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(Intermediate to Optimized) Tagging Content for Use Throughout an Entire Company

Now that you have a solid content tagging strategy mapped out for your marketing team, it’s time to start thinking bigger. Ensuring your tagging structure is set correctly for your department is great, but since when is content only used within marketing? 

Content should be a tool used by every department within your organization. Sales uses it to move their accounts through the funnel. Success uses it to educate current clients and drive expansion. Your HR or culture team uses it spread awareness of who your company is and what your brand stands for. 

With the myriad of use cases for your content, it only makes sense that you organize and tag it appropriately for them all. On top of that, with so many people or teams potentially touching your content, consider setting an appropriate tagging process as well. 

Creating an Organization-Wide Content Structure

If you’ve made it this far, we’ll assume you already have a great content tagging structure built out (if not, head back to this post for tips on how to create one). Your existing structure should look something like this one—tags that take content, audience, and use case into consideration:

Hub Tagging Structure

Now you’re ready to build it out even further to accommodate different teams and their use cases. To make sure content is discoverable by different departments, tag by team:

  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Client Success
  • Professional Services
  • Product
  • Culture

Sometimes simply tagging by department won’t cut it. Different teams engage customers within different stages of the customer journey—and that’s not always in a completely linear fashion. Sales obviously works with them throughout the sales cycle, but do they also pop back into that journey for an upsell or expansion? 

Consider tagging content by stage in the customer journey:

  • Engagement
  • Education
  • Research
  • Evaluation
  • Justification
  • Purchase
  • Adoption
  • Retention
  • Expansion
  • Advocate

Creating a company-wide tagging strategy is only the first part of ensuring that your entire organization is set up for success with content. With so many people creating, searching for, and using content, having a documented process for how and why content is tagged is imperative. 

Creating a Company-Wide Content Tagging Process

The most important rule for any content tagging strategy is consistency. If your tagging efforts are not consistent, the data associated with any reports based off of those tags won’t be accurate. 

Consistency isn’t difficult if you’re a one-man show, but if there are multiple people and multiple teams creating, handling, and tagging content, things can get messy very quickly. The easiest way to combat this problem is to create a tagging process, document it, and then enforce it. 

Create Your Content Tagging Process

Have the stakeholders involved in content creation across the organization come together and agree on the cadence for content creation, tagging, and publication. Outline who is responsible for what and how everyone will communicate that their part of the process has been completed, and create guidelines on when tags will be used and for what purpose.

Document Your Content Tagging Process

This should go without saying, but make sure that the agreed-upon process is documented and accessible to everyone within your organization. This way, anyone can refer back to what the tagging process is—which helps to keep everyone on the same page.

Enforce Your Content Tagging Process

Regardless of how many people within the organization work with content, there should be one person who takes on the responsibility of ensuring that the content tagging process is executed correctly. Set a weekly reminder to go through new content and ensure that tags are used consistently and properly based on the model you created. 

Now that you’ve successfully created and implemented a company-wide content tagging process, remember to be flexible. As your organization or marketing strategy evolves, your tagging structure should grow with it. 

As you use your tags to find, organize, and report on content initiatives, always think about how you could learn more from how your content is being used. As you continue to ask yourself these probing questions, you might find that you need another layer of content tags to help answer them. 

Don’t be afraid to mix things up and try a new content tagging strategy to help you become a more strategic content marketer!

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