Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you. Your manager has asked your team to clean up your marketing content library. And, of course, part of this includes defining or streamlining your content tags—those little keyword meta tags that relate one asset with other assets.

You book 30 minutes with the team thinking that this will be a quick sync to nail down these tag lists. Two hours later, you’re discussing where you should order lunch from, and debating in your head if you should have brought a change of clothes since apparently you live in that room now.

Sound familiar? It sure does to me. When I used to work in content marketing, I always found content tagging to be a tricky thing. It’s a balancing act between defining standard taxonomies to keep things organized internally, while providing enough keyword granularity so your audience can get at what they are interested in.

Now, as a Client Success Manager at PathFactory, I’ve spent many hours refining content tags with my clients to get to that sweet spot. But content tagging isn’t just about making your content easy for your team and customers to find.  The other huge benefit to a well-executed content tagging system is the valuable insights it allows you to collect.

In this blog, I’ll share 2 major benefits you’ll get from properly tagging your content.

1. Avoid duplication in your content categories

A strong content tagging system usually includes multiple attributes, such as topics, asset types, funnel stages, and business units. This approach allows teams in different regions, product/solution lines, or areas of marketing to understand what’s already been produced when looking at their content repository. Without this clear communication and visibility, content is often duplicated—plus, valuable resources, time and money are wasted.

Another great benefit of effective content tagging is the holistic view you can get of your content mix. By analyzing the rolled-up totals of these different tags, you can answer questions like:

What content types do we tend to produce the most of?

Which content topics need more volume of content dedicated to them?

2. Understand your content performance on a variety of levels

Providing visibility into and creating balance in your content mix is important, but the next level of content optimization is layering engagement data against your content tags. This critical data set—content consumption data—is what generates real insight into content performance. By doing this, you can answer questions such as:

At what point in the funnel do visitors’ view times start to drop off?

What content topics are driving the highest engagement times vs. volume of visitors?

Which Business Unit is producing highly engaging content that could be utilized across other departments, regions, or business lines?

These types of insight are what should drive your content strategy moving forward. They provide direction on where to dig deeper to find those “magic assets” (as my co-worker Alex calls them) that are really hitting the mark with your audience and you should produce more of. It also shows you what content isn’t working that should be switched out of your existing campaigns.

Key takeaways when choosing a content tag

With all of this in mind, the next time you sit down to build or refresh your content categorization, remember to incorporate multiple attributes that:

1. Give clear visibility both internally and externally to your content mix.

2. Allow you to derive real insights when assessing your performance data against these tags.

As Marketing Beyonce always says, “If you like it then you shoulda put a tag on it.” Happy tagging!

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