Let’s face it: with all the content being produced these days, tagging is rapidly becoming an integral part of the best content strategies. Not only does it provide structure to your content, but it also helps with organizing and reporting on your entire content library. At Uberflip, we have over 9,000 assets that are currently live; without a proper tagging strategy, our library would become pretty unwieldy pretty quickly.

Ideally, implementing a sound tagging strategy should happen as you begin your content creation process. However, if you’ve found that your team has gone a bit rogue with tags (which is super easy to do), rest assured: a tag audit and revamp can happen at any time. This article will highlight why it’s important to rethink your tagging strategy, and how to do it in the most effective way possible.

Why tag?

Strategically tagging assets is important for searchability, automating processes, and content reporting.

Searchability: Tags ensure that visitors on the front end and users on the back end of Uberflip find the most relevant content, quickly and easily.

Automation: Tags support the Smart Filter feature within the back end of Uberflip and will help with the distribution of content and the automation of content organization.

Reporting: By tagging your content, answering questions about your content performance within Uberflip Analytics.becomes much more granular and detailed.
 

How to tag effectively: Four key methods

There are some tags that are pretty stock in the content world: publish date, asset type, language. But to get true benefits from your tags, it’s important to think about your audience, and the different segmentation buckets they fall into. Do you segment your audience by industry? By use case? By pain point? Whatever it might be, think about how your internal team will search for content, whether or not you have the content to fill those buckets yet. The buckets you’re a bit light on can help guide your content creation strategy into future quarters.

Here’s a list of the most commonly used tag segments we’ve come across. But keep in mind that the possibilities are endless when it comes to available tags.:

• Industry
• Pain point
• Topic
• Use case
• Stage of funnel
• Persona
• Asset type
• Region
• Product
• Language
• Date published

Once you’ve decided what those ideal tag segments should be, the next step is to think through the available subcategories within each segment. These will ultimately be your tags. Be thoughtful as you work through each subcategory so as to not get overwhelmed with the amount of options.

We recommend setting your tagging infrastructure in a spreadsheet following the syntax ‘Category: Subcategory’. For example, if you have Industry as one of your tag segments, your list may look like this:

• Industry: Software
• Industry: Manufacturing
• Industry: Healthcare
• Industry: Financial Services
• Industry: Telecommunications

You might be wondering, why add the category ahead of the subcategories? Both the act of adding tags and searching for tags becomes much easier when you can start typing the category (in this case Industry) and have all the subcategories auto populate as options to select. It also helps on the reporting as it allows for you to filter analytics by category, not just subcategory.

Before jumping in and tagging each item, it’s important to set some boundaries. Establish a set of rules that dictates:

1. How many tags of each category an item can have, and
2. Which tags are mandatory and which are optional

You’ve retroactively gone through and tagged all your assets in your new tagging infrastructure—phew! Congratulations, that deserves a hi-five. But the tagging process doesn’t end there. Make sure everyone on the team who manages content is intimately familiar with the tagging infrastructure so each time a new piece gets added itt gets tagged accordingly.

We recommend setting up a shared spreadsheet that will help the whole team align and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

Public vs. Private Content: Consider adding a “Shared” tag, with Private and Public as the available options. This could help your internal teams determine what can and cannot be shared in the wild.

Author Tags: Adding an author tag to your content can help report on the efficacy of certain writers.

Publish Date Tag: We find that the best use of the publish date tag is using the syntax QUARTER-YEAR. Q3-2021, for example, could be a great tag for you to sort content by!

Conclusion

We know what you’re probably thinking: This is a monumental task! You’re not wrong, but the benefits of going through the process of setting up a tagging infrastructure and following it far outweigh the costs. Set some time aside and chip away at it bit by bit. We recommend starting with your top 100 best-performing items and working through your list from there.

If you have questions on how to go about setting up your tagging or if you want to talk through what this can look like for your organization, reach out to your CSM or connect with the Expert Services team—we’re always happy to help :)