25 years ago, in January 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay with the title “Content is King”. And even now content is still ruling the internet. Content has always been the identity of a brand, company, organization through the technical paradigm of a website. It has been generated across multiple departments within a company at a very incredible pace. It has also become painful for the management, structure, and delivery of this content – even for those who are using the robust content management systems (CMS).
This led to the need for a new approach termed Content-as-a-Service. In the last few years, the traditional CMS has seen growth as headless CMS. However, the headless CMS is better in terms of the technical paradigm. Henceforth, many companies are embracing the Content-as-a-Service which is also built on headless. The Content as a Service approach offers an alternative for conventional CMSs. In this article, we are going to discuss the CaaS incomplete details, and how it can be beneficial for your brand marketing.
Content-as-a-Service: Introduction.
You can find many different definitions of CaaS across the internet. The popular ones are terms like “Headless CMS” or “Decoupled CMS”. However, these terms are just the form of Content-as-a-Service. In its most simple form, Content as a Service is a service model that focuses on managing the content into those feeds where the other apps or properties can use the content as per their requirements. It is a cloud-based solution that stores the content in an indefinite form. The user can pull the content and loads it whenever or wherever required. There is no fixed shape or format of the content in which you will get it. It can be anything or go anywhere.
Wondering what is content?
Let’s go into more detail. Content is all that you see as:
- Blogs or Articles
- Whitepapers or Case Studies
- Videos or Webinars
- Sales or Marketing Assets
But content is not limited to these categories. It is also helpful for documentation, app features or functionality, enriched experiences through any language.
Characteristics of CaaS
There are four major characteristics of Content as a Service which makes it different from the traditional CMS.
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Structured Content
In CaaS, the content is not in the form of large blog posts but separated into fragments. That’s why the design & layout structure of the content gets removed and it is easier for the content to be pulled from a repository before delivering to a specific channel.
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Decoupled infrastructure
Separating the backed content storage & management layer from the frontend presentation layer shows the headless CMS approach. Henceforth, this CMS architecture is easy to handle & preventing marketers or coders from slowing each other down.
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Cloud Hosted
Similar to SaaS, CaaS also used the cloud for storing, delivering, and scaling the resources more easily. Instead of storing the resources on your server, the vendor would be able to provide everything you need.
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Separate presentation layers
Separate presentation layers facilitate the creation of customized front ends to fit different channels and yield better digital experiences.
Why is there a need for Content as a Service?
In the past years, the traditional CMS platforms were required to manage only one channel, i.e. the brand website. Due to this, the CMS was only concerned with the website, i.e. the content stored in the backend will be delivered to the frontend without any issues.
However, this traditional approach wasn’t able to evolve with the increasing number of channels arising today. It wasn’t able to identify how these channels can impact the desired customer experience. There are different touchpoints by which the brands interact with customers. But with the evolution of new technologies such as the Internet of Things, the number of touchpoints has even increased more and the number is only going to increase in the future.
As per Gartner, by the beginning of 2021, there will be more than 5.8 billion IoT endpoints. It is an increment of 21% from 2019. IoT is helping the online merchants by increasing the touchpoints where they can interact such as through websites, mobile applications, wearables, smart devices, tablets, etc. Due to the availability of these channels, the customers’ expectation is also getting changed. Customers are expecting online merchants to offer them an omnichannel experience and a high level of personalization at every touchpoint. The traditional CMS was monolithic due to which it can’t just keep up. Hence, CaaS is required to deliver content to these channels.
Benefits of Content as a Service
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Custom UI for all touchpoints
You can’t easily break the content and code-free when they are tightly coupled together, and that’s why can’t deliver it to the multitude of channels available today. As the touchpoints have evolved the brands need to find different ways by which they can provide content to PWAs, SPAs, Web Apps, Mobile Apps, etc.
CaaS is helpful in this. You can use it to create custom front ends as per your requirements and showcase the right content to your customers at the right time. It is highly futuristic technology, allowing online merchants for creating frontends that are not commonly used.
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Omnichannel marketing optimizes customer experience
Today’s customers expect brands to deliver the content on every platform with which they interact. It is a very normal scenario that customers start searching for the product on their laptop, check its features from their smartphone but make the final order from their smart speaker.
Also, the brands wish to market themselves to the customers at every touchpoint and do it in a synchronized way through omnichannel marketing. It is possible through CaaS for multichannel publishing and reusable content. The first approach of CaaS is to enable brands to publish the content to any channel just by using APIs.
It also means that content can be reused across these channels without too much additional work needing to be done by marketers or developers.
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Personalized Product Recommendations & Pricing Strategies
Personalization has become a very important aspect of e-commerce customer experience or marketing. Online marketers have observed an increase of 20% in sales while delivering personalized experiences. 80% of online customers prefer to buy from an online seller that offers personalized experiences. 77% of customers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized experience.
But providing personalization is not a cup of tea for every brand. The online merchants require huge datasets of their customers. CaaS helps in managing the content of multiple platforms, thus brands can accumulate more data on the preferences of customers and then personalize content for them.
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Consolidated Analytics
Content delivery is also not very uniform on different touchpoints with disparate systems. For instance, a piece of content that was shown on a CMS through a browser will be shown properly on the mobile device but get distorted on an IoT device. In this case, the content marketer might have to look at three or four systems and aggregate statistics to see how their content is performing. In a CaaS world, all channel requests for content live in a centralized location.
Wrapping Up
In this article, we have gone through all the important aspects of CaaS. At Emizentech, one of the best eCommerce development company in India, we are having expertise in developing custom e-commerce solutions. Please let us know your requirements.
