Headless CMS for Customised Experiences
The days when businesses could afford to have a take-it-or-leave-it approach to customer experience (CX) are long gone. In fact, in those days, no one thought very much about CX at all. It was all about one business, one brand, one way of operating, and if not quite one lone model for interacting and engaging with customers, at least a small number of narrowly defined options. Take it or leave it.
Fast forward to today and, according to McKinsey, 71% of people expect personalised interactions with brands, services and companies. According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to keep going back to businesses that recognise, remember, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.
So much for one-size-fits-all CX, then. The expectation now is that experiences and interactions are customised to the individual. If you don’t deliver, someone else will.
And that’s just considering personalisation. Another factor is all the many different channels and touch points people use to shop, browse, discover, search and research these days. The average person reportedly uses 14 different connected devices in their day-to-day lives. And then on top of that, there are all the different apps and platforms people use on those devices, from websites to mobile apps to social media etc.
As well as tailoring CX to the needs of individuals, experiences have to be customised to suit the parameters of different channels and devices. No wonder that, according to Gartner, 63% of digital marketers say they struggle with CX customisation. It presents a huge logistical challenge.
So, what’s the answer? No business has the capacity to create and customise content on a one-to-one basis for every customer, customer segment, channel and device. The resources required would just be impossible and would grind all other marketing activity to a halt. What marketers need, to borrow a popular phrase from software development, is a way to ‘create once, publish everywhere’ when it comes to content, and have the flexibility to customise as required.
That’s a radical departure from the linear production models of conventional content management systems (CMS). And that helps to explain why so many are moving to Headless CMS instead.
What is a Headless CMS?
Content management systems are integral parts of the web ecosystem. If you have a website, you use a CMS. It’s the interface that lets you load and edit content, create new pages and play around with design. Some CMS are more commonly known as ‘website builders’, things like WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace and Wix. And, specifically for eCommerce sites, the likes of Spotify and WooCommerce.
To understand what a Headless CMS is, it’s worth first pausing to explain what we mean by a ‘conventional’ CMS. Any CMS does two main jobs. It lets you create, store and manage content. And it also delivers/publishes it somewhere.
Conventional CMS platforms wrap both of these functions up in a single piece of software. And that’s because CMS were originally designed to manage the publication of content on a single website. So with something like WordPress, the idea was that you organised a domain and web hosting. And then you got a CMS to act as the interface for managing everything that goes on that site.
Compared to the pre-CMS era of website management, when content had to be managed within the HTML code of a page, this was revolutionary. It made managing a website easy and accessible for non-developers, and led to an explosion in websites.
But there are drawbacks. Conventional CMS is basically a no-code version of creating, managing and designing content within the code of site, a software interface added on top to make things easier. It’s all intended for publishing content in one place (mainly a website). But we’ve mentioned all those different channels available now. What if you want to publish the same or similar content to a corporate website, an ecommerce store, a blog, a mobile app, or even to kiosks and digital signage in a physical store? Conventional CMS isn’t set up for this. You need a separate CMS (or at least separate documents within a CMS) for each channel. The process involves a lot of duplication and repetition.
Headless CMS resolves this by removing the presentation layer, or the part concerned with content delivery and what it looks like on a particular channel. With the ‘head’ gone, you’re left with the ‘body’ where you create, store and otherwise manage your content.
But what’s the point of a CMS if it doesn’t actually publish content anywhere, you ask? That’s the clever part. With the ‘head’ removed, you’re now free to connect any front-end publishing platform – take your pick from the best available for websites, mobile apps, social media, and retail marketplaces. From linear, one-to-one creation and publishing, you now have a working model to create once and publish anywhere.
How Does a Headless CMS Work?
The key to Headless CMS is APIs. The first CMS platforms were built the way they were not to close the door on flexibility in the future, but because that’s how all software was made. Nowadays we call it ‘monolithic’, in the sense that software was built to be a complete, self-contained product that contained all the tools and features required to deliver all the functionality needed.
Application Programming Interfaces are pieces of software that mediate how different programs communicate and work with one another. And they have turned the world of software development on its head. Now, instead of thinking in turns of ‘monolithic’ programmes, developers think in terms of creating ecosystems of lots of different software, all joined together and coordinated by APIs. You will hear this referred to as open or composable architecture.
One of the many benefits of this approach is flexibility. And this is what Headless CMS capitalises on. When you step back (maybe with the benefit of hindsight) and look at it, having the management and delivery/publication parts of a content system all joined up in one package is not the most efficient way to go about things. In particular, whatever platform the CMS was designed for publishing on in the first place, you’re stuck with it. Adding new options would require a fundamental re-writing of the code that would affect all the management parts, too.
With Headless, that’s not a problem. You build the best set of management tools you can. A quality production suite, a database for storing and organising all content assets, and analytics for tracking performance. And then, with the freedom of APIs, you simply plug in the front-end publication tools you need, for whatever channels you require.
How does a Headless CMS help to customise CX?
Here are four ways Headless CMS can help to customise customer experiences through more agile content management.
It’s easier to reuse content
With the linear production processes of conventional CMS, it is usual to create a new instance for every piece of content published. In the modern omnichannel world, that’s hugely inefficient. Even if content is reused across different channels, it has to be done manually, cutting and pasting from one CMS to another, and editing according to the requirements of each platform.
With Headless CMS, all editing is done in one place, all publication is routed from one source. You also save versions in a central repository. Say you produce a podcast, and edit snippets to promote on social media – you can do this once, and then simply publish the same snippets across all the social channels your CMS is connected to, in one move. And you have those assets ready to go in the future, for example if you want to add them to promotional campaigns highlighting previous work.
Another benefit is that Headless CMS simplifies content editing and management, as changes made once to a particular asset are automatically reflected everywhere the content is published. This radically improves efficiency, as well as helping to maintain consistency.
It’s easier to build an optimised front-end
Headless CMS brings benefits to the front-end/delivery side as well as to the back-end/management side. Decoupled from all the creation tools and databases, front-end developers have much more freedom to focus on building the best interface for users possible. As mentioned, with a monolithic CMS, once it’s built, it’s built, and it becomes very difficult to tweak the front-end experience (or add more channels) without messing with the functionality of the back-end, too.
Headless CMS frees up developers building websites, mobile apps, kiosk software or whatever else it might be to focus purely on functionality, navigation and design. The content will take care of itself. This leads to much improved, more user-centric experiences.
It makes it easier for content and IT teams to work together on delivering great experiences
With conventional CMS, both content/marketing teams and IT teams are limited by the technology in terms of how much they can customise and optimise experiences. The fact that Headless CMS frees up both to focus on what they do best unencumbered also makes it easier for them to work together on delivering great experiences. Content teams can use their insights about what content works best, where and when, to inform IT teams to tinker with tech infrastructure to achieve it.
Unleash data
Finally, another drawback of having separate CMS instances feeding content into different channels is that performance data is collected and stored separately, and often stays stuck in those silos. In such cases, businesses and marketing teams never get a complete, integrated picture of content performance.
When all content delivery can be managed from a single CMS, as you get with Headless, you also collect data in the same place. This gives you a single view of performance and allows you to unleash the power of data to inform how you customise and optimise content going forward.
At Key Element, we use our own custom-built CMS to give us maximum flexibility to create and manage websites tailored to our client’s needs. To find out more about our bespoke web design services, get in touch with our team.
Robert Cowell
