An introduction to CaaS: the Content as a Service framework

Being able to customize content at scale is vital for enterprise marketers. CaaS empowers businesses to assemble content dynamically so that personalization can take place at the modular level. And a headless CMS with turn-key integrations that take the manual process out of personalizing content makes even the largest personalization projects faster and more flexible.

By pairing CaaS with personalization technologies, such as Optimizely, Monetate, One Spot, Evergage, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Target to track and take action on visitor behavior, geographic location, profile, and more in your content management system, you’ll be able to provide each consumer with the unique experience they desire.

Contentstack’s headless CMS empowers marketers to integrate their favorite customer analytics applications to create practically endless personalization configurations. One example is Contentstack’s partnership with the Miami HEAT, whom we helped expand their CaaS capabilities and unlock a compelling mobile content experience.

Using Contentstack, the HEAT transformed their mobile application into a 24/7 engagement tool with advanced personalization integrations. This new solution gave the HEAT visibility into individual fans’ preferences and the means to deliver customized VIP treatment.

“This project is not just something that’s exciting to our IT organization,” said Matthew Jafarian, VP of Digital Strategy and Innovation at the Miami HEAT. “This is what our president, Eric Woolworth, is exulting about in front of his peers. What we’re powering with Contentstack today represents one of the most important initiatives for the Miami HEAT.”

Future-proof omnichannel content

We are living in an omnichannel world where 45 percent of consumers watch television while they browse social media, switch between their phone and laptop while shopping online, or visit a brick and mortar store while using a smartphone to price check against an online retailer. In response, 75 percent of executives say omnichannel delivery is essential to their business strategy.

Cisco predicts that by 2021, 82 percent of all consumer web traffic will be video. Additionally, rising technologies, such as chatbots and AI, are adding new ways to consume content. Your audience may soon be less likely to read a long blog post in favor of interacting with an on-site chatbot or watching a YouTube video. Brands need to consider where this unique content is going to come from and how to deliver it across channels.

Gartner expects that by the end of the year, a total of 5.81 billion IoT devices will be in use, an increase of 1.85 billion devices in the last two years. These devices include everything from smart lighting to security and voice-activated home assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Home. The businesses that can serve their content across these devices are going to win consumer attention.

Content that only works on one channel, such as a web blog, creates a bottleneck and makes it harder for consumers to access useful content across platforms. As the number of devices, platforms, and channels increases, brands are going to face significant content challenges. Delivering content to all these channels is cumbersome, slow, and requires an incredible amount of manual input — without CaaS, that is.

Content created for a single channel has a short lifespan. The flexible nature of CaaS allows content managers to create content once and publish it as often as it’s needed, wherever it’s needed, including on channels and future devices.

Consolidated and streamlined content workflows

In the beginning, CMSs let businesses update content and websites easily. The fact that marketing no longer had to bring in a developer to add a new blog post was life-changing. However, we’re living in a post-website world. Now, a CMS needs to empower marketing users not only to add content without development support but also to personalize and distribute it across channels. Content as a service helps streamline the content workflow process by doing just that — creating and publishing content on multiple platforms seamlessly.

Knock down silos to boost efficiency

Another significant advantage of CaaS is that it allows you to remove silos between various parts of your content teams, improving collaboration and consistency across your brand collateral. Managing the content for all your channels in one place is also considerably easier and more affordable than attempting to keep your finger on the pulse of multiple different content streams, each of which previously required its own siloed CMS.

CaaS via a headless CMS enables you to employ a single editorial team and software stack for all your content needs while freeing up your developers to focus on harnessing the full potential of each channel you use.

Reduced IT maintenance costs and time

Almost all of the usual maintenance involved in using a CMS disappears when you use a cloud-based enterprise-ready headless CMS to deliver CaaS. Forget about backups, server maintenance, plugin management, and security updates. Additionally a headless CMS, like Contentstack, delivers on availability, scalability, security, and performance.

CaaS also relieves some of the pressure on IT by empowering marketers to manage, optimize, and publish content to multiple digital channels autonomously without the help of a developer — no app updates or lengthy release cycles required.

Content as a Service use cases

Switching to a CaaS content strategy can significantly streamline the way you create and manage content. Here are some real-life examples of how CaaS can improve your business’ content operations:

• Ensure unified, consistent messaging and brand identity across multiple channels
• Implement chatbots, which need the structured, searchable content that a CaaS strategy provides
• Track and improve content performance across multiple channels
• Create content that’s compatible with the 20.4 billion consumer and business IoT devices
• Deploy relevant content across your organization’s various languages and locales
• Control access, versions, publishing, and quality when it comes to branded content, no matter how large and distributed your organization is
• Efficiently run your content through best-in-class customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, translation services, AI tools, A/B testing applications, analytics parsing, and whatever other platforms you need to optimize your content

Where to put CaaS in action

Wondering what CaaS looks like out in the real world? Here are some applications where the flexibility, scalability, and personalization that CaaS offers have a significant impact on the user experience.

Mobile application content management

With traditional content management, content and formatting are all in the same system. If there is a change to the content, then everything has to be updated. For mobile apps, that means a lot of time spent submitting updates and approval processes. However, with dynamic CaaS delivery, businesses can update content independently of the app itself. That means marketers have free reign to change content, release campaigns, and perfect personalization without bogging down IT with constant requests.

Omnichannel publishing

Do you have several web domains? How about landing pages? Social media channels? Pretty much every enterprise today has multiple platforms to which they need to publish content. Considering the speed of modern marketing, by the time you get done manually rewriting, reformatting, and republishing content to every single one of those instances, it’ll be time to start over again!

With CaaS, a content hub enables you to deploy the same content to multiple platforms instead of maintaining separate content systems for each. And when you integrate the right headless CMS, you can automatically optimize content for each device without ever leaving your editing dashboard.

Chatbots

By 2021, chatbots will handle 85 percent of customer interactions. Chatbots and using CaaS to organize content into tech-agnostic modules are a match made in robot heaven. While machine learning is still developing, structured content that can be called via an API enables chatbots to provide much more accurate and relevant results than if they were to rely on scraping or natural language processing.

How to get started with Content as a Service

Decoupling content is important, but it’s only the first step in using CaaS. You still need an effective way to manage and deliver that content. While some traditional CMSs are trying to keep up with the times by attempting to implement CaaS through add-ons and plugins, they’re ultimately still webpage-centric platforms built to control content presentation.

For enterprise marketing and IT teams that are serious about capitalizing on CaaS, it’s imperative to invest in a headless, API-first CMS built around the idea of decoupling content and maximizing its use in a variety of contexts.

Contentstack’s headless CMS is a great option for the marketer who needs to optimize, personalize, and deliver content that converts no matter what channel or device consumers are accessing it from. It’s also great for that marketer’s IT team that wants to enable marketing autonomy but doesn’t have time to build enterprise-level security, scalability, and tools from scratch.

At Contentstack, we stand behind our promise to deliver easy to use content management tools and out-of-the-box enterprise IT technology. All you have to do is schedule a demo or create a proof of concept today for free.