Create once, publish everywhere: Composable content explained

The emergence of composable content is a significant development in the digital experience space. Breaking down digital content into smaller, modular components has proven highly advantageous in assembling and disassembling content for diverse applications and use cases. The composable approach optimizes content efficiency and effectiveness across platforms, devices, and contexts.

Non-composable content is a monolithic entity that isn’t broken down into smaller, modular components, for example, an entire page as a single unit of content, including all copy and images.

A significant challenge with this approach is that managing non-composable content across channels and platforms is inefficient. This content structure makes reuse difficult and often requires manual reformatting or customization to be used effectively in a different context.

Every piece of content must be manually edited and formatted for its specific use case, duplicating content and efforts and potentially leading to inconsistencies in branding, style, and messaging.

Furthermore, the monolithic structure of non-composable content can hinder the content and marketing teams’ ability to measure the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts, making it harder to optimize content for maximum impact and scalability.

Composable content is a content creation and distribution approach that segments content into smaller, modular components that can be assembled and disassembled flexibly.

To better understand composable content, we can visualize it as a set of editorial and graphical building blocks, including text copy, images, videos, and other media content and data that can be combined flexibly to create different compositions.

So, instead of a single monolithic entity, the composable approach supports building blocks that are smaller than an entire page. Broken down into smaller pieces, content authors can reuse and reassemble these content components to create unique, optimized customer experiences for different platforms, devices, and contexts.

The modular structure of composable content enables high flexibility and scalability. By creating content components once and then repurposing them, the composable approach promotes content reusability, improving marketing efficiency, cost savings, and consistency across different platforms.

By adopting this approach, content teams can also enhance the overall effectiveness of their content marketing efforts, as it allows for greater customization and personalization of content for specific audiences and channels, leading to better customer journeys for end-users and more engagement overall.

Magnolia is a composable Digital Experience Platform that allows enterprises to build a comprehensive platform that consolidates content in one place, easily integrates third-party technologies, and gives non-technical users a unified authoring interface for creating and managing digital experiences across brands, markets, and channels.

Magnolia offers composable content platform capabilities, including a visual editor, digital asset management, workflow management, and multi-language support capabilities. This robust feature set enables users to efficiently manage websites, mobile apps, and other digital touchpoints.

The platform supports composable content, for example, by offering modular content components, structured and unstructured content types, and personalization. Let's look at some of Magnolia’s features that enable composable content.

Magnolia's Page Editor is a powerful visual editor that enables content authors to create and modify website pages visually and efficiently. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface lets content authors quickly select from various component templates to create and customize webpages.

Magnolia's Page Editor is highly flexible and customizable in the context of composable content. It allows development teams to create custom content elements and page templates that can be reused by content authors across different pages and projects, promoting consistency in branding and design while streamlining the development process.

The Page Editor works in a WYSIWYG fashion and offers content authors a multichannel preview of the experiences they create.

Magnolia also offers a counterpart of the Page Editor for headless deployments using frontend frameworks such as React, Angular, and Vue. The Magnolia Visual SPA Editor allows non-technical users to manage content and layout for Single-Page Apps (SPAs) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).

Magnolia's Content Apps help content authors to create and manage structured content. Content Apps simplify and streamline the management of complex Content Types, including copy, product information, documents, and media assets.

Magnolia's Content Apps make it easier for content authors to create and publish content across various digital channels and devices. Content Types can directly be used on webpages or easily consumed via API to deliver content to any touchpoint.

Magnolia's Campaign Manager lets marketing teams and content authors create, manage, and schedule campaigns. Each campaign comprises a group of components and assets, such as text or product components and rich banners.

Like the Magnolia Page Editor, the Magnolia Campaign Manager offers comprehensive visual editing and preview options.

Ultimately, it is a powerful tool for managing and scheduling composable content campaigns, enabling marketers to create and refine their campaigns quickly and efficiently.

Magnolia Personalization allows content teams and marketing teams to tailor the content and user experience to specific user groups or individuals based on their behavior, preferences, and other relevant data.

Marketers can create targeted and relevant content that speaks to the customers’ needs and interests, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.

Magnolia offers seamless integration capabilities to connect with third-party systems and services, such as commerce platforms, marketing automation tools, analytics, and customer data platforms (CDP).

From a composable content perspective, Magnolia's integration capabilities allow content authors to compose personalized and targeted experiences and tailored customer journeys using existing content assets and data from other systems.

Integrations are a fundamental part of what is known as a composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP), which should be explained in the context of composability.

A composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an approach to building digital experiences that combines the flexibility and scalability of a composable architecture with the features and functionalities of a more traditional DXP.

A DXP that uses a composable architecture allows enterprises to consolidate content and digital assets and integrates with existing systems in the technology stack, creating more value from technology investments and accelerating the time-to-market of digital experiences.

The Magnolia DXP also provides unified authoring and an Integrated User Experience in one seamless workflow, bringing together all content and data in a single platform and making it easy accessible and manageable by content authors and non-technical users in a visual interface, eliminating the need to switch between different tools.

A composable Digital Experience Platform provides flexibility by allowing organizations to build and customize their digital experience stack with modular components, known as services or microservices. A DXP enables companies to only add components that support the business's digital strategy.

These components can be easily swapped out, added, or removed to meet changing business needs, customer expectations, and technological advancements cost-effectively and efficiently.

The flexibility of a composable DXP also enables organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and stay agile in their approach to digital experience management.

The Magnolia DXP allows digital teams of developers and business users to collaborate on delivering their digital presence. Book a demo to see how Magnolia can speed up your digital delivery and help you create fully integrated customer experiences.