Simplify Content Management with a CMS That Works The Way You Do

5 MINUTE READ / BY KILE LINDGREN

Managing content across channels can be a puzzle.

Take a moment to consider the channels where your business publishes content.

As a B2B company, you might have:

  • Websites

  • Ecommerce sites

  • Partner portal

  • Customer mobile app

  • Sales portal

Now ponder this: How easy is it to change that content? Yes, we’re talking about changing content across all the channels and various formats where your brand story lives.

No comment? Then it may be time to revisit your content management approach and the critical tools that support it, like your content management system (CMS).

Doing so will empower you to tell a better, more consistent brand story that matches the omnichannel consumption habits of today’s customers. When it’s easier to manage content, you can unlock more opportunities to effectively reach your audience, tailor your message, and maintain brand voice consistency.

Let’s examine what’s restricting your content management approach, the solution, and how you can build momentum toward lasting change.

Feeling restrained by your CMS, but aren’t sure you have the time or expertise to evaluate better options? Contact us for a free needs assessment. A talk with our experts will give you a better idea of what you need to look for to meet your needs.

What’s wrong with your content management approach?

Most B2B companies’ content management approach is stuck in the past. It’s held captive by monolithic CMS platforms that smush everything together—the content repository, backend editing interface, templates, and custom code.

While it’s nice to have everything neatly contained in a single site or app, a coupled model is restrictive. It’s siloed. And it’s not integrated with any of your other channels, meaning when you want to make updates, you’ll have to change it manually on every one of your properties. Every. Single. Time.

Traditional CMS platforms impair your flexibility and limit scalability. That prevents you from telling a consistent story. In today’s fast-publishing environment, you can’t afford to have an inflexible, unscalable system.

However, traditional CMS platforms remain the norm in the B2B space. Nearly half of the respondents in the State of Content Management 2023 survey said their organization still uses a traditional, monolithic CMS.

Coupled vs. Uncoupled:

What’s the Difference?

In a coupled environment, a “monolithic CMS” platform hosts the website and all its content; editors must manage assets in each siloed environment.

A non-coupled environment separates content from the frontend presentation layer. In this model, editors manage assets centrally and controls how they are presented in different channels.

This siloed content management approach is especially troublesome for you as a marketer. As the steward of storytelling and content, you need the ability to change and update your content easily to align with market changes.

But a traditional CMS makes updating nearly impossible without a developer’s help. Adding barriers wastes more time and money, especially if there are multiple rounds of collaboration.

Shun the siloes, centralize content

Stories draw customers to you. They’re persuasive. They prove that only your brand can solve their problem. Having a good story stimulates more sales.

However, many B2B companies suffer from the same storytelling problem: consistency. Your company has many people, across multiple departments, sharing your story in different contexts, formats, and channels.

What you need is a system—a headless CMS—that centralizes content and makes it easier for your teams to manage and share. A primary benefit of a headless CMS is the capability to create content once and then leverage it in multiple places. This results in significant time savings for your teams, making it easy for them to use content in their role.

When you store content in a headless CMS, you’re keeping it in a cloud-based hub that’s “decoupled” from the presentation layer. From this single source, you can leverage content to shape and share different versions of your story on the channels you publish.

What centralization looks like

Let’s say you’re a manufacturer with several SKUs. You serve numerous audiences. Each audience needs to hear a slightly different story and see different product details.

Those details might include:

  • Product name

  • Description

  • Pricing

  • Availability

  • How to order

  • Support

From an audience standpoint, you need to serve both internal and external people, including:

  • Customers

  • Partners

  • Sales team members

  • Executive teams

  • Warehousing and fulfillment teams

  • Training and support teams

Now, let’s put these elements together in tangible examples:

  • Customers see a public price list

  • Partners see their wholesale price and customer markup

  • Sales team members see incentives and special offers (in a private view)

A headless CMS is perfect for these scenarios because it enables you to:

  • Create all the content in a centralized hub

  • Personalize and customize information like pricing

  • Tag content so it’s routed for publishing in the right places

  • Publish updates automatically across channels so your story stays up to date

Hopefully, it’s becoming clear why the centralized, headless model is so beneficial in complex enterprise, member-based, and B2B environments. Centralization makes it easier to:

  • See, edit, and reuse content components

  • Empower non-technical users to build pages and assets

  • Ensure consistent brand storytelling across channels

  • Improve file organization

  • Personalize content for different audiences, users, and channels

We helped our client Western Research Institute (WRI) migrate to Storyblok, a leading headless CMS platform. WRI wanted to centralize their content so they could tell a better story and provide customers with a better experience across their digital channels—and adapt as their needs changed, without going through another complex tech overhaul.

Learn More About This Project

Centralizing content is powerful. It lets you accelerate the process of creating new content without sacrificing the consistency of your brand’s voice.

A centralized content management approach opens doors for storytellers on your team. With no coding needed, they can focus on where their talent is strongest—shaping the story—so your message can be strategically tailored and deliver more impact for your audience.

Choosing a headless CMS: We did the research for you

Changing your content management approach (and CMS) will help you tell a better story. Still, switching isn’t going to be easy; there’s a lot to consider.

Lucky for you, we spent time researching headless CMS options. It’s all in our comprehensive guide, The Buyer’s Guide to Modern CMS.

Our guide provides more details to help you:

  • See the difference between traditional and headless CMS

  • Compare headless CMS options

  • Ask the right questions

  • Find a partner who can make migration easier

With the right information, you can break up this intimidating project into a digestible, actionable plan.

Trust us to build the momentum your story needs

Even though you’ve read this post and are more knowledgeable on content management, you may still feel lost. That’s okay. We’re here to help.

Reach out to us to learn more about our proven, needs-based process for identifying technology that aligns with your business goals.

And if you’re not quite ready for a conversation, we encourage you to download our free buyer’s guide to headless CMS. It’s filled with insights that will get you on the right path to build momentum for your project.