In an increasingly overwhelming content universe, structure is everything. Organizations with geographically dispersed teams, diverse channels and international marketplaces must have universal taxonomies and metadata requirements to foster understanding, consistency and discoverability. When this is absent, content becomes chaotic, unorganized and scaling becomes nearly impossible. When teams have access to cross-enterprise classification systems and metadata obligation standards, they can more easily collaborate in the now, support personalization and ultimately set themselves up for success down the road for any enterprise requirement search, AI, multichannel.
The Definition of Taxonomies and Metadata Relative to Content Strategy
Taxonomies and metadata are the foundations of content. A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification of content by offering topic, type, audience, and other logical collections, while metadata is descriptive attributes that exist as per content author name, language, region, status, tags, etc. Thus, taxonomy and metadata create context, organization, and intelligent retrieval initiatives. For larger teams, it’s how an editorial department in one country understands what legal means by a category in another; all utilize the same taxonomy and metadata fields to their benefit for uniform definition and labeling initiatives across teams/regions. The Storyblok CMS supports this structure with flexible content modeling, allowing organizations to define and apply consistent taxonomies and metadata fields at scale across global teams.
Unless All Teams Have a Unified Goal/Language, Don’t Create Taxonomies or Fields
Establishing a taxonomy/metadata fields is only good if the authors of it understand the purpose to establish these content categorizations/declarations across the board. However, teams must also understand the benefits of using them, share a goal for using them and share language. Editorial/legal/product/marketing/regional teams may have different perceptions of what specific content categories might mean. Workshops, audits and stakeholder interviews can showcase current gaps/inconsistencies/challenges so that what’s created is optimal from the start to minimize overlap and redundancies. Thus, everyone has agreed upon expectations and transparency as to why a consistent and well-developed taxonomy/metadata system is necessary.
Taxonomies Should Allow for Growth Based on Established Content/Fields
The best type of taxonomy is one that allows for growth relative to current holdings. For larger teams this means that sometimes categories should be less granular than expected because if taxonomies are too specific it can box people in. Much like libraries avoid having too granular sections for fear of overwhelming readers, a larger team needs to create top level categories that make sense for strategic/business goals while allowing nested subcategories to maximize potential for future growth. In addition, taxonomies should allow for cross-team/brand/region consistency so they’re not always needing to be changed.
Purposeful, Defined Metadata Fields
Metadata fields should be purposeful and defined. Every question should be answered: what do you want to track? Why does it matter? How will this be used? Creating fields that just add superfluous information adds confusion and complicates the content lifecycle instead of easy usability. For example, instead of a general “Tag” field, create a “Topic” field, “Audience” field, “Campaign” field. In addition, make sure to add instructions on the fields, acceptable entries, and required input styles. The difference between an open-ended field or a predetermined or multichoice option comes down to use and editorial needs.
Governance Structures Keep Standards Intact
Shared taxonomies and metadata fields must be governed. The largest shortcoming within many organizations that implement taxonomies and standardized metadata is the inability to maintain such structures over time. Once established, new users, new teams, new tools come on board without oversight and standards are forgotten. A governance model must include who can create/edit taxonomy terms, who governs metadata schema and how changes are approved. A content operations team, a taxonomy committee, a person in control within the CMS are all great examples of ownership, responsibility and accountability measures. Governance also includes training, documentation and onboarding efforts so standards aren’t just known but enforceable as well.
Taxonomies Should Be Second Nature in Daily Workflows
To ensure compliance and consistent use, all taxonomies created for the brand must be part of daily content creation efforts. This means adjustments and configurations made in the headless CMS or authoring environment so that taxonomic selections are surfaced at appropriate times in the editorial process. Content editors should be prompted to choose or apply relevant categories tags it’s not an afterthought, it should be part of the foundational workflow. Autocomplete fields, predetermined value lists, and inline validation make sense to ensure accuracy and opportunity. When choosing a taxonomy or applying a value becomes second nature in the content creation process, integrity is stronger and reuse capabilities are enhanced down the line.
Supporting Personalization, Search and Multichannel Delivery
Taxonomies and metadata help ensure your content maximizes every opportunity from within a channel and across channels. For personalization of experience, metadata allows systems to provide readers content they need based on past engagement, behavior and current selection (e.g. location, demographic selections) as well as collections or ratings. At the same time, search standards rely on metadata to appropriately index and sort by relevance higher placement in the ranks of exceptional responses amid a sea of information. Finally, multichannel delivery (i.e. web, mobile, email, voice) relies on metadata to parse and serve appropriate content in the right form within each new environment. This flexible ability is only possible with consistent classifications and rich descriptions which only the largest enterprise organizations can provide.
