Digital experience, driving the push for (visual) headless

1,000 respondents share their thoughts on the next level of content management & digital experience design in the largest survey of CMS users – and the first one to focus on headless.

With the recent explosion in demand for headless content management systems, you could be forgiven for thinking that headless technology is something new. In reality, we at Magnolia have been offering a headless CMS for over 15 years.

But recently, there’s been a huge demand for headless adoption. In fact, according to Google Trends, searches for ‘Headless CMS’ have more than doubled over the last two years.

So why the sudden surge in interest? Well, for most businesses, it simply comes down to a renewed focus on digital experience. Whether you’re a business leader, marketer or IT professional, delivering a great digital customer experience is now key to building a successful brand.

When it comes to developing these great experiences, it’s vital to use a content management system that can meet the needs of your business. Technologies that help bundle data, distribute content and deliver services across an ever-wider variety of customer touchpoints are key to providing great digital experience. Furthermore, as customer expectations continue to rise, today’s enterprises are expected to deliver high quality, personalised content, quickly and at scale.

However, even as the popularity of headless technology increases, there are still those who are reluctant to make the switch. This comes down to the fact that there remains a lot of confusion around this technology — with many marketers unsure of how to generate effective marketing materials without a clear visual front-end interface.

In our new study ‘From Head to Headless’, we found that while 82% of marketers are confident in their understanding and use of a traditional CMS, this drops to only 42% for headless CMSs.

Our research also reveals that this is due to the lack of a clear, visual frontend, which makes it harder for marketers to visualise exactly how their content will appear once published.

To overcome this, Magnolia offers a unique visual editor for single-page applications (SPA) to complement its headless CMS. The SPA editor provides a visual preview for marketers and content teams, while retaining the flexibility of a headless CMS. It allows marketers to view and manipulate the presentation to the user, yet work with clean, structured presentation-independent content.

This hybrid technology approach 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 and ultimately, empowers brands to provide greater digital experiences to their customers.

To find out more, download the full Head to Headless report here.