By Janus Boye
How we build digital solutions has fundamentally changed in the past few years and this also has huge implications for marketing. To just mention a few of the new arrivals impacting marketing, there’s citizen developers, jamstack, no-code tools and then there’s the headless trend enabling faster and more secure websites while also separating content from presentation.
While many IT analysts, vendors, agencies and also quite a few IT departments have jumped on these emerging trends, marketing has been left catching up while looking at an overcrowded and confusing list of MarTech vendors.
We’ve heard this in our peer groups and also at our conferences, where in particular the headless trend is often considered a step backwards to marketers, as they’ve lost the ability to do real website management, including visual preview of campaigns and content.
Martin Michalik is Vice President of Product at Kontent by Kentico and is focused on making headless work for both business and IT
We are living in a time of “technology overload” as Martin Michalik, VP Product at Kontent calls it and this makes it even more important to have a strong collaboration between marketing and developers.
To quote from my recent conversation with him::
“If the new user experience is worse than the old one, then you don’t get better business results. This is why marketing must work closely with IT.”
To both address the underlying changes in the tectonic plates of the tech landscape and to bridge the gap between marketing and IT, Kontent introduced Web Spotlight back in 2020.
Let’s look at what makes Web Spotlight different, how customers have received Web Spotlight, how headless is changing the game and finally a word of advice for new CMS functionality.
What makes Web Spotlight different?
If you’ve worked with a CMS at some point during the past 20 years, you’ve probably seen in-context or WYSIWYG editing, where you can visually work on content and see how your content or campaign will look, while you are working on it.
This has been a popular demo in enterprise solutions since the late 90’s and today it is also the standard practice in both the lower-end solutions like Squarespace or WordPress and among the enterprise solutions from the big players like Adobe, Optimizely or Sitecore.
The arrival of the headless trend, about 10 years ago, fundamentally changed how we work with website content. Content was now supposed to be in one system (the CMS), while another system would do the delivery (the head). Many organisations have also found themselves with multiple systems and so the complexity has gone up and going headless has been seen as an attractive way to improve the IT landscape.
Yet, to marketing departments the arrival of headless CMS meant no more visual editing, no more easy preview, no more control of the navigation and these issues are exactly what Web Spotlight set out to solve, when it was launched in 2020.
Unlike a traditional headless CMS, in Web Spotlight you can once again organise your content in a tree structure, preview changes and edit content in the real time, while preserving all the headless benefits. Built on modern technologies, Web Spotlight delivers your content via APIs, so you get the advantages of a headless CMS with the traditional web-first CMS visualisation.
How customers have received Web Spotlight
In my conversation with Martin, he started by zooming out on the problem they are trying to solve with the product:
“The silo between IT and marketing continues to be a problem in many organisations. This is even more challenging in a headless setup, because IT has a bad habit of going out on their own and then the marketing requirements get left behind”
He specifically cited preview as an example of a requirement often not being implemented, as it’s not perceived as important by developers.
Still, content creators want to work in a way that is familiar to them, effectively and usable and this was also the case when it came to working with content 20 years ago. The benefit of a tool like Web Spotlight is that it brings the different stakeholders together.
The customers I’ve talked to share the same characteristic as most other marketers that I know in 2022: They are busy, faced with high pressure to deliver and to be blunt: overworked.
With Web Spotlight the point of departure for a digital campaign is not the same as a traditional CMS, and this clearly also helps with time-to-market as projects can be delivered in less time. Probably the biggest benefit to customers is the improved everyday life of working with content, building and managing websites.
Headless is changing how we think about content
Looking at the broader marketplace, both with Web Spotlight customers and beyond, headless is driving changes also in how organisations work with content.
Long gone are the days, where you would manage multiple sites for different devices. Even the once well established page-based metaphor is becoming a trend of the past with modular content that can easily be reused. Web Spotlight and similar products are making this happen.
It’s clear that customers expect effective templating, and they need to create and manage content quickly in a visual way.
As an analyst, I would say that we’re seeing progress on multiple fronts at the moment:
There is plenty of talk of content-first design, which is all about starting with the content rather than the design
A huge rise in content designers as an emerging title for colleagues. In the UK government alone, there’s over 1,000 content designers
Content Operations has also firmly arrived, which helps organisations realise that content is not just publish and forget, but content also need operations.
The arrival of tools like Web Spotlight to effectively design with words to make more effective campaigns, corporate websites and everything in between.
To put it in a circular way: Headless is tech innovation that helps drive businesses forward and improve how they work with content. This in turn sparks more focus on the skills of those working with content, emerging job titles appear and this then fuels new tech innovation, which further drives us forward.
A word of advice for new CMS functionality
While some industry pundits may argue that any CMS will do, when it comes to new features and new technologies, it seems like we are not done with improving CMS. Actually innovation is happening quickly across the board and many vendors are investing heavily in improving their products.
This also goes for Kontent, which is continuously improving and this year has implemented big improvements in several areas including reusing content in different languages, workflow, and features to save content creators time.
In my conversation with Martin, he shared one of his lessons learned during the past years as a product manager in the CMS space:
“New functionality needs to add value quickly, if not, it doesn’t get implemented”
Personally, I have a background of doing product demos, and live demonstrations are often a popular element, when we meet in our community. How you go from the initial wow that you want to experience in a demo, to a quick and smooth implementation and value ad, seems like a sensible thing to keep in the back of your mind next time you see an impressive new feature.
Learn more about headless CMS
Back in 2019 we covered the introduction of Kentico Kontent with this post: With Kentico Kontent it’s goodbye to legacy CMS. A part of this was also a strengthened focus on content as a strategic asset.
After some years of focusing on headless CMS, Petr Palas, the founder of Kentico, then hosted a very popular member call in 2021 on the hurdles to headless CMS adoption and how to overcome them. He mentioned that headless is equally popular and misunderstood and also made the strong case for not ignoring your content lifecycle. At the end of 2021, I also wrote towards composable content management for 2022, where I covered some of the options in a composable content management approach.
In the beginning of this year, I wrote my annual piece for CMS Critic on market trends asking: Will this be the year where CMS is finally about managing content?
The conversation continues across our community, in particular in our CMS Expert groups and at our annual international Boye Aarhus 22 conference in November.