MASTER YOUR TAXONOMY FRAMEWORK : STRINGS AT PLAY

“Taxonomy”, we have heard this name multiple times, especially in our day to day Marketing environment. The big question that comes to our mind is, what exactly the “TAXONOMY” is and what purpose it serve? Taxonomy comes from the Greek τ?ξι?, taxis (meaning 'order', 'arrangement') and ν?μο?, nomos ('law' or 'science'). What drives this apart is its unique practice and standard attributes that makes the entire process of classification and marketing activities universal, and helps automate and validate data governance across multiple platforms.

In a general term, “Taxonomy” is defined as the way of organizing your entire business processes and items. It can be, applying the taxonomy tags to identify campaigns or standardizing the referring channels or leveraging other possible marketing activities. Having a proper set of taxonomy is the basic guidelines around which the brand positions its data collection processes. Today, we see different types of taxonomies exist in an organization especially around asset, channel or campaign and can always be customize based on various business and brand requirements.

Creating the enterprise-level marketing taxonomy is mostly said to be a rigorous process and might not seem something exciting, however this is a prerequisite step towards enabling the organization campaign, asset and channel process to create and standardize consistent data across systems, teams, and marketing activities. Having a unified taxonomy governance helps define the core marketing concepts, allowing the standard use of content and metadata.

Now, let’s take a foot forward towards building an effective marketing process to define an universal taxonomy for your organization. The process must start with clear understanding around the tactics of grouping and organizing data. Taxonomies which is also referred to as schemas are normally developed in-house especially in the Marketing domain to give end-users (marketers) a structure of how they describe assets. We must be very clear and precise that the taxonomy practice is defined to fully leverage data and algorithms. It won’t be wrong, if we treat this entire process as that of a machine learning exercise to launch and enforce an enterprise-wide data governance.

LET’S EXPLORE THE STEPS IN BUILDING THE TAXONOMY FRAMEWORK

Though this feels like a daunting task, yet the initial backbone of a proper taxonomy framework must have a clear proof of concept. Taxonomies can differ from business to business or organization to organization, and there is no definite process that can bind all that in one singular model. However, based on what we have seen, having the standard taxonomy configuration is an approach towards defining your product and campaign requirements.

Below are some of the strings the organization must power and standardize to make the process unique and definite.

STRING 1 - Team Collaboration and Engagement

Setting the taxonomy governance must go through the standardized process of creating a team. The standard governance to be created considering teams that has an active say in the business processes and campaign structuring and will help in effective project delivery around taxonomy standardization. This will also make sure that no siloed nomenclature is defined in between the teams that can cut the consistency around product and campaign.

To enforce a disciplined data taxonomies, naming conventions and collaborative processes across platforms and teams, there should be a collective collaboration between Media, Campaign, Digital, Analytics and Product to define a templatized process around classification and attribute.

Below is one such example around Taxonomy Governance, where we see the changes normally coming from.

STRING 2 - Designing the Taxonomy Checklist

Next step is to gather and compile the checklist around dimensions and attributes to define that it matches with brand’s standard governance and KPI’s. The reporting requirements and standard dimensions can differ by organization, however having a base setup in terms of defining the wish-list of tasks is a proper way to move with the taxonomy governance. 

STRING 3 - Streamlining the Process

To enforce continuity and simplicity, next step is to move towards grouping especially considering that by now you have already created the checklist for taxonomy dimensions. Example, “keyword” and “placement” are ad dimensions with similar requirements: both are set to measure the effectiveness of a campaign at the most granular level.

Based on the requirements from the teams, both “keyword” and “placement” can be set as a dimension and can be consolidated into a single dimension “placement/keyword”. Other attributes will define the categories to be analyzed for business standards and purpose.

Taxonomy Governance - Taxonomy Maintenance Workflow

STRING 4 - Building the Taxonomy Structure

So once you land to the final string, wherein you have already gathered and created the consistent metadata classifications, you are now in the process to build out the campaign, channel, region/geography, or product line with the same structure and model. Now, check twice that you are ready with the alignment and completion of the core definition of critical information as per the standard set of implementation you designed initially.

For better accelerations, efficiency and quick results, you can always prefer to go with some of the trusted names in the industry who can help develop the entire Taxonomy architecture framework and database for you and your organization. This goes beyond the normal spreadsheets and multiple templates that is developed internally. You are now set with the standardized definitions and core concepts around different areas of the business that can be compared downstream.

So, with this we are now aligned to define a single taxonomy across all systems and product lines that helps users simplify the entire process of data collection and analysis. We can even expect a consistent customer experience and unified standard reporting that can help create operational efficiencies and analyze business performance with confidence.

"You" are all set now to communicate and deploy a unified taxonomy framework across multiple business unit.

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