From local to global: how to scale content delivery
Today’s digital market goes far beyond local reach
Read on for a look at what headless CMS is and how it supports your success in global expansion initiatives.
What is a headless CMS?
Let’s take it from the top: what is a headless CMS? A headless CMS is a content management system that separates the content creation from the presentation layer, meaning it has no rigid, default frontend. It does so through the use of APIs, which connect your technology with limitless technology options as well as frontends.
As such, you’re free to push your content to whatever channel you want without having to worry about limitations. In fact, according to the The State of CMS 2023: United Kingdom, 33% of businesses are already using a headless CMS to manage their content from one central hub and publish simultaneously on any channel.
This makes headless CMS the premiere choice for a flexible, future-proofed system that can accommodate any technology that you may need. Certain systems may also offer advanced native tools such as customizable workflows, internationalization features, and digital asset managers.
Headless CMSs also support a key element of digital success: reduced go-to-market.
Why does go-to-market time matter?
Audiences wait for no one, even if your content is top-of-the-line. Keeping them engaged and interested is key, and you can’t do that without a time-conscious upload schedule. That’s where go-to-market time comes in.
Go-to-market time is how long it takes for you to launch your projects. The length of your go-to-market has a direct impact on your content’s success and thus the success of your company. This is true for a few reasons.
For one thing, a faster go-to-market time can directly impact your brand’s market share. The longer it takes to present your work to the world, the longer your competitors have to put out their own content that builds their brand instead. You can’t make up for that missed exposure.
It’s not just about establishing yourself as a reliable source of content. If it takes you a long time to publish, you may be more likely to miss out on valuable time-sensitive opportunities. For example, if there’s a trend within your industry that’s generating a lot of buzz, it’s essential to present your related content while people are still interested.
Fast go-to-market also results in lower costs. One part of this is connected to the above: the sooner you can get a foothold in the market, the sooner you become familiar to users, making other marketing expenses less necessary.
Moreover, a shorter go-to-market also matters on the production side: the longer it takes you to produce content, the more resources you need to spend on it. Thus, limiting this phase cuts down on costs. It saves your team time and effort, too.
All of this is only multiplied when you’re expanding to global channels. As such, the first step towards successful global expansion is minimizing go-to-market time.
How does headless CMS lower go-to-market?
Faster content deployment
With headless CMS, you can create content faster. This is because users can push content to multiple channels simultaneously. Not only does this make the content consistent, but it’s also instantly deployed to users no matter where they access it.
Even if you’re managing several channels, content production is centralized to one unified dashboard, so distributing multiple instances is a breeze. Some headless CMSs even offer customizable workflows so that all teams can work together with a clear idea of the content pipeline.
The inherent flexibility of the technology also helps to ensure timely content deployment. There’s minimal downtime required when changing technology or adding channels, so content creators can keep working while developers make necessary improvements.
Increased content reuse
Monolithic CMSs often present content as one single element that cannot easily be reused. Headless CMSs, by contrast, offer all the benefits of composable content: content is broken down into the attributes that make them up such as images, text boxes, and videos.
These can then be used in several instances of content, acting as very flexible templates. Developers only have to make these components once, then content creators can use them over and over again rather than starting from scratch. Nevertheless, this reusability doesn’t mean they can’t be customized.
The content within can either be left exactly as it is or altered completely. The result is a time-saving process that ensures uniform presentation without sacrificing the necessary customization necessary for global expansion.
Streamlined localization process
Localization is an essential part of content creation on a global scale. It makes your work more accessible to more audiences and can increase the chances of conversion. Optimizing this process is thus essential.
Headless helps you do so by centralizing your content so it’s easy to manage multiple localizations from one place – and with the omnichannel capabilities, to publish from one place as well. That means no wasted time individually managing each site, a problem that only becomes greater as the number of localizations grows.
The API-first nature also means connecting any localization tools you need without missing a beat. Moreover, top-tier headless CMSs offer specific localization tools such as field-level translations, allowing one content tree to push your content in different languages to a limitless number of locales.
How Oatly built 16 global websites in just two months
Oatly, a leading name in the plant-based dairy industry, offers a shining example of how headless CMS can benefit the process of global expansion through a shorter go-to-market. Using Storyblok, Oatly found a variety of benefits that directly impacted their ability to localise while minimizing go-to-market time, including:
- Best-of-breed solutions that supported localization needs as they scaled to a global market
- Time-saving content that can be copied and applied across multiple pages as well as 16 localized sites
- A visual editor that allowed content creators to act independently instead of spending time going back and forth between developers
- Developers can use programming languages they were already familiar with rather than having to learn a new one
All of this supported Oatly’s impressive growth results: being able to access 16 global websites. Additionally, the time to market was impressively short at only two months.
Key takeaways
Go-to-market has the potential to seriously impact how successful your content will be in the globalization process. Minimizing the time is thus essential - and there’s no better way to do it with headless CMS. Offering benefits such as the faster deployment of content, reusable content components, and streamlined globalization, choosing a headless CMS is the first step towards optimizing your go-to-market times.