Assessing your business requirements
What’s the best headless content management system? Well, the answer to that depends heavily on your organization. To figure out what you need, start by thinking about your current digital maturity. Have you mapped your customer journeys? Are you collecting data on the experiences you offer before and after purchases? Are you using that data to engage your customers by persona? What high-performance use cases would you like to explore?
Once you’ve clarified the distance between your current customer experience maturity and your future ambitions, think about the features and available architecture that will help you close that gap. How far across the model you want to move will determine how complex your CMS needs to be. Since you’re moving beyond a monolithic, traditional CMS, do you need a decoupled CMS? A hybrid-headless CMS, or something else?
What do you want to achieve with your content? Where are you now in terms of personalized relationships with your customers, and how far do you want to go? Are you aiming to deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences?
9 headless CMS features you need
1. Creating and editing content
As a minimum requirement, your CMS should let you easily create, edit, and publish digital content. The easier it is to use, the more time you’ll have to concentrate on your strategy. With a headless CMS, the content creation and editing experience on the back end is separate from the front-end presentation layer, so that content creators can work in a consistent user interface, independent from and in parallel with front-end developers. The editing environment should include templates for webpages and other content types with drag-and-drop or WYSIWYG functionality.
2. Personalization and analytics
The future of digital marketing lies in building experiences that are relevant and personalized for your customers, no matter how they choose to interact with you. A headless CMS, however, despite its ability to reach a seeming infinite number of channels, does not in itself support optimization of this type. In order to have this feature, you’ll need a hybrid-headless CMS. A hybrid-headless CMS can collect and process interaction data in real time, and help you interpret that data to understand where your customers are in their buying journey. With that information, you can then show them content that’s personalized to their situation.
You’ll also need to make sure you’re capturing their entire experience across all your channels, which is why it’s important to have a CMS that operates as part of a larger, composable digital experience platform.
3. Workflows, reporting, and content organization
Are there a lot of people involved in producing your content? Make sure your CMS has version control and can track the details of your content from start to finish, from authoring, editing, and approval to publication, promotion, and reporting.
The ability to customize, control, and streamline workflows within your CMS will help everyone work together smoothly and stay on track with deadlines. And with features like intelligent reporting tools and dashboards, you’ll be able to keep tabs on different categories of content in your ecosystem, like content that’s awaiting approval and content per topic.
If content editors and other end users often make urgent updates, look for a CMS with strong organizational and SEO-friendly functionality, like link management, so that your content is automatically accessible even as it moves around or changes on your site.
4. User and role-based administration
Having control over who can access content and features will help you prevent mistakes. Choose a headless CMS that allows customizable user administration, including room to expand as your needs change.
Ensuring your chosen solution allows for role-based rights will help you scale as you grow, as it enables you to manage permissions for groups of people instead of individuals.
5. Security
Imagine this: you’ve worked hard to refine your digital strategy and build personalized relationships with your customers, only to wake up one day to discover there’s been a security breach. Protecting your data and your customers’ data will help you retain trust in the products and services you offer.
Some CMS platforms integrate with strong authentication mechanisms to beef up security and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information. Make sure your CMS integrates well with your chosen enterprise security provider or third-party authentication systems.
6. Multichannel scalability
If you’re looking into headless CMSs, your organization is probably prioritizing reaching customers across multiple digital channels. API-driven, headless content management systems enable efficient content delivery to many different channels, devices, and interfaces and developers will be able to choose their preferred frameworks for front-end development, such as Vue.js, React or Angular. If you want a future-proof solution that can accommodate the latest channels such as IoT devices — or channels that are not in existence yet — a headless CMS is the right way to go.
7. Multilingual content capabilities
Before the digital revolution, marketers struggled to deliver their message far and wide. Digital marketing allows you to skip across borders and expand your customer base with ease. But no matter how great your message is or how easily you can deliver it, you won’t reach your audience if you’re not speaking their language — literally.
If you currently serve an international audience or expect to in the near future, make sure you choose a headless CMS solution that supports multilingual editing tools and intuitive localization workflows. Laws surrounding digital information and privacy vary from country to country, so you’ll want to look for a CMS with information governance controls that comply with local regulations where your customers live.
8. Flexibility, scalability, and performance
Your CMS is a long-term investment. Make sure your headless CMS is scalable enough to grow with your business. Headless CMSs are “API-first” and support an extensible range of GraphQL and restful APIs so you can do more with your content across different channels, touchpoints, and devices.
Generally, you can either run your headless CMS from your own servers or on the cloud. SaaS headless CMS platforms can speed up your time to market and also give you the agility you wouldn’t otherwise have to handle traffic spikes and changing demand.
9. Content and commerce integration
With customers expecting more from their online experiences, it’s almost impossible to do e-commerce now without connecting it to appealing content. If you need a CMS for both e-commerce and digital marketing, you’ll be integrating it with commerce functionality via APIs. For the smoothest integration, look for composable digital experience solutions that let you pick and choose the functionality you need, comfortable with the knowledge that the pieces are designed to work together seamlessly.
A single-pane-of-glass interface will help you unify disparate sources of data in one place. Additional features like seamless and adaptable inventory management, next-step automation, and easy integration with payment, shipping, and tax providers will help you bring a simple shopping experience to your customers.
CMS architecture: Why it matters
In a nutshell, the CMS architecture you choose depends on how complex your online presence will be. The architecture can also limit your flexibility in terms of how editors and development teams work together, which channels you can deliver your content to and how quickly, and how easy it is to make changes to content across channels.
If you’re aiming to future-proof your marketing tech with the ability to reach any number of channels, headless architecture is essential. If you want the user experience on those channels to be personalized, you’ll need a hybrid-headless solution.
Make sure you understand the differences so that your CMS doesn’t hold you back from providing the best possible experience to your customers.