Being a marketer is no easy task, and it carries a massive responsibility with huge goals & responsibilities. To make profitable business decisions, marketers must have years of company knowledge at their fingertips. However, not all knowledge is particularly useful when it comes to creating a marketing strategy. It is where institutional knowledge comes into the limelight to provide marketers with the right marketing strategy. 

Institutional knowledge plays an essential role as it is the combined sum of all the knowledge within an organization. With the experiences, values, processes, data, and expertise, the information is possessed and preserved by an organization’s members. Knowledge management is excellent in terms of efficient handling, storage, and revision of the knowledge. 

Institutional knowledge is typically managed within a centralized database, called a corporate wiki, and is regularly expanded and edited by related team members. When learning is managed well, it improves the marketing strategy by taking it to the next level and boosting marketers’ efficiency, confidence, and collaboration.

Crucial Institutional Knowledge That Marketers Need

The Institutional knowledge that marketers need to know will undoubtedly help them improve their marketing strategy and campaigns. Once you are ready to develop a knowledge base, you have to decide the most critical institutional knowledge that you need to include. 

Prioritization is incredibly essential for marketers as you only have a limited number of hours in a day to focus on learning new things. Since there is much information that you need to know, you need to focus and work as a team to ensure that every person in your marketing department’s voice is heard. Here are the seven different institutional knowledge types that deserve a better place in your company’s wiki.

Workflow knowledge is essential as it forms the foundation for a marketer’s overall efficiency and consistency. Workflow is a sequence of tasks that are performed for each particular business activity. By merely providing a high-level overview of how the marketing team gets its work done, you can utilize workflows to help new hires become more productive members.

1. Policy Knowledge

Policies are an essential type of institutional knowledge that deserves a much earlier spot in your company’s wiki. Marketers need to be aware of not just HR policies, but also guidelines around customer service and communication. It is mainly because of key policy documents such as the code of conduct, brand style guides, company values, ethics, employee rights, responsibilities, complaints, and appeals.

2. Job Descriptions and Hierarchies

Every time your marketing team hires someone new in their group, they will spend many hours getting on track with the other team members. It is no wonder the turnover costs are at an estimated one-third of the employees’ annual salary. 

Much work goes into understanding the hierarchy and job descriptions, and if it remains unclear, that means that they have made a mistake. It is essential always to unite and work together as a team as marketers need clarity that job descriptions and hierarchy charts provide to create the best marketing strategy.

3. Process Knowledge

The process of knowledge is a little different than workflows. Still, it is equally essential as workflows describe big-picture activities such as campaign development. In contrast, process documents give granular and step-by-step instructions on carrying out specific tasks. 

4. Template and script knowledge

Templates and scripts help marketers perform better and do their job more efficiently as marketing teams need templates that are important for creative professionals. It might also seem that the creative would want their work to be unbounded as boundaries are critical for creativity, without needing to create e-newsletters, as it can be a core part of your marketing strategy.

5. Sales Material knowledge 

Sales material knowledge is highly essential, as the customer’s expectations can be misaligned. Thus you need to think broadly in terms of your sales material, as sales team and marketing people need to be at the same pace to form a perfect marketing strategy and minimize leakages in the pipeline, thus leading to create a practical set up to reap team success. 

Final Thoughts

Marketers need to immensely understand the importance of institutional knowledge while forming their marketing strategy. You must have more in-depth knowledge and marketing experience to empower the overall marketing strategy to take to the next level.