The Future of Content Marketing for Professional Service Firms
Professional Services firms have spent the past 20 years learning to differentiate and drive growth through digital content marketing. As a leader in such a firm, you’ve likely invested heavily in crafting blogs, white papers, and social media strategies. However, with the advent of Gen-AI, the era of “content as king” is coming to a close. It is time to turn our focus to a more powerful and enduring asset: knowledge. It’s not that content isn’t important, in fact it remains essential. But,
" In the Gen-AI era, where content is practically free to create, the value lies more in the insight and knowledge that informs it. "
The transition from content creation to knowledge management is not just strategic; it is a matter of survival. To succeed in this new era, professional services firm must leverage three kinds of Knowledge:
- Public Knowledge (Internet): Accessible to everyone, harnessing this knowledge is critical but it's not a sufficient competitive advantage
- Private Data: Software code and formal databases make up a significant part of the core IP of many firms.
- Private Unstructured Knowledge: Encompasses all of the wisdom buried in your internal communications, wiki resources, marketing content, project and product experiences and documentation, client interactions, and even in people’s heads. It's the wisdom that naturally and organically accumulates within your firm
In the Gen AI era, all of these knowledge sources can be tapped for new experiences and content generation. However, we have found that there is a fourth kind of knowledge that we think will emerge as crucial for professional services firms in the Gen-AI era:
- Private Curated Knowledge: This is a carefully maintained and constantly updated knowledge repository. It includes what we’re calling Known Good Answers (KGAs) – verified, reliable Q&A that represents your firm's best thinking right now that really sets you apart.
Your private knowledge, whether unstructured or curated, is the core of your Intellectual Property (IP). It is what makes your firm unique and valuable. The beautiful part is that there is now a reward for getting your arms around your knowledge: great and practically free content and new, powerful interactive experiences. And, as it turns out, Gen-AI can help make knowledge management easy. Gen-AI without Knowledge is of limited value, and Knowledge management without Gen-AI is a dead-end, but together they are extremely potent.
A Case Study for a Financial Services Firm
As a great example of what it means to shift from content focus to knowledge focus, we were approached by a financial services firm who wanted to create an AI-based Sales Development Rep (Gen-AI based chat) to qualify inbound prospects. They named the project “Max”. The idea was for Max to be able to do three things at once: gather information needed to qualify or disqualify a prospect, answer their questions about the firm and about small business taxes and accounting, and trigger appropriate follow-up actions. The original idea was to use existing content (unstructured knowledge) as sources for question answering. However, we quickly learned that a blog post from, say, 2021 with out-of-date information, though harmless to a reader who can easily see that it is a few years old, is dangerous when used to generate fresh answers to live questions. Something had to change.
To power Max we used Gen-AI to extract a collection of questions and answers as the starting point for a new kind of knowledge base. Then, we provided powerful AI-based tools to help the firm’s experts curate their knowledge going forward. They now have a set of over 500 Known Good Answers (KGAs) that are easy to manage and use to drive all manner of content creation. This company is making the shift from content to knowledge and they are winning. They are investing in new skills with new tools (building and managing a semi-structured proprietary knowledge base), that makes their content and experience driven sales pipeline far more efficient.
The Big Picture:
Gen-AI is not just a faster way to do the same old thing. For professional service firms who have invested in a content driven client journey, from marketing to prospect qualification, and onboarding to service and support, Gen-AI makes it easy and fast to create all of that content, but based on what? The answer, and the big idea, is Knowledge.
We are helping firms like yours move from a content-centric mindset to a knowledge-centric one, replacing investments in single-purpose content with high value multi-purpose curated knowledge, which, in turn, drives dynamic content generation and direct client experience. Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about how you can win the Gen-AI era.
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About Larry Arnstein
Larry brings broad technical and business experience to Simply Augmented. Larry joined the Simply Augmented team after a long entrepreneurial career that included helping lead Impinj to IPO in 2016 as a member of the executive leadership team, followed by the acquisition of Xnor.ai by Apple in 2019 where he was head of market and product strategy. Larry then left Apple to become the CTO and co-founder of AirTerra, a retail supply chain solution provider that was acquired by American Eagle Outfitters in 2021.
About Simply Augmented
Simply Augmented is a leading provider of AI-driven workflow solutions aimed at enabling businesses to optimize the key operational aspects that bring value to their clients. With Simply Augmented, you get more than just an AI service provider; you get a partner committed to your business’s success. We strive to make AI accessible, understandable, and beneficial for all businesses, regardless of size or industry.
Our AI development team is ready to help your business at every step. We’ll guide you from planning to launch, and from training to support. Whether it’s integrating process automation or conversational AI, you can think of us as a dedicated AI partner.
