Why Structured Content Is the Foundation of a Successful Headless CMS Strategy
Organizations are creating digital experiences at a rapid pace. They are adopting more types of technology and leveraging that technology to reach their customers across a growing number of channels. As technology adoption has increased, companies have realized that the creation and management of content for digital experiences is just as important as the technology behind those experiences. Headless content management systems promise flexibility but only when content is designed correctly. Structured content is at the heart of every successful headless CMS implementation. Without structured content, companies find that headless CMS systems are difficult to manage and scale. Structured content is the foundation behind headless CMS systems.
Structured Content Enables True Omnichannel Delivery
One of the most cited benefits of a headless CMS is the ability to deliver content to any channel. However, this benefit depends on one additional factor: whether or not the content was structured. Streamline development with headless CMS by ensuring that structured content models are in place from the beginning, reducing friction across channels and teams. Structured content is content that has been separated into different elements or categories. Instead of a few blocks of text that entail all the information, you might have headers, descriptions, metadata, calls to action, media information, and more. This separation of content elements allows them to be formatted depending on where they're published, enabling content to be adapted for websites, apps, kiosks, and beyond without rebuilding it from scratch.
Without structured content, omnichannel content delivery falls flat, as it would be impossible to take a piece of content and deliver it anywhere that would make sense to an end-user. In this case, structured content gives brands the flexibility and control they want, as they continuously expand into new platforms and channels.
Structured Content Improves Scalability and Long-Term Maintainability
If you're looking for a headless CMS to provide your company with scalability, you might want to look for a solution that also encourages structured content. Many companies only think of scalability in the here and now, but scaling your digital presence can be a significant challenge if you don't make use of structured content. Many companies will create increasing amounts of content over time, making it necessary to be able to update all of that content easily and with large-scale changes made all at once. This can quickly become a complicated endeavor if structured content is not considered.
From a long-term perspective, structured content allows for better maintainability. For one, managing technical debt is far more accessible, as integrations are easier to maintain over time with structured content. Furthermore, because structured content has been broken into smaller sections, it's easier for employees to understand how content is created and formatted. This makes it easier to onboard new team members, so when thinking about the advantages of a headless CMS, consider structured content and how it can help, even in the long term!
Structured Content Enables Custom Interfaces and Workflows
Web interfaces and workflows can become increasingly idiosyncratic, reflecting the unique preferences of individual users or teams. But allowing for this level of customization becomes impractical when the content is unstructured. Structured content enables a wide variety of user interfaces to interact with the same underlying data in a consistent way. In a headless CMS, developers can create different displays and workflows tailored to the needs of different teams or stakeholders because the content is predictable, and the relationships between content elements are clear.
Even without a headless architecture, leveraging an unstructured approach would significantly increase development time and error-proneness, as developers would need to account for a variety of unpredictable ways that users might try to interact with the content.
Structured content also supports structured workflows that can be customized to the specific roles involved. For example, approval workflows can vary widely depending on the document type, business area, or even particular projects. With structured content, it’s easy to define these workflows in a flexible manner that adapts to whatever role is interacting with the document.
Structured Content Supports Personalization and Dynamic Experiences
Many modern digital experiences are dynamic and personalized. Content changes based on who is using it, where they are, or even how they’re accessing it (web versus mobile). This level of personalization wouldn’t be practical with unstructured content. Only with structured content can different piece of content be treated as separate elements that can be pieced together to provide a cohesive user experience. A “page” or experience can easily draw in different headlines, main messages, images, or even calls to action while excluding other elements of content that may not be relevant to a particular segment of viewers.
The personalization options dissolve when you start working with unstructured content because there’s no reliable way to extract the necessary elements from unparsed or unpredictable text. Structured content provides easy ways for personalization engines to query the right content and provide it to the right user. Structured content also allows for quicker and more accurate personalizations in comparison to trying to guess what a user needs by analyzing a large chunk of text.
Even over time, structured content helps separate things that need to be personalized (like an offer or image related to a campaign) versus what can remain the same across all requests (like brand messaging).
Structured Content Enhances Localization and Global Content Management
Structured content is also extremely helpful when the users or readers are international. Being able to support multiple markets is already tricky, but it becomes impossible if your content isn’t structured. Structured content allows localization teams to work on specific fields without messing up an entire content entry. This makes it easier for everyone to stay consistent while localizing aspects like messaging or legal disclaimers. More than just localization, structured content enables easier localization efforts for an infinite number of markets.
Even without a headless approach, having structured contents means localization teams can inject relevant content rather than having to copy over files each and every time there’s a new market. New markets can be stood up quickly, and any changes to global messaging or other updates will be effortless with structured content; it’s just a matter of updating information in relevant fields as opposed to trying to find and replace each instance of messaging across an infinite number of pages.
