Blogs

Headless Experience Management Done Right

Stefan Schinkel

Managing customer experiences in today’s omnichannel world can be hard if you don’t leverage the technology to do the work for you. The upper right quadrant has you vendor locked and exhausted your time-to-value as well the return-on-investment. Your technology team is frustrated with proprietary technology, which requires scarce (and expensive) resources, while the cool kids play with a stack that is #AgileAF. Or, if you’re at the other end of the spectrum, you chose this cool start-up pure headless CMS that is far from mature, where your team is forced to build experience management capabilities from the ground up, over and over, even for simple digital touchpoints. Not ideal either. Fortunately, there is a middle ground.

Building a digital experience platform doesn’t have to break the bank, it just requires a solid content foundation, that helps you to create and orchestrate connected, trusted and continuous customer experiences. Here are some capabilities to look out for.

API-first

An API-first platform is built as such from its inception and not as an afterthought. All critical elements that allow enterprises to create and manage experiences should be treated as content and exposed over REST or GraphQL APIs, including permissions and relationships. No restrictions. With a decoupled architecture of your content foundation, technology teams have the freedom of innovation to build applications with the stack & speed that they want, not just the front-end as well dedicated authoring applications as well. Oh, and of course, you can still personalize experiences, build API-based web forms.

Cloud-native

dilbert

No further comment. Ok, maybe one thing.  

Front-end Agnostic & Head-optional

A hybrid or head-optional CMS offers many advantages. Re-use of content and fuel omnichannel experiences, as well as the flexibility of the experience delivery technology. A hybrid CMS can help to optimize resources supporting the enterprise and therefore impacting business outcomes. It will reduce the dependencies of vendors and allows for agility in both the marketing and development team. Digital marketers can drive time-to-market and time-to-value with NoCode tools (like building microsites and landing pages for their campaigns) and still have undisrupted access to tools like preview, inline editing, drag & drop, personalization, when managing apps built in AngularVue or ReactEdit Mode Anywhere at its best for both teams.  

NoCode vs Extensibility

This is the kicker. Digital Marketing is a team sport, which means that composing the technology stack should be a team effort, as well. That is to say if you want to get the most out of your digital marketing stack. So why settle for technology that is hindering or even frustrating both marketers and development teams? A content foundation platform will offer the NoCode tooling that puts Digital Marketers in the driver’s seat to crush the company’s digital ambition, independently from development teams. Conversely, technology teams can focus on innovation and move the technology needle even further. Everybody wins. The team wins. Also, NoCode means that development teams have the flexibility to go wild on coding where and when appropriate. It is crucial to have that balance in your content foundation that enables development teams to extend the platform, independently from vendors or Third Parties. Open for business since 2003.

Stefan Schinkel
Chief Revenue Officer
November 21, 2019

Filed Under:

api-first headless cms

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