Why digital leaders are ditching their web CMSes for agile content management
It’s almost a misnomer to describe any particular aspect of a customer journey today as “digital,” since nearly every interaction can be tied to a digital experience. A weekend trip to a home improvement store for a new bathroom lighting fixture probably started with a visit to the company’s website. There, the customer might have read articles about the best types of lighting fixtures, watched a YouTube video on DIY installation or browsed the product selection.
Relevant content lies at the heart of this nonlinear journey. Regardless of industry, customers want the ability to access information when and where they want. B2B customers are no exception and expect their path to purchase to be as on-demand and seamless as it is in the consumer world.1
As customers dictate when, where and how they want to access information, business leaders need to find the right tools to help them keep pace. Headless CMSes are the vehicle of choice on the road to providing seamless, omnichannel content. Those who continue to rely on traditional CMSes to manage their digital portfolio will find themselves struggling to keep up.
That’s because legacy CMSes were designed to build and support one-dimensional websites using a webpage-oriented framework that combines content with channel-specific code. This creates two challenges for digital leaders who want to expand their digital content portfolios:
Both of these challenges inhibit the ability to quickly and easily repurpose content across digital channels and to create new layouts and digital applications without migrating content.
Headless CMSes solve the first problem by separating content from code, empowering digital teams to use APIs to deliver content from a content hub to any digital endpoint. But this still leaves the problem of how to organize content for use and reuse across channels, and that’s where content infrastructure comes into play.
Like with any headless CMS, content infrastructure decouples the content and presentation layers. However, it’s also much more than a headless content management system. Content infrastructure is a structured approach to organizing content so it can be easily managed and reused across any digital platform. The benefit of headless CMS is flexibility, and the added benefits of content infrastructure are extensibility and adaptability, empowering digital teams to apply software development best practices to content.
Content infrastructure begins with a content model custom-built for each use case, so content creators aren’t stuck with the preprogrammed models offered by traditional CMSes. The content model breaks down content into individual components, such as a blog post headline or a call-to-action button. Users can define how each element relates to others, and in doing so, create a flexible model that can fit any digital container.
Let’s look at four different omnichannel content strategy needs and how a legacy CMS performs against content infrastructure.
Check out the Trunk Club (Nordstrom) case study to see how they overcame the content bottleneck and optimized engineering-to-editor workflows with content infrastructure.
To learn more about building speed-oriented architecture, watch the TUI Nordic case study video.
Read this Xoom case study to learn more about using content infrastructure to increase content quality and accelerate deployment time.
Learn how TELUS used streamlined content infrastructure to quadruple their speed to market.
Content infrastructure empowers digital leaders to put content first in their digital strategy. You can focus on creating the content and experiences customers want, regardless of where they start their journey. It enables companies to streamline their operations, expand into new channels faster and provide a seamless experience for customers.
References:
1 Adobe Blog, “Your B2B Customers are also B2C Consumers”, November 2018