Why Headless Has a Marketing Problem?

In recent years Headless [What is a Headless CMS?] has emerged as a popular way to manage content and build websites. However, this developer lead approach has a marketing problem. The concept can appear alien to non-tech people and as a result, it is failing to communicate the value to other stakeholders involved in the purchase decision. As this article explores it is long overdue a rebrand.

A Headless CMS refers to the decoupling of the front-end and the back-end of a website such that the design layer and the content layer are separate, as distinct from the all-in-one approaches of traditional CMS. The Headless CMS refers to the back-end or content repository where content creators manage and maintain content which can then be fed to various ‘heads’ of front-ends via APIs. These ‘heads’ could range from websites, to mobile apps, to billboards. It is thus headless in that it can serve content to multiple heads.

And herein lies the issue. 

Both the name and the explanation are not that intuitive and serve to confuse many people as to what it actually is.

This is not helped by the main Headless players who have focused primarily on messaging that is designed to convince one dominant persona - the developer (or tech lead), to the neglect of the other stakeholders typically involved in the purchase decision (ranging from the CEO to the CFO to the CMO). Are these other time-pressed decision makers really expected to quickly and easily understand the benefits of composable architecture, data lakes, and webhooks?

Most of these managers will be familiar with the WordPress brand, but probably won’t have heard of the brands providing a Headless CMS solution which means you are on the back foot from the get-go. Thus, if Headless seeks to ‘cross the chasm’ from ‘early adopter’ status to ‘early majority’ it needs to appeal to a broader non-technical audience.

This very issue is one we at Contento, are acutely aware of, and thus explains some key differentiating factors we embrace as one of the emergent solutions in this space:

• We have non-technical writers writing much of our content to try and ensure it is clear

• We value equally our marketing and content creators rather than treat them as second-class citizens

• We have doubled down on usability so these same content management personas can navigate the UI/UX without needing developer support.

In short, we believe there is enormous opportunity in educating non technical buyers as to the value of this approach for scaling companies - but we feel it needs to be rebranded (or repositioned first). So what accounts for the growing popularity of Headless?

While Headless CMS is the name the category is best-known by, some of the following names are also used on occasion:

• Content platform

• Content repository

• Content-as-a-Service

• Decoupled CMS

• API-first CMS

• Composable CMS

What does not help is that some vendors refer to their offering as a Composable CMS, with others as a Content Platform, hence serving to further muddy the waters. Again, these are all very technical terms that can often confuse the reader, as they refer to relatively obscure technical ideas in stark contrast to the simplicity of a term like “website builder”. However, shifting to one of these is unlikely to make a major difference as a ‘rebrand exercise’. 

Finally, a note about Contento a modern CMS designed for B2B SaaS and technology websites. One of our motivations for building Contento was that our technical co-founders could see the overwhelming advantages of Headless as an attractive CMS for growing technology companies, but recognized that the opportunity in the space was to do a better job communicating the value to non-technical decision makers, while also striving to build a solution that a marketing team could use without needing to defer to developers for every minor tweak to the site that was needed. 

The phrase ‘Headless CMS” refers to a fast-growing category of Content Management Systems that are powering a growing number of commercial websites. However, we contend that the fact it is a developer-lead category has meant that to date the narrative is excessively tech-centric meaning it is difficult for non-technical users to grasp the concept. In an increasingly time-pressed world, where a decision as to a choice of Content Management System will often include CMOs, CEOs and CFOs the category needs to modify its language so these personas can more readily grasp why this shift to Headless is attractive in the right use case. Could this blog act as a catalyst for change? Who knows? But at least if it acts as a conversation starter we can do a better job of outlining why modern content management systems are becoming so popular.