Written by:
Expresia
Benefits of Headless CMS: 10 Reasons to Go Headless
Own the conversation around headless CMS and its benefits.
It is no secret that companies operate by focusing and relying on sales, but in the last few years the focus has shifted to the users, their experience, and the interaction flow between them and the company. Stop for a minute and ask yourself: are you just putting information out there or is your team working towards upgrading content quality, scalability, and performance? Are the decisions taken smart and customer-centric?
Forrester explains sales intelligence as the "solutions that offer data, insights, and data management services to optimize sales efficiency and effectiveness". Investing in how your company creates digital experiences and reaches its audiences is now at the forefront of curating digital experiences. Due to necessity, Content Management Systems (CMSs) have dominated conversations around digital media for the last few years, so it is no surprise, -, the term "headless CMS" may have crossed your path recently.
The capability of increasing ROI, building loyalty and unifying your message is reachable with a headless CMS. That said, is your company making smart sales decisions? Today, it is important to ask yourself and understand what “headless” means, why it should matter, and how it can help you or your business. In the following 7 minutes or so, we'll break down the basics to headless CMS, so in the next conversation that comes up, you can stop pretending you understand what your co-workers are referring to, and truly own the conversation.
What is a Content Management System (CMS)?
A Content Management System (CMS) is “a software application that enables you or your business to organize, manage, and create content for the web with minimal IT involvement needed in a friendly, easy-to-use interface”. A CMS allows you to manage the digital content of your website, you don't need to build code from scratch. A CMS is a tool for you to simplify the day-to-day of managing your content. It has tons of functionality, including keeping everything in one place, that we’ll dive into later.
What is a headless CMS?
First of all, what is headless architecture?
The backend and the display layers are separated in headless architecture. This means, headless systems merge all business processes and services into a collection of APIs that are backed by customized backends, allowing any front-end channel to connect to it and provide individualized customer journeys at every touchpoint.
Let’s dive into headless CMS
A headless CMS separates the front layer, or the head (the content management system) from the backend, or the body (the repository). Your content lives in a central hub right at your server, ready to be published in any channel you can think of, which translates into the home of your content and assets. But what makes a CMS truly headless, or better than the traditional one? Three words: content-centric approach. With a toolset of APIs, a headless CMS can display and deliver the content of your choice in multiple channels, devices and formats, without the need to build it from scratch or replicate the publishing process.
What are the benefits of a headless CMS?
Headless CMS, also known as decoupled, is the solution to the business need to create deeper bonds with their customers and deliver personalized content that aligns with the interests of their audiences' choices.
Let’s dig into the benefits of headless CMS and why it has become a trend in the last few years.
Flexible, decoupled architecture
Traditional architecture systems make it difficult for a digital experience to be personalized and they often fail to provide the freedom and flexibility the content is in such dire need of. Since the backend and the presentation layer are tightly connected to each other in traditional systems, that business logic cannot be separated, which translates into limitations when building an end-to-end customer experience journey.
Headless architecture systems make it possible for you to choose the coding language of your preference, they even enable content focused team members that have little-to-no code experience to collaborate, produce and publish content without assistance from technical teams. Besides, with API top-notch integrations at their core, your company can easily integrate with your other existing systems or any other feature you desire.
Headless CMS fits your needs, not the other way around, making the development and marketing workflow easier and wider-reaching.
Powerful API integrations at the core
Built for integration, headless CMS opens up your team to a whole new level of possibilities. With content delivery, payment or any other API, you easily access a complete set box of tools for your team to build and design unique consumer experiences across all channels.
Due to the powerful API integrations at the core of headless systems, and its capabilities, it enables end-users to open their world to endless integration possibilities in a simple and efficient manner, making it easy to acquire and populate new apps, websites, and the like.
Future-proof investment
Digital transformation should be thought of as a long-term solution. The future of digital experience relies on investing in future-proof assets for your business now which will guarantee the efficiency and scalability you need for the years ahead. With a headless CMS you're ensuring your business operation for the next few years by guaranteeing it is as scalable as your objective, operations, and needs.
The fact that the front and back layers are independent ensures that your website won't be locked on efficiency losses, even if it experiences difficulties or requires any updates. And, if you aim for a rebrand, there won't be a major technical transformation required. Thus, from the very first moment, development teams can easily adapt the system to their existing toolbox through APIs. No more building from scratch, a headless CMS grows along with your business needs.
The ultimate easy-to-use, scalable, team-empowerment tool
With a headless CMS your team can start creating right away, reducing learning curve times and increasing productivity and efficiency. With the ability to constantly expand on what has already been created, the headless feature allows end-users, both technical and not, to develop and curate any digital experience they can dream of, in just a few simple steps.
A headless CMS is the meeting point between developers and non-technical collaborators. In an easy-to-use interface, marketing teams can efficiently create microsites or share content without the need to wait for technical teams to come up and save the day. Meanwhile, developers can focus on improving the experience and bringing value to the journey with new features and functionalities.
Omnichannel experience
When traditional CMSs were created, the way of thinking about content was completely different. Content development was thought to be web-centric and to be displayed mainly on desktop browsers. It remained that way for a while, however, it was only a matter of time before we moved towards other devices and technologies, which made the need to create more meaningful connections greater, and thus content personalization became the most obvious way to go.
