The inability to find content impacts customer experience, sales efficiency, and marketing return on investment. The problem increases exponentially with growth. A root cause is the practice of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) tagging their content with metadata such as product name and market segment. However, effective tagging requires a system-wide perspective, which is found wanting among SMEs and individual authors. So, how to make content tagging effective?
Making subject matter experts (SMEs) responsible for tagging their content with metadata is shortsighted because their focus is usually domain-specific rather than system-wide. Hence, best-in-class organizations pair SMEs with content operations to optimize all aspects of content performance at scale. Nevertheless, why are the SMEs paired with the content operations team?
In Business-to-business (B2B) organizations, members of the content operations team are from digital, sales enablement, or marketing. Hence, they understand how to manage content across multiple business systems — web, sales content solutions, and internal file shares— containing overlapping inventories of hundreds or thousands of files. The content operations team also understands taxonomy and knows that findability is not the only goal for tagging content. Furthermore, the content operations team deploys content tools to employ a taxonomy strategy that balances the three A’s- access, automation, and analytics- to derive the taxonomy’s business value.
For instance, the content operations team selects appropriate tags for each audience, thereby enabling audiences to access content through filters, keywords, menus, folders, etc. Content operations teams use tagging to deliver personalization at scale and reduce management overhead by auto-generating personalized content, interactions, and pages on the web, sales-content solution, and partner portal from tagged data or files in a back-end repository. Analytics enable the content operations teams to measure audience satisfaction with content, content contribution to business results, and content health metrics like version control. This requires aligning tags for a product, market segment, and customer type across content and business systems and designing systems to deliver timely, meaningful insights.
Developing, deploying, and optimizing taxonomy strategy and content tagging across business systems requires specific, in-depth knowledge and skills in content operations. SME's understanding of the topic, audience, and market is essential to good tagging. The same can be said about the system-wide view possessed by the content operations team. Therefore, ideally, SMEs should suggest appropriate tags, which the content operation team could validate against the entire content corpus and apply the right combination of tags to optimize the three A's.
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