Audience taxonomy is the backbone of modern marketing strategies in today’s data-driven landscape. It provides a standardized framework for defining, organizing, and analyzing audience segments across various channels and platforms. A robust taxonomy structure allows marketers to:

  • Enhance targeting precision: By clearly defining audience segments, marketers can tailor their messages more effectively
  • Improve cross-channel consistency: A unified taxonomy ensures consistent audience definitions across paid, owned, and creative marketing domains
  • Enable deeper insights: Standardized audience data facilitates more meaningful analytics and performance comparisons
  • Optimize marketing efforts: With a clear understanding of audience segment’s performance, marketers can optimize across channels, platforms and creative messaging to deliver on campaign objectives

As you can see, understanding and effectively categorizing your audience is crucial to success as a modern marketer. However, many marketers overlook the necessary processes and governance protocols required to maintain the effectiveness of a well-structured taxonomy.

For many organizations, taxonomy becomes a tedious and a non-value driving effort due to four common mistakes. 

Developing a centralized audience library with consistent terminology, definitions, and mappings is crucial. Creating a source of truth for marketers to understand and reference audiences that exist to date as well as how they were built can reduce the need for customization in the future. Where possible, using consistent audience fields and values across all marketing domains ensures seamless integration and analysis. Consider adding in a unique identifier (numerical or alphabetical) to allow for data parsing and gleaning insights (don’t forget to map it in the audience library!). Lastly, establishing taxonomy and tagging workflows with consideration for automation and compliance reporting ensures that your taxonomy remains up-to-date and adheres to regulatory requirements

Pro Tip: Learn to balance granularity and simplicity. When designing your audience taxonomy, strive for a balance between granularity and simplicity. Aim for dimensions and data values that offer sufficient detail to maximize insights while minimizing implementation and maintenance efforts

To maintain the integrity and effectiveness of your audience taxonomy, follow these governance steps:

  • Develop a workflow for integrating new values into the audience structure available data values
  • Specify necessary updates and approvals across teams and systems
  • Ensure awareness of new audience values and ongoing system maintenance
  • Implement a formal approval process for audience values, involving key stakeholders such as insights & analytics and relevant agency partners
  • Socialize updates across relevant teams to ensure alignment
  • Establish regular compliance monitoring and reporting processes
  • Involve both internal teams and third-party governance partners (if applicable) to ensure comprehensive oversight
  • Develop formal steps for taxonomy compliance remediation and modification recommendations, then operationalize across your organization
  • Create a centralized repository of available audiences to serve as the source of truth
  • Implement formal decision-making processes for data revisions or optimizations based on taxonomy updates

Remember, an effective audience taxonomy is not a one-time effort, but an ongoing process that requires continuous refinement and governance. By following these principles and governance steps, you’ll be well on your way to mastering audience taxonomy and driving marketing excellence. To learn more about how to implement an effective audience taxonomy get in touch with one of our MarTech specialists today!