Headless CMS: The Business Value of This New Content Management Approach

In an ideal world, marketing technology streamlines processes and shrinks workloads for marketing professionals. In reality, the opposite is often true.

Take content management systems (CMSes) as an example. A recent survey revealed that 74% of brands are using at least two CMS platforms. 27% are using four or more.

Why do so many companies feel the need to deploy multiple tools with similar capabilities? In short: the demands of the modern marketing arena. 67% of companies have multiple tools in place so they can deliver an omnichannel content experience.

If the idea of multiple platforms in your martech stack with overlapping functionalities doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, you’re not alone. In fact, this is such a common challenge in the marketing industry that it’s led to the rise of a new solution: the headless CMS.

Headless CMS decouples the frontend from the backend. It gives you a way to develop and deploy content, but it doesn’t marry that effort to a specific presentation layer. Instead, you use application programming interfaces (APIs) to bring information from your headless CMS to websites, apps, social media channels, digital storefronts, and even emerging fields like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

The delivers a number of benefits, including:

• Omnichannel functionality: Traditional content management systems allow for the development of content in the backend with the intention of publishing it on a specific frontend. But as today’s consumer expects brands to be where they’re at — that is, on multiple platforms — traditional CMS presents a challenge. By separating the presentation layer out, headless CMS enables content management on an omnichannel scale. Teams get the power to then display that content where, when, and how they want.

• Content as a service (CaaS): With a headless CMS, you can take a modular, cloud-based approach to your content. Through APIs, your team gains the agility to show audiences tailored messaging on a wide range of platforms. CaaS enables a flexible, future-proof content strategy.

• Scalability: When you decouple your CMS from a presentation layer, you unlock options. You can then compose your martech stack to deliver the right content to the right channels at the right time. When you need more functionality for additional channels, the headless nature of your CMS makes it easy to stack other technologies on top.

• Speed and performance: Without the presentation layer in the mix, content can be created, approved, and adapted more quickly. And because it’s developed in a display-agnostic way, it’s easier to prep it for deployment on specific channels. Plus, once it’s there, display is quick. Because the API delivers the content — rather than rendering it on the server side — assets load quickly on websites, apps, and more. All of this means your team can move more quickly while supporting high-quality, consistent messaging from your brand.

• Improved security: Digital attacks often target the presentation layer as a way into a company’s CMS. When you lop off that head, you shrink the footprint hackers, bots, and other unsavory players can hit.

All of that may sound pretty convincing to anyone within a marketing org. But when it comes to working with the enterprise as a whole, money talks. To get buy-in from leadership, it helps to present a financially convincing case for headless CMS.

Because of the benefits we just laid out, headless content management can limit costly mistakes. By lowering the likelihood of a data breach, it protects your company from that expensive fallout, which cost an average of more than $9 million last year.

It also helps you keep customers in your marketing funnels. A BBC survey found that consumers won’t even wait three seconds for a site to load. Headless CMS can speed your brand’s digital performance, preventing lost leads and, worse yet, churn.

Beyond that, you can tie some direct savings to making this adjustment to your stack. When compared to a traditional CMS, headless content management delivers notably lower costs. Storyblok surveyed more than 40 companies with more than 5,000 employees. They found the following:

• Implementation costs an average of $128,787.50 for traditional CMS but $73,406.52 for a headless solution, delivering savings of $55,380.98

• Yearly maintenance costs an average of $39,637.50 for traditional CMS but $19,734.78 for headless, delivering savings of $19,902.72

• Yearly training and support costs an average of $29,855.00 for traditional CMS but $16,633.04 for headless, delivering savings of $13,221.96

That brings total savings across the surveyed organizations to more than $88,500, and that’s just in the first year. The annual savings in terms of ongoing costs — maintenance along with training and support — totals more than $30,000.

As with all martech tools, not all are created equal. To provide you with concrete evidence of what headless CMS can do to drive results for enterprises, we’re focusing on one headless CMS provider today: our partner Storyblok.

Per a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ report, organizations saw tangible gains after the implementation of Storyblok. Specifically, the report revealed that brands realized the following:

To give you an idea of how those benefits shake out over time, Forrester looked at the effects over a three-year period:

In short, your marketing organization could stand to gain a lot by making the move to a headless CMS

That said, change isn’t easy, and making this kind of adjustment will require some concerted change management efforts. Is it worth it, then?

That depends on your marketing org. The lift of getting your new CMS up and running might be worth it if you’re exhibiting the following symptoms of a bad status quo:

• You’re deploying multiple CMS tools

• Your marketing org struggles with omnichannel deployment

• You feel limited by your CMS’s presentation layer

If all of that sounds familiar, we’ve got good news. You don’t have to navigate all of this alone. We can help with implementing your headless CMS, integrating it with your martech stack, and training your team on it. For support to smooth the transition and maximize the benefits of going headless, contact our team at gateB.