Benefits of headless for your customer

Keith wiped his sweaty forehead. He could hear his heart thumping over the laboured breath. He has been running for the last 2 hours. Scratch that, he has been running for the last 2 years, since he started his business: selling custom furniture online. So, why is he running? 

Digital Innovation Gap

Keith, like 70 percent of business leaders, is trying to keep up with customers’ expectations in terms of digital experience. In order to succeed, however, he needs to be better equipped. 

The digital abilities of a business are directly tied to revenue, but a lot of business leaders are struggling to offer custom, personalized, omnichannel customer experiences with outdated tools. If your clients can relate to this struggle, it’s time they hear more about the headless CMS (Content Management System).

What is a Headless CMS?

A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system built as a content repository that makes content accessible via API (Application Programming Interface) to be displayed on any device and channel.
The term “headless” refers to the concept of removing the front-end, the head, from the back-end, the body. This, essentially, means you can add any “head” to  your “body”, making the headless CMS a very friendly hydra.

Benefits Of Using A Headless CMS

Now that we know what it means, let’s find out how a headless CMS can help your clients close the digital innovation gap and deliver digital experiences in a scalable, repeatable way.

Platform Independence

As we found out in the definition, a headless CMS is independent from any platforms. This type of CMS makes content accessible via API and it can be displayed on any device without having to make any changes. Simply put, Keith would be able to reach brand consistency across channels and meet the customers on all devices, offering them an omnichannel customer experience.
Having this cross-platform support will also increase your clients' speed to build, speed to market and time to value.

Free Technology Choice

Another great benefit is that your customers are free to use their technology of choice to connect the back-end to any of the “heads” or front-ends. Once the content is ready the developers can load it to a website, mobile app or any other channel using their preferred framework.

Personalization and Localization

When you choose a headless CMS to deliver future-proof digital experiences and content, you get the added benefit of personalization, localization and optimization.

Keith knows, as do your customers, that more than 80% of the users say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. A headless CMS would help any of your customers' content team to unify content management and seamless integration with personalization, localization, and optimization tools. They would be able to create a connected marketing stack and deliver personal digital experiences. Additionally, seamless integration means they can forget about slow waterfall workflows and, consequently they will have more time for content creation.

Using a headless CMS, your clients can easily unlock new revenue sources. They can reach a global audience because headless CMSs offer full localization support and a translation workflow for all types of content and assets: rich text, URLs, SEO metadata, and responsive images.

Architecture and Integration

Due to the separated nature of the headless CMS, your customers can choose the technologies that fit their current architecture. Each of the technologies is independent and acquired individually, giving them complete freedom over the technology stack. Developers can query the content via API and distribute it to any channel from a single source.

Especially since Covid-19 has pushed the market towards a digital-first economy, having this complete autonomy and control over your technology stack is more important than usual, helping companies stay ahead of the curve in a globally competitive market. 

Flexibility and Speed

A headless CMS overcomes the challenges of siloed content that is managed manually. More than that, the content team can make fast changes that are implemented across all channels, minimizing the impact of redesigns and product changes.
Some systems, like Storyblok, offer modular content blocks. These blocks can be reused in different situations and open up the possibility to automate a portion of your content creation process through using Intelligent Content, moving  towards data-driven, automated content creation.
The developers team, as stated before, also enjoys the benefit of flexibility by being able to work with any modern language stack.
To summarize, your customers would increase reuse, flexibility and experimentation for practitioners while allowing technical professionals to build and deploy in short iterative bursts.

Costs and Licensing

We established that the developer teams have complete freedom over the technology stack and can optimize it to their specific needs. Choosing what tools they need also saves money, by only buying the tools they need and by paying only for as long as they need them. Once a tool becomes obsolete, it can easily be removed from the stack and replaced with something more useful.

Onboarding and Adapting

Having an optimized stack has the added benefit of fewer tools that need to be implemented. Each tool is compact and specialized, by definition, so your customers' teams would get onboarded very quickly and they would also win time by only learning to use the tools specific to their activity.
In addition to that, by building a technology stack based on the team’s experience your clients will considerably shorten the time of implementation of the new system.

Updates and Security

Although it’s listed last, security is a major deciding factor when it comes to choosing a CMS for a business. Headless CMS platforms protect against security risks due to its decoupled nature. Most systems use API to provide content that is read-only. Additionally, that API can be placed behind an application and a security layer.
Generally, headless CMSs leave the rendering of the content they deliver client-side, rather than server-side, reducing the impact of any possible DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attacks).

Apart from these broad aspects, each tool is offered by an individual expert provider, which initiates updates regularly and in small sizes, reducing the overall security risk. Furthermore, if a problem arises in one of the tools, it will not affect the rest of the stack. These isolated issues pose a much lower risk and are much easier to control.

Key Takeaways

At the heart of every digital experience lies content. The way your clients approach their content delivery will impact their business and revenues.

By becoming our partner and selling Storyblok to your clients, you will be able to offer them, aside from the listed benefits above, an easy onboarding experience, a low maintenance effort, and transparent pricing. You will empower them to offer authentic digital experiences and to meet their users’ needs on any device, in a secure way, with a low-level effort investment.

As our partner you will benefit from revenue sharing, unlimited staff members that you can use on all development and customer spaces, unlimited development spaces, co-marketing and learning opportunities, the ability to build and sell apps, and a dedicated partner management team.