Why businesses are hiring taxonomists

As organizations update their data strategy, new roles are often created so there’s more ownership of data and other digital assets. These roles go hand-in-hand with implementing marketing taxonomy, as two experts from data governance company Claravine recently discussed at our MarTech conference.

At the very top, businesses are hiring Chief Digital Officers in part to restore trustworthiness in the data that marketing teams use, according to Michael Shearer, Sr. Director, Digital Innovation & Strategy for Claravine.

Under these leaders are marketing taxonomists who work to make sure that campaign assets are tagged and tracked.

“When you have a campaign that you spend millions of dollars on and ‘oh, by the way, we didn’t track this’…that’s a scenario where tracking is broken,” said Shearer. “They can’t attribute any performance to that.”

He added that if marketing teams fail to track this performance, they will have difficulties asking for more budget funds in the future.

“Other roles that we’re seeing, in addition to the Chief Digital Officer, are [Chief Data Officer] roles dedicated to noticing issues within their data and just dedicated to figuring this out,” said Christine Reges, Director of Solution Consulting at Claravine.

When customer and performance data is tagged, that still leaves content and other digital assets that could fall through the cracks, providing another need for taxonomists.

“The content that most businesses are pumping out is astronomical, and a lot of times there’s duplicate content being created,” Shearer said. “There’s a lot of content duplication and wasted time when you also are applying taxonomy in those fields and values that are stored in your DAM or CMS. When they’re standardized, you can find those assets, and when they’re not, somebody has to go recreate [the taxonomy].”

View the full presentation from our MarTech conference here (free registration required).