For as long as businesses have sold products, they’ve needed to share knowledge to differentiate their offerings and help customers make sense of them. Take John Deere’s customer magazine, The Furrow, launched in 1895, or the Michelin Guide, created in 1900 to promote tire sales. Both are still around today.

Businesses selling complex products need to explain how they work. Businesses in competitive markets must differentiate themselves through expertise and service. And businesses in emerging markets often need to educate customers about pain points they haven’t yet identified.

The challenge of customer knowledge sharing is not new. However, the fragmentation of knowledge many B2B businesses struggle with today has been building for the past 25 years.

Going digital

In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, pushing return on investment to the forefront of every B2B purchase. The early 2000s saw the rise of marketing automation and CRM tools as more consumers migrated online. With that came an obsession with outbound sales and ads, everywhere. Whiplash from these tactics led to a rise in a pull over push approach known as inbound or content marketing. Although designed to cut through the noise, much of this content has just added to it. 

The goal of every B2B business is to build human relationships at scale. B2B businesses is still a people to people process. Over the years B2B brands have continually adapted how they create and share knowledge to engage potential and existing customers. But to find a better way forward, we need to understand how the status quo was formed.

Blogs to resources

Originally known as a “weblog” in the late 90s’, the word "blog" became Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2004. Initially, blogs were a novel way for businesses to share a journal of news and insights online. But as SEO strategies prioritized quantity over quality, the value of expert knowledge diminished. Search engines have since updated their algorithms to favor genuinely helpful content over “keyword-stuffing”.

Businesses responded by focusing more on creating "resources" — evergreen documents like white papers, e-books, and case studies designed to provide in-depth, long-term value. As brands have experimented with more content formats, the line between blogs and resources has become blurred. Without effective segmentation and personalization, website visitors often struggle to navigate to the information they really need.

Today, generative AI is also reshaping how content is discovered and consumed. Moving forward, the brands that share expert insights, trustworthy statistics, and unique data will maintain visibility.

In-person events to webinars to online learning

In-person events have long connected businesses with their customers. From medieval guild feasts to MacWorld expos, these gatherings offer opportunities to share knowledge, gather feedback, and build relationships.

While impactful, in-person events are often costly and limited in reach. Webinars emerged in the mid-90s as a low-cost alternative, allowing businesses to connect with global audiences. Many years later, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual events, but as "Zoom fatigue" set in, many customers shifted their preference to consuming content on their own time.

As technology continues to evolve along with consumer preferences, more businesses are reorganizing their existing knowledge into step by step learning journeys. Today, many businesses are creating academies or universities around their products and expertise. 

The key is finding the right blend of in-person, virtual, and asynchronous experiences to engage your customer community. In offering a broad range of experiences to suit different customer preferences, many businesses risk a return on their investments by creating a fragmented customer experience.

Forums to social media to online communities

Online forums have facilitated knowledge sharing since the 1970s. Tech giants like Dell, Rackspace, and Apple quickly saw the value in leveraging customer participation to scale support.

In the early 2000s, the rise of social networks transformed how brands interacted with customers. Initially, brands used these platforms to offer additional support and quickly address complaints. But through a transition from social networks to social media, platforms became saturated with ads. As it's become harder and more expensive to share knowledge with customers via social media, businesses sought more authentic ways to engage customers.

Companies like HubSpot, Notion, and Figma have scaled by galvanizing their communities to help fill knowledge gaps. This community-led growth approach — scaling through customer participation and advocacy — has become increasingly popular. Today’s technologies allow businesses to create branded community platforms that blend the focused knowledge exchange of early forums with the interactivity of modern social media.

Customer knowledge sharing today

Customers increasingly demand access to instant, personalized, interactive, and trusted knowledge. AI will continually reshape customer expectations. The challenge businesses face now is streamlining multiple approaches to customer knowledge sharing into an experience that's tailored to each customer. The SaaS explosion of the 2010s has left many companies with multiple teams creating, sharing, and managing knowledge across a patchwork of tools. Without the right customer feedback and insights, producing impactful knowledge has become guesswork.

Fragmented knowledge makes it harder to deliver the right experience to the right customer at the right time. This doesn’t just frustrate customers — it also costs businesses real money.

Streamlining how you share and co-create knowledge with your customers can be more manageable than you might expect. Zapnito makes it possible to consolidate resources, community, and learning experiences in a single personalized knowledge hub. With our expert support, migrating your current knowledge sharing initiatives is a smooth process.

To see Zapnito in action, you can watch our platform walkthrough or schedule a personalized demo with our experts.