The modern customer journey has dozens (if not hundreds) of touchpoints. And they're distributed across multiple channels 鈥� HubSpot's 2024 State of Inbound Marketing Report found that , and other research indicates use at least eight.
With so many different types of content spread across several platforms, managing them and delivering them to the end user is a major challenge for businesses. And that's where content-as-a-service (CaaS) comes into play.
Just like the SaaS model transformed software delivery, CaaS is making it remarkably easier to manage and deliver content across multiple channels in a unified manner.
What is content-as-a-service?
Content-as-a-service (CaaS) is a modern approach to content management that emphasizes the separation of content creation, management and delivery from its presentation.
CaaS operates through a headless CMS architecture, where the backend (content storage and management) is decoupled from the frontend (presentation). This means you can create and manage content in a single location, but deliver it to multiple platforms and devices via an API without the need for manual formatting or customization for each individual platform.
How does content-as-a-service work?
CaaS works through a headless CMS, which stores and manages content in a structured format without any predefined templates or styling. It's cloud-based and operates using a microservices architecture, where different services are built around specific capabilities and communicate through lightweight mechanisms (like APIs).
Thanks to this, content can be served to any frontend application, allowing for maximum flexibility in displaying it on websites, apps, digital displays, smart devices and more 鈥� all on-demand. It also makes the content easily reusable, searchable and scalable while also being adaptable to new system requirements and technologies.
Advantages of CaaS over traditional web-based CMS
Unlike traditional content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, where content and presentation are intertwined, CaaS allows content to be managed and stored independently from how it is ultimately displayed or consumed.
Let's take a look at what sets CaaS apart from traditional CMS:
Content and presentation layers are separate
Traditional CMS is channel-first, meaning the content is created and stored in the same location. It has its own presentation layer, so any changes made to it require a redesign of the entire website.
In CaaS, content is stored separately from its presentation, making it easier to update and distribute to multiple channels. Isolating presentation layers enables the development of tailored front ends for various channels, enhancing digital experiences.
Content is fragmented or structured
In a standard CMS, content is separated into single-page blobs. In other words, a page's content, layout and presentation are all intertwined. In CaaS, content is structured into smaller chunks (like paragraphs or images) that can be easily reused across multiple channels and devices.
The modular approach to content removes the design and layout structure of the content and makes it easier for content to be pulled from a repository before it鈥檚 delivered to a specific channel.
Decoupling prevents marketers and devs from stepping on each other's toes
When the backend and frontend are coupled, making changes requires collaboration between marketers and developers. Customizing content delivery and user experience require extensive backend modifications or even complete platform overhauls. This leads to long wait times for updates, increased costs and potential conflicts.
In a headless CMS, you have greater flexibility in customization and integration. Marketers have the freedom to experiment with different layouts and channels without risking breaking the website or app. Developers can use APIs to pull content dynamically into any design or platform, supporting a broader range of devices and channels, including IoT devices and mobile apps.
Scalability with cloud infrastructure
Managing large-scale content operations is cumbersome with traditional CMS due to the intertwined nature of content and presentation. Scaling often requires significant infrastructure changes or redesigns.
CaaS offers better scalability and reduced maintenance overhead by leveraging cloud infrastructure. Since the content delivery is handled through APIs and often supported by a content delivery network (CDN), it can easily adapt to increased demand without the need for extensive infrastructure adjustments.
When is content-as-a-service a worthwhile investment?
Because of its advantages over regular content management systems, CaaS is an absolute necessity for any company with multiple digital channels.
If any of these scenarios sound familiar to your organization, you're a solid candidate for CaaS:
You need to personalize content for your audience
With CaaS, your team can dynamically handle their content. They can create custom rules for displaying content based on device, location, time, or any other criteria. This degree of control ensures a personalized experience for your audience.
On a more complicated scale, your marketing team could connect their headless CMS to multiple customer data platforms and personalization tools (like Tealium). They can create automations within CDPs to display certain content to subsets of their audience, depending on their behavior or attributes.
Omnichannel marketing is vital to your business
The customer journey is more complicated than ever. Buyers can interact with your brand on and offline dozens of times, on dozens of platforms, before even considering a purchase.
Through multichannel publishing and reusable content, CaaS's content-first approach makes it possible to reach and engage customers at each of these different touchpoints, giving marketers the power to manage their content assets for each channel from one central location.
All your channels require custom user interfaces
If you're anticipating using a mix of templates, languages, stylesheets and custom UIs on various platforms, you can't do it unless you're working with a CaaS platform.
Headless commerce enables you to provide content to all of your channels without reworking it for every distribution point. In a headless commerce solution, you can use the same content asset to power information on your website (on desktop or mobile), in an ecommerce app, on augmented reality devices, inside a digital kiosk and in any other environment that supports APIs.
Pricing and product recommendations are tailored to customers
CaaS can support your team's efforts to deliver personalized recommendations and pricing by integrating data from customer records, content and external resources. Your headless CMS can populate the relevant data into dynamic pricing tables, or your commerce platform can use it to make personalized product recommendations to customers based on their user group.
When is a traditional CMS the better route?
Content-as-a-service is remarkably comprehensive in its capabilities. That's great in some contexts, like when you're managing multiple digital channels or building experiences that are specific to particular customer segments.
However, if you're only setting up a business blog or simple website, CaaS probably isn't the right tool for the job. In these cases, a traditional CMS's lower licensing costs and less intricate setup make it a far more efficient solution.
The content-as-a-service model goes beyond headless CMS
While headless CMS gives you the tech infrastructure you need to centralize content storage, it's only one part of delivering an entire content ecosystem. It initially served as an alternative to cumbersome traditional CMS options 鈥� that is, a use case for developers only, with no tools or templates for marketers.
Brightspot is a hybrid CMS, meaning it combines the power of headless CMS with conventional CMS tools and user interface. It's easy to use for both developers and marketers, thanks to its customizable drag-and-drop interface, reusable components and powerful digital asset management system.
We consider every asset as content that can be assembled into modules from its components, providing our CMS with exceptional flexibility through modular content. In this context, modular content is another way to look at CaaS. Modular content's adaptability enables APIs to deliver information in any format across different devices and digital experiences as needed.