What Your Marketing Consultant Needs to Know About Taxonomy

How Can Your Business Start to Use Taxonomy?

You can organize data and content using a few different methods depending on the amount of material you have; how specific you want to be; and what the content is.

Content-type: You can organize your material according to what type of content it is.

You can classify them as blog posts, case studies, infographics, and photographs. Of course, this is quite broad and if there is a lot of material to class, then this may not be the best method of taxonomy for sufficient categorization. 

Content title: You could tag content according to their title. For instance, this individual’s blog’s title is “What your marketing consultant needs to know about taxonomy”. While quite long and very specific, it would lead to highly accurate content find-ability. Though, extra caution should be exerted to ensure no misspelling of tags since due to its highly specific nature, it would simply never be found. 

Content description: Not all media types have a title, i.e., a photograph or an animation. For this type of content, it would be useful to tag them with a description of what’s depicted in the picture or what’s happening in the animation. For these descriptions, it would be best to keep descriptions relatively broad to ensure most users are still able to find the content with their interpretations of it. For instance, if there’s a picture of a woman smiling, it would be rational to search up “woman smiling” and not assume why she’s smiling. For instance, “woman smiling because she got promoted”, may not lead to the correct content if it’s not depicted. Of course, if the woman is holding a work contract or is visibly in a meeting discussing her salary, that tag may be reasonable but otherwise remain exercise rationality.

Objectives: A more targeted approach to taxonomy that may take a bit more effort but would likely be more beneficial and rewarding in the long run would be classifying the data and content according to their respective objectives. This can entail grouping different data and imagery to the individual marketing campaigns they were created for; this will then allow someone to easily locate all the media related to a specific campaign if needed in the future. Another method following a similar principle would be to class content and data according to their target persona. Assuming that a business is following a marketing strategy that targets multiple customer personas through personalized advertisements and content - different tags could be created to represent each customer persona (i.e., Bill/Chloe). By compilating persona content, you can compare between personas with ease to check for missing gaps in content creation. 

The Importance of Taxonomy in the Digital Space

Taxonomy is the backbone of content find-ability and content re-use but it’s also valuable for website coding and searching. By having a strong and successful taxonomy system, businesses can design and redesign their websites with ease. There’s no need to hand-code each piece of content to each link since taxonomy can dynamically display content on every page for you. It’s also a bonus that applying tags to the metadata will also help your website with its SEO.

Taxonomy also lends a large helping hand to successful website searches since keywords and phrases are linked to their relevant content. Internal searches become more efficient when search logs and parameters are drawn upon to modify and improve the taxonomy search fields.

Steps From Here

Taxonomy is a valuable instruction manual for the tools and processes used to successfully navigate and distribute content online to boost your content marketing efforts. If you’re still unsure of how your business can implement taxonomy and what it can do for you, don’t hesitate to click here to contact one of our experienced marketing consultants.

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