As a marketer, I understand how today’s marketing campaigns face fierce competition. With so much content and ads competing for eyeballs, creating campaigns that stand out is no easy task. 

That’s where strategies like tagging come in. 

It helps you categorize and optimize your marketing efforts. It also helps your campaigns cut through the noise and reach the right audience.

To help you out, I’ve compiled nine ways brands use a tagging strategy to create an impactful marketing campaign. 

Let’s get to it. 

How Brands Use a Tagging Strategy

Tagging involves using keywords or labels to categorize and organize content, products, or customer data. You attach tags to specific items or information to make searching, sorting, and analyzing data easier. 

There are various types of tags, including meta tags, analytics tags, image tags, hashtags, blog tags, and more. 

So, how do brands use a tagging strategy to make their marketing campaigns stand out?

Improve Social Media Engagement

With over 5 billion users, social media provides an easy way to connect with your audience, build relationships, and promote your offerings.

Use a tagging strategy to boost social media interactions. Consistently use hashtags that align with current trends and topics. This encourages people to interact with your content and boosts content visibility.

You can also use tags to monitor brand mentions of your products or your industry. This allows you to engage with your audience promptly.

Consider virtual social media assistants to streamline your tagging strategy. These AI-driven tools can suggest relevant hashtags, track mentions, and automate responses. Implementing them can save time and resources while ensuring consistent engagement across your socials.

Build a Personal Brand on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform, with over 1 billion members across 200 nations. It offers excellent opportunities for individuals and businesses to build and nurture their brands.

However, simply creating a professional profile isn’t enough to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. 

Use various tags to increase your visibility, establish thought leadership, showcase expertise, and attract the right connections. For instance, use skill tags to showcase your expertise and industry tags to attract connections and opportunities within your industry. Use certification tags to help showcase your expertise and credibility to potential employers or clients. 

Facilitate Customer Segmentation and Personalization

Personalization matters—more so in today’s data-driven world. In fact, 65% of consumers expect your brand to adapt to their changing preferences and needs.

To meet this expectation, consider using a tagging strategy.

Segment your customers based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, interests, purchase history, cart abandonment, and behavior.

Here’s a summary of the steps to customer segmentation.

With your customer segments ready, use tags to tailor your marketing messages and offerings to specific segments. Imagine sending targeted email campaigns based on what your customers need. That’s the power of segmentation and tagging in action!

Enhance SEO and Content Discoverability

Tagging content can have a profound impact on search engine optimization (SEO) and content discoverability. When users search for specific topics or products, well-tagged content is more likely to appear in search results, driving organic traffic to your website. 

Additionally, tags can help you analyze the most popular topics with your readers. Then, the results of this analysis can help you adjust your content strategies accordingly.

And get this— certain AI tools can help analyze your content and suggest relevant tags and keywords. Using these tools in addition to a tagging strategy can help optimize your SEO strategies and boost content discoverability.

Partner with the Right Influencers

Influencer marketing has become a go-to marketing approach for modern brands. Recent stats show that 85% of marketers and business owners believe influencer marketing is an effective marketing strategy. 

But how do you find the perfect influencer for your campaign? 

Utilize tags to identify influencers who are relevant to your niche. Beyond this, find influencers who align with your brand values and target audience.

Additionally, look for influencers who use hashtags that are relevant to your campaigns. For instance, fashion influencer Chiara Ferragni uses #adv (advertising) and #ghd (good hair day) hashtags in this campaign.

Monitor industry-specific hashtags and mentions to discover influential voices and build profitable relationships with them. 

Track Hashtag Performance

Tracking your hashtag performance helps you understand your campaigns’ engagement, reach, and effectiveness.

To achieve this goal, assign special hashtags to each marketing project. This helps you see which hashtags generate the most engagement and reach, enabling you to refine your tagging strategy. 

Here’s an example of a hashtag performance report for the #SuperBowl2024.

This curated list of hashtag generators by Attrock discusses the top tools for your consideration. You can analyze each and choose the one that best fits your needs.

Categorize Content Accordingly 

The human attention span is shrinking. The last thing you want is for your audience to have difficulty in finding or navigating your content, get frustrated, and bounce.

Untagged content can be difficult to navigate and manage. As any marketer knows, content is important in digital marketing campaigns. 

To categorize your content, identify the main categories by topics, themes, campaigns, target audiences, or product lines. Then, assign relevant tags based on the categories you’ve identified. After that, implement a consistent tagging strategy for existing and new content. 

Organizing your content using tags can also help streamline your content management workflow. Most importantly, readers can easily find the content they’re looking for, thereby boosting overall user experience, engagement, and conversions.

Boost Your Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing remains a powerful marketing tool in today’s digital world. It’s also another area where brands use a tagging strategy to directly reach their target audience.

Use tags to segment your email list and personalize your marketing messages. Then, you can send targeted emails based on factors like purchase history, interests, and demographics. 

Personalization can significantly improve open rates, CTRs, and overall engagement and conversion rates. It’s a simple yet impactful strategy to make your email marketing strategy more effective.  

Plus, you can use tags to track how well your emails perform with each group. This helps you understand what content resonates best with your audience and provides insight on how to improve your emails going forward.

Enhance Analytics and Reporting

Every marketer appreciates the immense value of data. For brands using tagging strategies, tags are powerful tools for gathering valuable data. 

