles that are not very relevant to the question being asked, should be addressed sooner rather than later.

Ultimately if you operate a well maintained, regularly expanded knowledge base that both internal and external users can access, your marketing decisions need not be fuelled by guesswork or expensive independent research. Instead such a system will naturally spill forth valuable facts about habits and desires; you simply need to be proactive and use this information to your advantage.

Generating Momentum Through Content

The web is awash with sites scrabbling for attention and the main obstacle to gaining traction is that of optimising for search engine visibility. Adding high quality content to your site is always sensible in this respect, ensuring that it meets the high standards set by the search algorithms themselves. However, the problem with this is that the information you are providing might end up becoming slightly fragmented. Visitors to your site are less likely to stick around if they get what they need from an article if it is isolated and not seemingly connected to any other element of the site.

A knowledge base not only overcomes the issue of what to do with the content that you create to market your organisation online; it also provides a cohesive platform to host said content in a way that makes it searchable and closely integrated with a world of other important information that should be relevant to prospective customers and clients.

Embracing a knowledge base will allow you to kill two birds with one stone, appeasing the automated rankings applied by search engines while also giving visitors a reason to remain engaged beyond their first click.

The question of how to create high quality content that will be seen and shared in the first place is also worth considering. Whether you generate it internally or outsource it to third party writers, there are lots of options available today. You could even allow customers to make their own contributions, which can result in much larger volumes of content being added than would otherwise be feasible. This will require significant moderation, but the payoff could make this worthwhile.

Giving You Something To Share

In the era of ubiquitous social media use, it is impossible for any business to ignore the need to occupy a multitude of popular platforms. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and any number of other industry-specific services require a lot of time and effort to manage effectively. This is compounded further by the need to say something interesting and most important share content that is targeted at your audience of followers.

A knowledge base can be the catch all solution to your social media marketing strategy issues, since you can distribute the latest additions and provide access to long standing elements of this system as necessary. News feeds can flash by in a blur so to stay relevant you need to ensure that your presence is felt with regular posts.

Most of all, this gives you an excellent excuse to actively promote the content that you have added to your knowledge base. If you are proud of your work, it is worthwhile to demonstrate this and also raise awareness of the knowledge base at the same time.

As well as sharing content to your own social accounts, it is possible to call upon the assistance of an influencer in your field to spread the word even further and drive sales forwards. All of this and much more is possible if you adopt a knowledge base and combine it with your marketing strategy today.

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