Championing Change through Analytics Over Time
Taxonomies and metadata support change over time. By reviewing relevant usage data, you can see which tags are applied most frequently, which filtering is done for search or navigation and which CC types see the highest engagement. Therefore, over time, you may decide that certain terms no longer apply, other elements become redundant or successful CCs require additional fields. Access to such data allows you to undertake incremental changes that keep your standards comprehensive. Analytics allow you to enjoy a never-ending process of improvements.
Documenting and Distributing Your Standards Enterprise-Wide
With larger teams (or even remote teams), documentation is essential. Your enterprise-wide taxonomies and standards for metadata must be documented and distributed so all contributors have access to how they should be treating classifications. This means field requirements, definitions, rules for combining terms, hierarchies or governance should be easy to find. An internal metadata wiki or knowledge base compiles information so new team members can onboard quicker and editors and developers have a trusted reference to get specifics. Documentation eliminates confusion but fosters an attitude of responsibility and accountability for the project.
Facilitating Inter-Department Collaboration with Common Language
When working with large teams across multiple departments writers, editors, designers, developers, product managers, marketers having a common language facilitates collaboration even if the ultimate goals differ per department. Taxonomies and metadata become that common language where everyone is communicating with the same categories, tags and attributes to avoid inter-department miscommunication. Thus, efficiency improves when logistics can more easily be implemented with like-referencing standards as guidelines. The more alignment exists, the easier execution is for goals that involve content from multiple disciplines.
Metadata as a Quality of Worklife Enhancer for Intelligent Workflows
In addition to helping find and categorize content, metadata is a quality of worklife enhancer for intelligent automation. For example, when metadata is in place, it can trigger workflows, assist in content servicing and create dynamic experiences. Metadata tags can allocate where content goes (i.e., channel assignations), when content gets embargoed or when and where content will appear on a website. With many stakeholders across many markets processing large volumes of content, educated guessing or manual recommendations may not always align with expectations and risks can be detrimental. Automation not only fosters consistency, but takes away the manual effort so teams can focus on strategy, creativity, brand opportunities instead of redundantly processed work.
Compliance Requirements Are Often Mandatory and Supported by Metadata
There are many emerging legal and compliance requirements surrounding publishable content. Metadata can help support compliance requirements as it notes what’s published vs processed, rights managed vs owned canon, who owns the content and compliance elements like alt text or ARIA roles. By adding compliance fields to content models, large teams can avoid oversight of compliance considerations which not only reduces legal exposure but ensures that published content meets industry and brand standards thereafter.
Taxonomy Structures Can Change As the Business Changes
As businesses grow and change, so do new product offerings, new markets, new clients and target audiences or campaigns meaning over time, existing taxonomies will need to be adjusted or new metadata fields created. Therefore, assess your taxonomy structure for extensibility and ensure it has the adaptability to change without disrupting current efforts in place. Thinking of evolution now opens metadata as a competitive advantage going forward with less impact on efforts already established. Keep in mind: what happened before matters and metadata can provide a saving grace for maintained integrity even when systems change.
Conclusion: Creating a Foundation for Sustainable Content Management
Taxonomies and metadata standards are essential for a viable content strategy regarding consistency, discoverability, and collaboration. Taxonomies and metadata are the essential building blocks for successful content operations. They determine success or failure. As content ecosystems grow, they become more complicated. The difference between a content operation that scales effectively and one that spirals unmanageably out of control is the use of taxonomies and metadata as foundational structures.
Without these foundational structures, articles and experiences become fragmented assets buried within the vast digital universe. With these structures, these articles and experiences become meaningful extensions of a larger organization’s message. Large teams exist across departments, across town and time zones. An organized system of classification ensures that content is created in a way understood across various job roles. Content writers understand what to tag for what they create, developers know how to develop what they must, and strategists can talk about performance due to effective reporting because links allow for easy transitions between jobs.
Therefore, metadata standards support all in marketing, product, legal, and design in understanding how to tag what is already being customized so it can be properly surfaced in websites, mobile applications, email marketing, and branded digital endeavors.
Additionally, when these criteria are set at the content model level, opportunities for automation, personalized experiences, and syndication to the right audience at the right time emerge. Strong taxonomies assist in compliance, accessibility, and regionalization all related to help support the ability to scale through effective efforts executed throughout the globe for multi-touch digital distribution.
When stakeholders are on the same page from day one and mandate a flexible but controlled system that naturally integrates governance into daily habits relative to digital publishing, an organization will always keep its content organized and increasingly more strategically valuable. Such valuable adds up to better personalization, high reuse of digital assets, improved analytics, and faster time to market for anything involving content.
In a world driven by digital and content where everything from user experience to operational integrations relies upon an organization cannot live without a scalable taxonomy that defines everything, for without it, it becomes unsustainable. Instead, it empowers content to be more than just a vast digital asset library but instead, a smart, evolving resource that can always be developed as necessary over time. Therefore, assessing the need for taxonomies ensures that even the greatest content strategy can live sustainably.