Analyze how users interact with your tagged content. See which tags generate the most clicks, shares, conversions, and other forms of engagement. Gain insight into audience preferences and campaign effectiveness.

This granular data about your marketing efforts allow you to make data-driven decisions, allocate resources effectively, and refine your marketing strategies.

Final Thoughts 

There isn’t a single correct way for brands to use a tagging strategy in marketing. You can use a tagging strategy however you see fit. However, the bottom line is that this strategy offers you a simple yet powerful way to create attention-grabbing and unique marketing campaigns. 

Fortunately, tagging strategies are useful across various marketing initiatives, from social media and email marketing to SEO and more. 

So, if you’re ready to elevate your marketing campaign, build a strong brand presence, and stand out among the competition, consider employing effective tagging strategies today.

The technology space is pretty obsessed with preventing code defects from getting to production. We take great pains to make sure that a mistake doesn’t make it from the developer’s fingertips all the way through to the product system.

There’s an entire field called DevOps (short for “development operations”). This is something like a $5 billion industry. There are entire market segments filled with companies that tightly control the movement and testing of code.

Search for “DevOps diagram” sometime. You’ll be amazed at what you find—detailed schematics showing exactly how code should be copied, packaged, tested, and deployed. Developers who don’t have an artistic bone in their bodies suddenly turn into Da Vinci when describing in exacting detail how they want to orchestrate code deployments.

All of this is in search of one goal: prevent bad code from reaching production. A lofty goal, to be sure.

…but why don’t we care so much about content?

Where we have majestic acrobatics on the code side, when it comes to content, the process is usually something like, “Well, Alice writes something in Word, then emails it to Bob, and he copies it into the rich text editor” then presses publish.

Congratulations, you have the tightest, most reliable codebase serving up terrible content. A+. Great job.

Content defects are a thing, and we don’t do enough to prevent them. In particular, we don’t look at content development as a process to be managed. We think it’s some kind of magic, not a flow of work with checkpoints, trackable assignments, and review gateways. We’re somehow convinced this would take the “soul” out of it or something.

So, while our developers get six figures worth of toys to make sure they can swap every line of code instantly without spilling their coffee, our content creators are copying and pasting things into Slack and yelling “I swear sent that to you last week!” over the cubicle wall.

We need to do better.

Content creation isn’t magic—no more than code is magic. It’s a process that can and should be managed just like code deployments, and it deserves the same level of regard.

Your content creators need:

• Library services. Your developers have source code management. They know where code is, all the time. They probably have versions of it dating back to when they were teenagers. These things exist for content as well—they’re called content marketing platforms (CMPs) and digital asset management systems (DAMs). They’re designed to store, organize, and version content assets so creators know where everything is.
• Change management, in the form of editorial calendaring. Your developers know when code will be released (note: don’t do it on Fridays). They plan these things long in advance. But ask a content creator when Content Item X for the new campaign is launching, and they can only say something like, “I don’t know. I showed it to Bob. It’s in his court now…”
• Workflow. Developers have detailed ticket management systems that can tie their actions down to the exact line of source code they changed to resolve a defect. These systems exist so that everyone knows, at all times, who is responsible for what. Meanwhile, the content editors can only shrug when someone asks who was supposed to edit the CEO’s blog post that she just announced from the keynote stage.
• Content preview. I promise you that your development team has a graduated system of environments where they test code. They probably spend hundreds of hours maintaining it, so they can run code in isolation and know exactly how it works before they deploy it. Think of that fondly next time when your image caption is published in 30pt bold-faced font because no one told you that it wouldn’t be. (Incidentally, I’ve been thinking about preview a lot lately.)

Here’s why this is important:

Content defects matter. They can be far more damaging than code defects, while being so much harder to detect. By the time you realize something is wrong, the problem may have been existing in public for a long time, doing a lot of damage.

Imagine that you have a software company, and you’ve been trying to get an analyst to include your software in one of their reports. Your Analyst Relations staff has been consistently courting, cajoling, and hinting to this analyst that your software fits their segment exactly, and would be a great addition to the report.

The analyst finally decides to check things out. They go to your website, looking for evidence of all the things you told them about. They expected to find reinforcement of that information, that energy, that…vibe.

But, they didn’t. Their experience fell flat. They gave you a 20-minute chance, but then clicked away and didn’t look back.

Oh sure, you had plans. You were going to revamp that part of the website, and you had mentioned it to Gary just before he went on vacation. You heard some rumors that people were working on it, and some content got changed, but you never saw and never had a chance to guide it. Content development seemingly happened in a far-off land somewhere. Normally, when something changed on the website, you were as surprised as anyone.

This is a content defect. The whole thing. One big defect.

Why don’t we categorize like this? Why don’t we call it what it is?

Maybe because it’s not…binary? With code, things often either work, or explode spectacularly, so we can stand back and confidently say, “Yup, that’s busted.”

But with content, there’s a spectrum—there’s a range. People can look at it and say, “yeah, that’s fine” even when it’s not.

The only solution here is process. You need a way to make sure that content is seen by the right people, and at the right time, and has a way of reflecting the right input.

This happens with code all the time. We handle code exactingly, rigorously, and with due process and care.

We need to demand the same for content. And we need to start acknowledging that poor content is a failure of process, a failure of planning, and a failure of tooling.

The tools are available to avoid this. We need to implement them and use them.

Interested in learning how Optimizely Content Marketing Platform can better support your content creation process? See how it works in this quick video.