What’s the difference between an eBook and an e-book?
To you, probably not much.
But to Google Analytics 4 and other tools, they’re two different types of content.
Which can make your analytics inaccurate and weaken the discoverability of your hard work.
Erika Heald dug into the taxonomy of B2B marketing content and offered new ways to think about how you publish in her B2B Forum presentation from 2024.
Watch a clip from Erika’s presentation or read the transcript below to see how taxonomy and templates can increase the impact of your content.
And for more “a-ha!” moments on increasing your B2B marketing impact, join Erika and more than 50 other B2B marketing experts presenting at B2B Forum this November in Boston.
Browse the B2B Forum program here to find the expert-led sessions that interest you, and then get your ticket here before the Summer Rate discount pricing ends.
See you in Boston!
So define “taxonomy.”
It sounds really scary. But all of us have taxonomy in place. And, probably, not a really great taxonomy.
How many of you here are in charge of managing your blog, or some other kind of content management system, where you’re going in and you’re adding, let’s say, categories and tags to things?
Well, I got to tell you that every single time I’ve ever done a taxonomy audit and have gone in, and frankly, if I’ve done any kind of an analytics audit, I have found on average—if you’re talking about marketing, people usually have the worst data when it comes to the type of content that they’re producing.
Especially if they do long form content.
Because they will have that long form content tagged in multiple places as an Ebook, capital “E,” small “b”… e-dash-book as an “e”, capitalized “B”… All of these things.
And you think to yourself, “well, Erika, all those are the same thing!”
You can look at that and you can see it’s the same thing, right?
You know who can’t?
Google Analytics 4 can’t.
It says, “oh, wow, you have these six different content types and they’re very bad. They barely get anything,” because they see it as individual line items.
And so you have these situations that you create—when you haven’t had that defined taxonomy in place—and every person who puts in a new landing page or puts in a new blog post is off the top of their head deciding how I want to categorize this.
So that’s why, if you’re wanting to use AI and have AI look at your data and understand what is working for you, what differentiates you, you have to have this taxonomy in place to help it understand what you’re trying to achieve and the topics that you are wanting to talk about.
Now, this is one of those slides that I promised you for the slides that you take to show your boss why you need to spend time on taxonomy.
Because they’re going to say, “what do you mean we need to renovate our taxonomy? It’s like, we have categories and tags!”
You need to be able to audit it. You need to clean it up. You need to agree how you’re going to talk about things.
This is the slide that you show.
This is giving all the benefits about having that unified brand tone and voice creating tailored, engaging content, all of the stuff that you can do by putting taxonomy into place. It’s in this slide. Please steal it. Please use it.
Because this is, if you don’t, first, it’s going to make doing all the rest of this a lot harder.
Now, this is an example for those of you who still, despite if you haven’t been doing things like managing blog content or other things where you’re already tagging and categorizing content, this is an example actually from a client when we went in and fixed their taxonomy.
So email is a content channel.
Email newsletters and email notifications were the two different kinds of emails they had.
And then for email newsletters for example, they had a marketing email newsletter. They had a partner email newsletter. Heck, they had internal emails too.
So this actually, for them, could have gone even another column over.
The reason this is important is because you want to make sure that you’re using the most correct and most nuanced tag.
But you need to help AI understand how this stuff works in the ecosystem, what all of the things are, so that way it can actually then help you do your job.
Now, this one is something that content creators frequently will want to fight me on.
They’re like, “templates? You think I should be using templates for content creation?”
And I’m like, “I know. I’m a former journalist. I have a magazine journalism degree and I love templates.”
The reason I love them is because as a content marketer, they’re the ways that I can make sure that we have consistent branding, that we are doing the right workflows, that we have all of these things happening that don’t happen.
When somebody just emails me a document and says, “hey, can you post this on the blog?”
Now, specifically, how many of you here in this scenario I just shared, how many of you have had somebody email you something and said, “oh, hey, I wrote this. Can you get it up on the blog?”
Right? Does that piece of email that you’ve received, does it ever include the SEO keywords that they wanted to target?
Does it ever include, oh I don’t know, a meta title? Or a meta description in that dashed off blog post?
Does it even tell you what customer segment they’re trying to reach with that content and what job that content’s trying to do?
It doesn’t. Because they don’t even know any of that stuff goes into creating a piece of content.
To them, it’s like magic. You just publish things. You just write, you’re creative, and wow, you just do the work.
Well, having those templates in place means that they will do the work.
Your content creators will understand what you need from them, and that right there is going to give you the ability to scale your content creation so much more easily.
But best of all—and this is my favorite—the reduced cognitive load of not having to remember, “hey, for this blog… is this the one where it starts always with a pullout quote, or is this the one?
Is this the kind where I have to start with a statistic?”
All of those things that are built into the kinds of templates you have for your landing pages, for your webpages, for all of these things, it’s a lot to try to remember all of that and still remember to do things like eat lunch, take your dog to the vet, brush your teeth, right?
We have so much already to be thinking about and doing.
You shouldn’t have to remember all of the different fields that you need to make sure to include in that blog post.
Instead, you have a template. So all of that also then means that you can work so much more easily with those people in your organization.
Because also they have this great idea for a piece of content?
If they can’t fill out a template, and I’m going to show you an example of a template, then maybe you won’t have to publish that terribly ill thought out piece of content that you don’t want to publish.
Published June 25, 2025
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