Marketing with Video: Why You Need a Meta Tagging Strategy

Why You Should Tag Your Videos

Tagging strategies help digital marketers manage their ever-expanding library of assets. A tag is a word or term describing your content asset. Video marketers should apply this practice to video as soon as possible in order to organize, sort, and display individual video assets, playlists, and libraries. Less than an hour in planning will save you hours of clean up later on.

One of the most skipped steps by a new video marketer is taking 10 minutes to pre-define a tagging strategy. Let me show you how quickly this can be accomplished.

Start by asking yourself how you already talk about your videos within your organization. It might be by internal department, product line, or region of your business.  Use these dividing lines for your initial taxonomy. For example, if you sell a line of personal care products, you may define a set of  top-level categories like:

• Soaps
• Perfumes
• Lotions
• Aftershaves

You may want to add several sub-categories under each of these top-level categories, but keep it simple. Remember, most people skip this important step and never create even a basic taxonomy, so simple is better if it means it will be used.

There you go! You have your tagging strategy. The last thing to do is to print out your categories, write it on a sticky or whatever works for you and your team. Share it with two groups of people within your organization:

1. The “uploaders” - often the content creators who make video content available to your organization
2. The “publishers” - the individuals responsible for putting the content live

Stick this list to the side of their computer screens so they always have easy access to it.

Why is this so important, you ask? Let me show you by telling you a quick story.

On a recent flight, I recorded a time-lapse video out of my airplane window.  After landing, I quickly edited said video on my iPhone and uploaded it using the Video Cloud upload module, all while waiting for my next flight. The magic happened when I tagged it with the tag “timelapse" during upload. In my account, I have a smart playlist that automatically adds any videos with the tag “timelapse.” So the video is automatically added to this playlist. This playlist is then also published on my Brightcove Gallery so I can set its exact publishing location right from the upload module.

That’s it. My phone was back in my pocket. While I was on my second flight, my video was transcoded, added to the time-lapse playlist, and published to my gallery. While this is not a typical production workflow, you can see a simple tag can go a long way to automating your publishing process.

So take a few minutes, define your tagging strategy, and before you know it, you'll have videos flying all over the Internet because of a simple tag.