"For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned."

Ben Franklin

Because the tourism industry is in a state of reemergence and adaptation, now is an optimal time to prioritize your organizational strategy for your Simpleview CMS. Using tags and categories according to best practices can benefit both internal team workflows and external user experiences. 
As your team and content adapt, so should your organizational methods. Do you have a strategy, and if so, is it serving its purpose? The goal is to build a framework for your destination marketing organization (DMO) that can be used years into the future. 

To help you do that, I’m going to offer five best-practice tips. Before doing so, I think it’s important to explain the difference between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ tags. When working on utilizing the tags within your CMS, you’ll run across some items that are used for internal organization and some that are used externally on your website. 

Internal tags – such as CMS Tags, Nav Tags and Asset Categories – connect and group content together. Using these can create efficiencies when locating or building content in your CMS but do not display on your website pages. For example, a marketing campaign might use specific images and documents, landing pages and possibly a blog post. Using CMS tags allows you to connect all those different content types to make campaign management easier for your team. 

External tags, such as Categories or Tags found on most modules, are used to group together your content for your website visitors. Clicking on a Category or Tag that displays on the front end of your website will pull through any similar content that uses that same concept. For example, clicking on an ‘Events’ blog category will display the results of all blogs that are using that category. 

Got it? OK, onto the best-practice tips!

  1. Strategize First: Take time to sit down with your team. If you are currently using tags, review what’s in place and determine if it’s serving its purpose. If looking to use these tools for the first time, decide which structure makes sense for your team's workflows and content roadmap. Build a foundation that is consistent for all users. 
  2. Keep It Simple: Tags are here to make your life easier. But be judicious. If you load up on tags for every content item, that can quickly turn these tools into a cluttered burden. Because you can find most individual items by using a keyword search, you want to use your tags and categories to group items on a higher level. 
  3. Use Standard Terms: Although every DMO has its individual destination brands and lingo, using them doesn’t make for a best practice when creating organization in your CMS. If you call your yearly Restaurant Week ‘Foodtopia,’ the term is familiar to you – but anyone new to your organization wouldn’t necessarily be able to step in and recognize that. The best practice would be to use the term ‘Restaurant Week’ to make it easily accessible across the board. 
  4. Maximize Your Efforts: Tags are used not only to group and organize your content but to pull content to your page. For example, if you have several summer-focused blog posts that you want to use for your Summer page, you can use CMS tags to pull through the summer blog content in a Collection feed. Any new summer content utilizing that tag will automatically be populated to that page. 
  5. Now’s The Time: There’s no better time to start or reorganize your tagging strategy than right now. You may find yourself in a position where you have tags in place that just don’t work for you anymore. Don’t be afraid to start over and rebuild a strategy that gives you a leg up going forward. If you’re hesitant to start, start easy and small and build your comfort with creating and managing the tools you have. Then it’s easier to expand as new content, efforts and workflows emerge. 

You’re busy – I get it. But Benjamin Franklin said it well: “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” Your future self and future DMO staff will appreciate you taking the time to decide on and implement a CMS tag strategy.  

More resources:

  • Check out the CMS knowledgebase article, “The Best Practices for CMS Organizational Tools”
  • Watch this 30-minute webinar, “Use Tagging to Organize your CMS”
  • Get some 1-on-1 training! Just submit a ticket through our client portal