The difficulty for content creators and marketers only kept growing. Nowadays, from smartphones to voice-activated devices, content is everywhere in all types of forms, and must be as smooth and straight-forward as possible, which translates into new, top-notch, personalized content delivery systems and layers.
Headless systems are capable of creating connections between brands and customers, by getting to them through all the channels you can imagine. It provides a 360º customer experience. Wherever your consumers are, headless provides a smooth and uniform experience across all touchpoints.
By centralizing the management activities through a single platform, you can now build complex, strong strategies that reach users wherever they are, with it all running through the same system. This means no more doing manual data entry and importing and exporting between systems.
But what makes a CMS truly headless, or better than the traditional one? Three words: content-centric approach. With a toolset of APIs, a headless CMS can display and deliver the content of your choice in multiple channels, devices and formats, without th
10 reasons for you to choose headless CMS over traditional CMS
- Multi-channel content management: Address your users at any touchpoint with meaningful, powerful, personalized messages and reach your audiences across the customer journey. Save time by creating content once in a single area and have it be accessible anywhere on the site which reduces or eliminates the need to duplicate it.
Expresia and its integrated headless CMS create fully omnichannel experiences, reimagining the way of doing content and directly modifying numerous channels, without writing a single line of code. Your content can now be arranged into clear, manageable groups using Expresia Content Playlists. Mix them as you want to and explore the limitless possibilities of a seamless workflow between your teams.
- Custom user experience: Create a deep understanding of the customer journey with a headless CMS and provide custom experiences from end to end, advocating loyalty and brand awareness.
Simplify the user experience by directly addressing your user's needs and earn a unique competitive advantage by rising the standards over expectations. With Expresia you can engage your customer at different stages providing them with a strong, unified message and improving the brand perception. It's all about creating experiences that make them want to come back for more.
- Enhanced security: Experience the meaning of true security with a headless CMS. Since the orchestrating layer is separated from the front layer, your content is always safe and accessible.
Expresia is “true cloud”. With our AWS cloud, you get the security and flexibility your team needs to keep expanding at its highest potential. We also do regular backups to give you peace of mind if a mistake happens.
- Pay for what you use: A headless CMS is a long-term investment since it has the possibility to transform into your most valuable asset. With Expresia and our pay-for-what-you-use model you get access to every tool in our suite to build your business as you grow, and our REST API core gives you the freedom to connect with third party apps.
- Scalability: Optimize and improve your site at any time without compromising efficiency. Easily expand your functionalities and integrate new features to continue growing your business. The Expresia network covers you globally and ensures there aren't any failure points by adapting and scaling automatically. Experience the most recent OS and security updates with Expresia. In headless CMS, there are countless hosting possibilities for your projects as well as deployment environments.
- Faster time to market: Headless CMS allows your team to update and scale easily without the need to build from scratch, shortening the time to market and avoiding the rebuilding of unnecessary instances. It is designed to be fast and to improve the daily workflow.
With Expresia you'll save time and embrace an efficient workflow that allows for easy integration with other third-party APIs.
- Real-time collaboration: Headless CMS ensures all content updates get to the touchpoints of your choice. Content creators won't have to worry about replicating content over and over again for every channel. A single source of content will do it for you.
Headless CMSs also empower both developers and marketers to promote complex content campaigns and work simultaneously. Expresia empowers your team to achieve real-time collaboration and build a solid global business with cross-company cooperation.
- Future-proof: We bet you can relate with the need of adding new functionalities to an existing system. This is commonly associated with expenses and downtime, which only make it difficult for you to grow and keep expanding. We bring you great news! Headless architecture takes care of that for you, so you won't need to replatform in order to remain relevant and modern.
- No code mastery required: For marketers, omnichannel may be difficult since it requires them to produce outstanding content that performs smoothly across all devices. Choreograph a seamless user experience that addresses all user touchpoints while retaining consistency and relevancy by using a headless CMS. Your content-only team members won't need to learn how to code, they can easily edit directly on the front end.
With Expresia non-technical users can easily populate the site and bring to life their wonderful, engaging messages and ideas.
- Take better, data-informed decisions: A headless CMS frees you up to concentrate on your company and aim your efforts at building community and value around your brand. It will improve the time management of your goals, so you can focus your efforts on expanding your business, and providing a better customer experience at multiple touchpoints.
With Expresia you won't only have the time for making important decisions, but the data to ensure you're making the right one. Export your data from Expresia and connect it to analytics and whatever third-party you'd need. Be the owner of your data and embrace the next step for your company.
Content management with Expresia
Experience the true power of a headless CMS with Expresia. Manage many channels at once and deliver your message through multiple touchpoints. Expresia's Content Playlists are going to be your next obsession and your new go-to tool. Organize, deploy, and reuse content pieces across as many channels as you want with the help of content playlists. Make content management easier by dividing it into manageable groupings that you may call into many locations, channels, and variants.
If you’re interested in knowing more about how to use a headless CMS to improve audience reach, check out our article or contact us for more information. We’re here to join you in your digital transformation path.
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