Headless CMS – The Benefits of Losing Your Head

Omnichannel marketing demands flexibility and a headless CMS can provide it, both in terms of future capabilities and the need for enhanced collaboration.

  1. chevron left iconHeadless CMS – The Benefits of Losing Your Head
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Morag Cuddeford-JonesMarch 10, 2023
  • Content Management
  • Digital Marketing

Any company with a website knows about CMS, or content management systems. The process is fairly straightforward. Take content assets from the database, server, ordigital asset management (DAM)system, work on it in the CMS dashboard, and publish. Simple.

The difficulty arises when this is too simple. Most companies have to populate more than just a website with this content. Increasingly, content must also be produced, managed and published for apps, virtual assistants, print collateral, ecommerce sites, partner sites…the list goes on.

Using a traditional – or monolithic - CMS to deal with all these channels involves deploying multiple systems. These are often self-hosted, rather than SaaS or cloud-based, and struggle to cooperate in an omnichannel content environment.

The Solution? Go Headless

The answer to this lack of interoperability and inflexibility is to lose your ‘head’. The ‘head’ in a CMS relates to where content is being created for – for example, the aforementioned website. By losing the head, known as a Headless CMS, the content can be managed and manipulated in one system but is then accessible to a range of third party systems and channels, allowing it to be distributed to whichever channel needs it – apps, point of sale, catalogs, chatbots and more.

Now, it might sound as though taking a headless approach to your CMS might revert the system to a developer-type environment, requiring highly-skilled, IT-focused users. But nothing could be further from the truth. A Headless CMS is built around a simplified interface that allows users from across the organization to use it for their content needs, whether that’s sales, merchandising, marketing, customer services or ecommerce.

This user democracy is increasingly important, as research shows. The State of Universal Content Management 2020 study demonstrated that leading companies are the ones who spread the responsibility for content across the company, rather than leaving it siloed in marketing (59% of mainstream companies versus 42% of leaders) or editorial departments (20% vs 35%).

Simplifying Content Complexity

Critically, because a Headless CMS treats content like data, rather than fixed assets designed for a single platform, content can be used across all sorts of different platforms and adapted to the company’s needs as it grows. It is infinitely flexible and scalable. As the company adds new competencies, such as offering virtual assistants or AI-driven recommendation engines, the Headless CMS simply couples onto the new channel and funnels the required information there too. Previously, the company would need to set up a new end-to-end CMS for each new platform. But using such a single source of content data makes for a faster, more accurate content process.

This ability to turn information around quickly is vital, and I don’t just mean in terms of the heavy demands digital makes on businesses today. Take the use case of a European grocery chain, illustrated in our latest whitepaper, New Freedom with Content and Headless CMS. Already using censhare’s Universal Content Management System to take care of customer communications, it used the Headless CMS to simplify its shelf card production.

Using an intuitive interface meant even staff who were inexperienced in using content systems could generate shelf cards in-store with no extra training. It introduced flexibility regarding the shelf communications for national and regional promotions, and relieved head office of constantly supplying regional stores with materials, significantly speeding up these process from many angles.

Omnichannel marketing demands flexibility and a Headless CMS can provide it, both in terms of future capabilities and the need for enhanced collaboration and cross-departmental, cross-geographical use today.

For information on how censhare’s Headless CMS system can work with existing content systems and data streams, plus additional case studies on how companies are using it today, download our exclusive whitepaper, New Freedom with Content and Headless CMS.

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Morag Cuddeford-Jones
Morag Cuddeford-Jones is a writer, editor and broadcaster. She has been working in marketing, business, and the SaaS space for more than 20 years. With experience interviewing C-Suite executives and working in tech, Morag has gained a unique insight into both the evolving martech landscape and the impact digital transformation has on consumer and B2B brands.

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