According to the latest report on Content Management Systems (CMSs), nearly half of marketers say the switch to ‘headless’ tech has made marketing faster. CMS teams find headless CMSs to be agile and efficient in accelerating the overall pace of publishing content. They found marketers are able to increase the speed at which they publish content by using a headless CMS.

The trends in the headless CMS market are evolving at a rampaging pace. According to Magnolia, “Today, headless adoption is at an all-time high – but there are still those who are reluctant to make the switch. Without a visual interface in place to physically “see” the content being created, many marketers are still unsure of how best to use a headless CMS.”

What is Headless CMS? 

A Headless CMS is a back-only management system that allows publishers and content marketing teams to take full control over their inventory, independent of what’s existing at the front-end of the website. It’s often referred to as decoupling of CMS from the front-end operations. It affects Sales outcomes too!

Unlike a traditional CMS, where the frontend and backend are connected, in a headless CMS the two are separate — the ‘head’ (frontend) has been removed to allow for publishing content rapidly across multiple channels and devices.

The new research, which comes from Magnolia’s report, “Head to Headless” incorporates data from 1000 CMS users working in IT and marketing across the USA, UK, Germany, Spain and Singapore.

It reveals that since making the switch to headless tech, 35% of marketers have reported a better user experience and 43% feel that they are less reliant on IT.

But while there are many benefits of adopting a headless CMS, there remains a lot of confusion around the technology, with only 1 in 3 marketers saying that they find their headless architecture easier to use than a traditional CMS.

Adoption of Hybrid CMS Crucial to Staying Competitive in 2021

For many, the lack of a visual interface remains a cause for concern, which is encouraging 43% of brands to adopt a hybrid approach — blending headless technology with the traditional full CMS experience. With a hybrid CMS, content can still be created, distributed and re-purposed without limits. It also gives marketers user-friendly drag- and-drop interfaces, WYSIWYG editing and content previews to help manage content.

Commenting on the research, Rasmus Skjoldan, CMO at Magnolia said, “A headless CMS offers a great opportunity to marketers to improve processes and meet long-term goals. However, the lack of a visual interface to design and preview content is proving a significant challenge for marketers.

“A hybrid CMS helps to bridge the gap for marketers by providing a headless CMS architecture, while also giving authors the context and creative control of a traditional CMS. At Magnolia, we offer a unique visual editor for single-page applications (SPA) to complement our headless CMS. The SPA editor provides a visual preview for marketers and content teams, while retaining the flexibility of a headless CMS — ultimately giving marketers the ability to view and manipulate the presentation to the user, yet work with clean, structured presentation-independent content.”

During the pandemic crisis, we learned how various martech customers are revisiting their martech stacks and budgets to tighten Cloud operations, security and Content management frameworks. A headless CMS not only offers low-cost IT and marketing costs but also provides CMS managers the ability to fix bugs, control Front and Back-end integration, and add more members seamlessly. The device responsiveness, operational agility, and omnichannel flexibility or readiness are other advantages that come handsomely with CMS in a headless system.

Read Also: MarTech Interview with Tim Brown, CEO at Magnolia

[To share your Martech insights on CMS and CRMs, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]