Organize digital assets at scale with taxonomies in Kontent.ai

Content is more than just copy. Grabbing attention, educating a buyer, evoking a feeling: carefully selected assets help make digital experiences meaningful. To choose the right asset for your content, you need a well-organized library. But as teams grow and content demands scale, keeping things orderly can quickly become overwhelming.

The growing complexity of digital asset management

Keeping your the asset library in your CMS organized and useful can be a challenge, especially when there is more of everything to manage these days: users, content, and assets. To scale your content workflow, it’s important to have digital asset management (DAM) capabilities that can accommodate:

• More diverse and complex content operations 
• More teams and users in the mix 
• A growing volume of assets and folders 
• More complex relationships between assets 
• A variety of search intents and mental models  

Kontent.ai’s asset library is built to support smooth digital delivery at scale. With taxonomies, large or distributed teams can easily tag content and organize assets to get more value from the content they already have.

Why asset folders alone aren’t enough

At first glance, folders seem like a logical way to organize your asset library. They offer a familiar, structured view and help teams group files by topic or team. But folders come with a key limitation: an asset can only live in one folder at a time.

In practice, many assets serve multiple purposes. For example, a product video might be relevant to both the marketing team for a campaign and the training team for onboarding. If you’re relying only on folders, you’d have to pick one place to store it. Or worse, duplicate it, which creates versioning issues and increases clutter.

Asset taxonomies solve this by allowing you to tag a single asset with multiple terms. This reflects how assets are actually used across your organization and helps maintain consistency. Plus, the ability to filter for untagged assets makes it easier to spot gaps and keep your library organized.

Structuring your asset library for better search and scale

In Kontent.ai, taxonomies allow you to assign descriptive terms to content and assets, creating a multi-dimensional structure that goes far beyond repositories and folders. This helps teams filter and locate what they need quickly, whether they’re building landing pages, planning campaigns, or assembling region-specific collections.

You might use taxonomies to:

• Associate assets with a specific audience, product, or initiative
• Cluster related visuals and content around an event or release
• Build dynamic menus or organize content for publishing workflows
• Enable teams to navigate your content hub through lenses that reflect their daily scope

As content operations expand, organizing your digital assets becomes just as important as managing your written content. That’s where asset taxonomies come in. They give teams a flexible, scalable system for labeling and grouping files in ways that reflect how they’ll actually be used. When applied consistently, asset taxonomies help reduce duplication, surface reusable digital media, and ensure files are used in the right context, without relying on rigid folder hierarchies.

Asset taxonomies make search and governance easier

When you’re looking for a specific asset, like a regional variant of a product image or an approved customer logo, taxonomy tags make it faster. With the right structure, you can filter, locate, and retrieve the right file, no matter where it lives in your asset library.

To ensure your taxonomy groups support real users with real intents, consider dimensions that match how your users actually search and make decisions, such as:

• Locations, audience, descriptive categories  
• Brands, departments, organizational units 
• Regions, languages, purposes, licensing agreements 
• Features and descriptions 

A good taxonomy takes the guessing game out of the search, allowing an asset to be discovered from more than one entry point or perspective. It also helps govern how assets should and shouldn’t be used. 

Taxonomies help you surface what you didn’t know you had

Beyond helping you find what you’re looking for, a well-structured taxonomy can also help you discover assets you didn’t realize were there—files that could be repurposed, reused, or shared more broadly across teams. This kind of discovery unlocks efficiency, especially in environments where teams are producing similar visuals, videos, or campaign materials in parallel.

Creating the right asset taxonomies takes some pre-planning, but don’t let that stop you from getting started; it’s not necessary to overhaul your asset library all at once. Making incremental updates allows your teams to see immediate value in the taxonomy system and invest in its upkeep.  

To improve discoverability, focus on categorizing assets that have the most reuse potential: these are the ones that need to be searchable and discoverable first, as they’ll bring you more long-term value. Long-term value is an important consideration, especially for scaling teams who need to be mindful of their design resources and capacity.  

Filtering assets by “uncategorized” allows you to easily tidy up the library too. Quickly spot the assets that may have been overlooked and assign them to the right group. Not every asset needs to be categorized, but too many uncategorized assets can point to inefficiencies in your operations and may hide opportunities for reuse.

Getting started with built-in asset management  

Don’t let valuable assets sit unused. To keep your library efficient and searchable, ensure your team understands how taxonomies work and why they matter. If you’re interested in how Kontent.ai can support your advanced content operations including asset management, schedule a personalized demo with one of our content experts.