(Basic to Intermediate) Creating a Tagging Structure for Your Marketing Content

Now that you’ve gotten started with tagging your content, building out a full-fledged content tagging structure should be your next step. 

The internet is full of tagging structures that are easily adoptable by most marketing teams and brands. However, before you begin tagging every piece of content you’ve created based on someone else’s model, ask yourself this: 

“What do I want to learn from my content?”

Your tagging structure shouldn’t be created for the sake of having one, but as a tool to help you answer questions about your content and the strategy behind it. It should also do more than simply organize your content. 

Think about the pieces of information you would need to know in order to be a better content marketer. Now, what questions do you need to ask in order to obtain that information?

For example, maybe your question is: “Which content format performs better for us on social media?” In that case, you might consider tagging all of your content by content format and campaign type.

Or, maybe you have a burning desire to know: “Is in-house created content or third-party authored content performing better, and if so, during what times of the year?” In which case, you would want to tag content by author and publish date (year, month, and/or quarter). 

Basically, start with the question(s) you want answered, and work backward from there. Tagging in this way will allow you to easily aggregate those pieces of content that your question pertains to, and then analyze the consumption data to answer those burning questions.

Once you have the beginnings of a great structure based on your initial questions, you might want to consider the following content tagging scenarios as well:

Tagging Content for Discoverability

Tagging content makes it easier to search for—on both the back-end as well as for consumers on your site. Think about the ways your prospects and customers might search for content, as well as how your sales or success team might look for it. 

For discoverability, you might tag your content by topic, vertical/industry, persona, and product.

External vs. Internal Content Tags

There are some tagging systems that will be used for external or public-facing content organization (such as content topic or format), and some that will be for internal organization or reporting only (such as campaign or buyer stage). Make sure that you’re taking both into consideration when you begin to work on your tagging structure! 

Great examples of internal tags would be stage of funnel, author, campaign, and account.

Automated Tagging Rules

Uberflip’s platform will allow you to set up smart filter rules that will segment content to different areas based on the tags associated with it. This feature makes it a breeze to distribute content appropriately to multiple places once published. These rules are dependant on your tags, so be sure to take this automation process into consideration when building your tagging structure out to help you save time!

As an example, here is the tagging structure we use here at Uberflip:

Remember, your tagging structure should help make your life as a content marketer easier, not harder. Put a good structure in place for your team’s use and start reaping the benefits of having an easy way to report on your content’s performance. Then, check out this next article about how to expand this strategy out to account for your entire brand or organization. 

If you have a cool examples to share, or questions, please comment below and let us know!