Martha Bush
The next time your marketing team builds a predictive model or your research team presents new insights from their research, don’t let your corporate assets be shoved on a shelf with the last PowerPoint presentation. Too many companies treat each analytical exercise as an ad hoc response to a transitory business problem — without thinking about building a long-term plan for the development, documentation, application and maintenance of Knowledge Assets – just like any other corporate asset.
Businessdictionary.com describes “Knowledge Assets” as “an intellectual capital asset such as a copyright or patent that does, or can, generate income.” Marketers today seem to spend a lot more energy thinking about Creative Assets than Knowledge Assets. What are we really talking about? A Knowledge Asset is the output of some kind of marketing analytics exercise. Some of these assets could include:
- Segment Definitions: The names of your key customer segments, with the algorithms or definitions you use to create them are assets that need to be maintained, documented and clearly communicated to marketing teams.
- Model scores from individual campaigns that might be used for future campaigns or to help define new segments.
- Messaging business rules such as when renewal letters should start or how lead nurturing campaigns will progress, or which segments receive which offer.
- “Golden Questions” or the key survey questions that can be used to define a particular group.
- Trigger Rules: Combinations of customer characteristics that can identify when messages should be sent based on the best results of past tests and programs.
- Transformed variables or metrics that have a significant impact on your business – these may be roll-ups or ratios or new scores that you compute from other information, which you want to save for future marketing use.
Like any other assets, knowledge assets need a home – hopefully in your database. They need an advocate who will protect them and advocate for their proper use over time. Finally, they need to be recognized as the critical corporate revenue generators that they are!
About the Author:
Martha Bush is SVP of Strategy & Solutions at SIGMA Marketing Group. Follow Martha on or connect with her on .
