In a world where commerce and communications are increasingly multichannel and multi-device, it stands to reason that businesses have to adapt the content they serve to their customers and prospects accordingly.
Such content is produced by various teams in the company – product, sales, marketing, customer service – and needs to be managed so that it is flexible. It also needs to be able to be rapidly deployed to various forms of output and display such as mobile apps, IoT, and smart devices, chatbots, or AI devices as well as kiosks and in-store screens.
Traditionally, this content was inextricably linked to websites, which first took the form of hard-coded HTML pages, and later on, were powered by proprietary content management (CMS) systems such as WordPress, Adobe and Drupal. These included a database of content, an interface to manage that content, the integration between the content and the output – the presentation of the content as a page on a website, say – as well as the output itself.
While traditional CMS function very well for simpler websites, the client experience and interactions for larger brands these days include way more touchpoints.
Ideally, since the cost of creating separate systems for each is prohibitive, the content created should be agnostic and be repurposed for more than one channel. These considerations have made services such as Storyblok (Adidas, Decathlon), Prismic (Deliveroo, eBay, Levi’s) and Contentful (Spotify, Nike, Lyft) that offer native content-as-a-service solutions increasingly popular in recent times.
Content infrastructure
Content infrastructure is a way of thinking about the structure of content that is divorced from the medium or framework it usually inhabits.
Similar to headless commerce (link to blogpost), content-as-a-service decouples the front-end interface (the website or mobile app) from the back-end (the library or repository of the content and its delivery). Where it goes further is how content can be added via an interface layer to the cloud in categorized chunks that are called out via REST-based APIs (JSON, XML) when needed and managed via a structured, custom workflow for authoring and editing.
Why deploy content-as-a-service?
With omnichannel and a consistent customer experience becoming more important to organizations, the business case for content-as-a-service to fuel them is getting stronger by the day.
Speed: Content created once can be pushed to or updated across all platforms simultaneously to provide a consistent customer experience. Response times are reduced and real-time preview and editing are also possible.
Flexibility: Since content-as-a-service is platform-independent, it offers content creators and developers more flexibility in the creation and structuring of the content. Pages or apps can be built and maintained without worrying about the pieces of content populating them and vice-versa. Plugins and widgets can be easily integrated into these systems.
Scalable: With a single content creation and developer team, content can be reused on multiple digital properties – and those that will exist in the future.
Personalization: Content isn’t restricted to pages or even chunks of text. Digital assets such as images, video, audio, and experiential tools ensure that disparate audiences are served up relevant content at the right time using marketing automation. This results in a tailored customer journey without needing unlimited and unique content.
Insights: A content-as-a-service architecture can measure the performance of individual pieces of content across different channels and provide immediate feedback, so that campaigns can be tweaked with little delay.
To learn more about BORN Group’s content services, please contact Mackenzie Johnson ([email protected]).
