As a B2B business leader tasked with bringing digital transformation to your business you are faced with numerous challenges - not the least of which is whether headless content management is right for your business.
B2B players are midway through a rather steep learning curve; they are experiencing first-hand that becoming digital-first is not as simple as creating a rudimentary self-service portal and calling it a day. And with global digital transformation spending forecasted to reach an eye-watering $3.4 trillion by 2026, it’s mission critical not to get left behind in the technology acceleration race.
You may well be considering enterprise DXP’s - one stop platform solutions for ecommerce and content management. These solutions may be right for some but not for all. You may have conflicting or apparently divergent business needs: lead generation/ product sales and an e-commerce offering / or a fully personalized customer portal with the ability for your clients to manage their accounts in a military grade secure environment.
The complexities of your ever evolving roadmap can make those DXP solutions seem unsuitable.
So you have a headache.. but a headless architecture solution could well relieve your pain.
Put simply headless solutions decouple the CMS and front end from the diverse requirements of your back end. This results in a number of significant advantages for your business. So exactly what are those advantages?
1. Flexibility
In Headless architecture the front-end and back-end are separated, developers can use their preferred frameworks, libraries, and tools to build the presentation layer. This enables B2B businesses to quickly adapt to changing market trends and technologies.
A Headless CMS like Contentful allows for all your content to be controlled centrally and delivered into whatever format and whatever device with infinite ease. It's a fluid experience for your customers and a pain free job for your internal content managers.
Put simply the content created for your website can be effortlessly deployed across different channels for example, in a dedicated web app for your sales team to use in on-site presentations, played out in digital-out-of-homescreens at real world conferences and marketing events, or across your internal communication channels.
Additionally this form of architecture makes it easier to adopt new technologies, platforms, or channels as they emerge. This helps businesses stay ahead of the competition and maintain a long-term competitive advantage.
2. Interoperability and scalability
Headless solutions are highly scalable, enabling B2B companies to add new features and functionality as and when the business need arises.
The separation of front and back end means that headless architecture allows for the easy integration of new technologies and tools as they become available, and of course these new API sourced tools will be developed with up to the minute services and technologies.
The automation of connectors and marketplace integrations, and the seamless deployment of those new features mitigates cost and risk across your platform as a whole.
With a headless architecture, the front-end and back-end can scale independently. This allows businesses to optimise resources, handle increased traffic or demand, and maintain performance during peak times.
3. Faster load speeds and faster to market
With a headless solution the content your customers actually see is cached in the browser which means headless architecture allows for hugely faster website load times and a much more efficient user experience. This can have a massively enhanced and positive effect on your SEO.
Research by Backlinko found that the top 10 positions in Google’s SERP had an average page speed of 1.65 seconds.
The improved page load speed given by headless architecture will massively improve those Google rankings and give enhanced customer experience, with your customers no longer left waiting for content to load and bouncing off the page as a result.
Google's own research showed that the chance of a bounce increased by 32% when page load time went from one to three seconds, and by 90% when the page load time went from one to five seconds. If a site takes up to 10 seconds to load, then the chance of a bounce increases to 100%.
Headless also means that you can deliver much more interactions, tell more engaging brand stories knowing that these will not compromise page load speeds.
But it's not just load speed that's benefitted by headless.
Speed of course is hugely important when it comes to deployment cycles and headless will fastrack integration of new features or services, and this in itself will help your business, while making you look good! Decoupling the presentation layer from the back-end allows developers to work in parallel, which speeds up the development process. Moreover, changes to the front-end can be made without affecting the back-end, leading to faster deployment of new features and updates.
4. Omnichannel experience and brand consistency
You have developed a strong brand with clear rules in place to ensure a consistent customer experience but with a conventional structure those rules can start to fall apart as content is managed across numerous channels and platforms. Maintaining consistency of experience is a central pillar of good customer experience.
A headless architecture can support multiple front-end channels, such as web, mobile apps, kiosks, and IoT devices. This helps businesses deliver a consistent and personalized user experience across different platforms and devices.
The reassurance that a headless architecture solution brings ensures a consistent user experience across all devices and platforms. It doesn’t matter how your customers access your content, you know that they will have the same experience of your brand across all platforms. As more and more customers buy your products online, and more and more of them interact with your sales teams digitally, this consistency is a necessity.
Your business is evolving, delivering new products, with new ways of your customers understanding them and buying them. Ensuring that they buy not just your products, but your brand, and become loyal advocates of your business is mission critical. Choosing a headless architecture solution may well be the single best decision you could make to ensure your business fastracks its transformation and its growth.