Structured Content Strengthens SEO and Content Performance
Many aspects of content performance measurement and search engine optimization benefit from a focus on structured content. When teams follow the structured content approach, many of the same SEO best practices that we need to manually implement for each piece of unstructured content become much easier to automate. Metadata is a great example of this. With structured content, metadata like headings, descriptions, schema attributes, and internal links become much easier to manage. All of these best practices help our content rank better and perform well among our target audiences.
From a content strategy perspective, structured content also allows us to achieve greater reuse and optimization at a large scale. The ability to identify high-performing content elements and reuse them across different channels is only possible when individual content elements can be measured effectively. While it’s possible to optimize unstructured content in many ways, fine-grained insights are much more challenging with unstructured content. Finally, structured content opens up the gates for developing SEO best practices at a much more granular level than page-level SEO optimization.
Structured Content Aligns Teams and Streamlines Workflows
Structured content also plays an important role in improving team alignment and workflow efficiency. Many organizations work across several different departments. These may include content creators, designers, developers, and digital marketers, among others. A structured content approach helps align teams in the sense that it provides a clear description of what each team should contribute to a piece of content. Content creators know what content fields they need to fill out, designers will know which content components they can work with, and developers will know which data structures they need to use.
Moreover, workflow automation also becomes much more effective with a focus on structured content. There are several different workflow processes that need to be applied to every piece of content as it goes through its lifecycle approval processes, versioning, and so on. When we treat content on a granular level instead of on a document or page level, we can apply these processes more effectively. In the long term, the use of structured content allows organizations to foster greater collaboration between teams, improved efficiency in their content operations, and much more success overall.
Structured Content Future-Proofs Headless CMS Implementations
Digital channels are always changing, whether new ones are created, existing ones evolve, or even regulations or user preferences necessitate rapid shifts in the content. Structural content is what allows headless CMS implementations to be resilient against change. Because content is separate from its presentation and because its meaning is inherent to its structure rather than being freeform text, it can be adapted to new use cases without the need for reauthored content. Whether the next major evolution in frontend technology will be another social media channel, another AI-driven experience, or something entirely different yet to be imagined, structured content will still be there.
Future-proofing isn’t just about the technology itself. It’s about ensuring that any money spent on content technology will continue to provide value for the long term. Structured content helps here, too, since it is always usable, searchable, and adaptable regardless of how frontend technologies may change. This is all the more reason to invest in structured content on the front end. When implementing a headless CMS, it is possible to future-proof content thanks to the usability enabled by its structure and because of the long-term agility and growth that structure provides.
Structured Content Supports Quality Control, Compliance, and Governance
As digital ecosystems grow, it can be difficult to govern the content in the absence of any structural elements. Structured content enables organizations to support quality control of all their content. Even with many pieces of content produced by many different teams, it becomes easier to ensure that content is correct, complete, compliant, consistent, and even ultimately usable. This is made possible through the requirements that headless CMSs define for fields and by implementing rules for how content must appear and how it can interact with other pieces of content.
In terms of governance specifically, structured content also enables organizations to audit their content with far less effort than would otherwise be required. Rather than reviewing pages and pages of content, individuals can simply check certain fields, such as disclaimers or pricing. Even better, updates can also be performed on a field-by-field basis. This means that if something needs to be updated, it will be updated wherever it needs to be. In time, this can all lead to improved content quality, fewer mistakes made during publishing, and digital ecosystems that everyone can trust all thanks to governing the content with structure despite how complex things may become with an expanding ecosystem.
Automation and intelligent content operations
One of the features that is made possible when content is structured is that intelligent automation systems can perform more of the content creation and content lifecycle management without human intervention. While this was briefly stated in the previous section, it warrants further explanation. The ability of tools and frameworks to perform analytics, make recommendations, or make optimizations to the content operations of an organization all require structured content in order to perform their functions. Enabling content operations that intelligently optimize the performance of content means transforming the capabilities of a headless CMS system from basic to advanced. The next level of content automation that contribute to improving the digital experiences created by an organization over time can only be enabled through the adoption of structured content.
Conclusion
The above-mentioned benefits of the use of a headless CMS system all demonstrate the importance of using structured content. Structured content is the foundation that enables every major capability and benefit that is enabled through headless CMS architecture, and the flexibility, scalability, localization, SEO, personalization, omnichannel delivery, and improved team collaboration that is possible through these types of systems all rely upon having structured content as their backbone. As a result, investing in the use of structured content even beyond the setup of the initial CMS system is necessary to ensure that the system acts as an important digital asset for the organization.
