A headless content management system (CMS) decouples your website’s front end from the backend, giving you better control over your content marketing.
Many people associate headless commerce with site design flexibility, but it’s also a pivotal growth strategy. A headless CMS can improve your SEO and help you reach more customers. Find out what headless commerce can do for your content marketing and accelerate your strategy with this guide.
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Why Choose Headless Commerce for Marketing?
With new storefront updates and ecommerce trends popping up seemingly every month, it’s easy to mistake headless ecommerce as just another set of buzzwords that you can ignore.
Interestingly enough, headless is actually a reaction to the fast-paced technological and aesthetic changes that are constantly pouring through ecommerce — whether that’s social commerce, mobile shopping, or live marketplaces.
As an online retailer, headless ecommerce puts you in the best possible spot to adapt to new trends and grow your business. Here are some of the benefits headless commerce can have for marketers and brands.
A Better Way To Sell
Headless ecommerce is expected to receive over $1.6B in funding over the coming year, and it’s easy to see why the industry is betting big on headless CMSs.
- It’s Faster: Being faster than the competition should be right at the top of your list if you’re looking to grow your store. Even a difference of a second when it comes to page loading speeds can mean a loss of thousands of dollars in revenue. Headless commerce isn’t just great for marketers, it can also significantly speed up your website and give you an edge over the competition.
On a headless system, your content (images, videos, blogs) can be distributed almost instantly via APIs from a central storage location. Naturally, pages are going to load much faster when they can instantly fetch high-res visual elements. Additionally, since the front and backend architectures are separated, your business doesn’t have to rely on sluggish third-party plugins to make changes to the store that can further slow download speeds.
It’s worth pointing out that speeding up your store with a headless CMS can also improve your SEO. Visitors tend to spend a longer amount of time on responsive websites, and fast-loading pages are bound to incentivize them to further explore other products and pages on your store. If you’re looking for an organic way to improve your search engine rankings, this might be it. - Easier To Scale: Headless commerce’s scalability makes it appealing for marketers and upper management alike. Over time, the popularity of certain trends and customer demands for new technologies like AR scanning can result in stores struggling to keep up with the growing resource demands while still maintaining optimal loading times.
On a headless CMS, you can keep adding exciting new features, pages, and users to your store with simple APIs without ever having to worry about breaking the backend or slowing down the website. Focus on creating a solid marketing strategy and building connections with your customers; the CMS will handle everything else.
- Great For Rapid-to-Market Launches: If you’re looking to branch out and grow your business quickly, chances are you will need to maintain multiple sites or online storefronts. Traditionally, building a brand new website for a sister brand used to be an exhausting affair, often needlessly costing businesses thousands of dollars and months of development time to effectively “start over” with the new product line.
One unique advantage of headless commerce for marketers is how it can make rapid-to-market launches easy and seamless. Marketers are well aware that it’s often not about doing something better than the competition, it’s about getting there first. Once you’ve built the front end for one website on a headless CMS, you can very quickly re-purpose that code for a sister or daughter brand. This is particularly useful if your new website will have the same basic features. Once you’re done, you can switch up the outward appearance of the website to suit your sister brand and even add new functionality on top with APIs.
Find your customers
Headless CMSs aren’t just great for SEO and website performance. They also immediately benefit your customers! Shoppers are tired of being bombarded with the same old traditional advertising, day in and day out. Instead, more and more customers are choosing to do their own research, usually through blogs, infographics, and videos. Headless ecommerce’s flexibility for marketers lets you adapt your content to your customers and build meaningful relationships with them, educating them about your products the way they prefer.
That said, tons of site builders offer design flexibility. What makes headless commerce so appealing for established and growing brands is the ease of use. Since the headless CMS isn’t interdependent with website design, even big businesses that are entrenched in a legacy system will find it easy to update and migrate their store as they scale up.
Differentiate your store
Whether you’re following a B2B model or going B2C, you’re most likely going to be running into fierce competition online. A massive percentage of small and medium businesses tend to choose free or cheap templates when initially building their websites due to resource crunch. As a result, customers often find it tough to differentiate one store from the other.
Headless commerce can offer a breath of fresh air for marketers and designers here. Because headless systems give you full control over how your website looks and behaves, you have the power to fully build a unique brand narrative and create new touchpoints with consumers. In practice, this could mean anything from new modules that facilitate live selling to all-new product pages with AR features.
More than anything, a headless CMS is an opportunity to switch over to a truly omnichannel solution for your brand by building a consistent experience across every facet of your business — whether that’s your website or social media. You’ll be free to build the brand experience that your customers are looking for since you won’t have to worry about every little front end change causing a backend error. With studies reporting a 250% increase in purchase frequency after businesses switched to an omnichannel and headless solution, the results speak for themselves.
Make Headless Work For You
The full list of theoretical benefits of headless commerce for marketers is endless. What’s more interesting is how you can grow your business and improve your SEO with a headless CMS. Make headless work for you with these simple tips and enjoy a seamless transition today.
- Unrestricted Content Marketing: Gone are the days when miscommunications and a lack of sync between your marketing and product departments would lead to needless delays. Instead of working overtime to coordinate multiple departments to ensure that your store’s backend stays stable, your marketers can enjoy full freedom with their content strategy.
With a headless CMS, it’s okay to be out of sync sometimes, and that’s a massive advantage for businesses that are working with a growing or remote team. An unrestricted marketing team is free to build contemporary and relevant customer experiences without depending on the whims of a potentially unstable website.
- Omnichannel Done Right: Headless commerce works for marketers and developers because it enables them to sell anywhere and in any way that they like. Naturally, this makes it a great fit for any business that’s looking to embrace an omnichannel retail experience.
73% of customers will go through multiple channels before checking out. For example, a shopper might discover your business through email marketing, check out your Instagram business profile, and finally head over to your store page to make a purchase. With your product data stored securely on an isolated backend, you can use your headless CMS to sell across different platforms such as Instagram or Facebook without needing to build separate stores. - Build a Narrative: Whether you’re trying to organically improve page rankings or just looking to boost conversions, building an effective brand narrative is always a great place to start. This narrative includes multiple elements such as the overall design of the website as well as the non-product content it offers.
Take your visitors on a journey and build connections when you’ve got the freedom to add engaging tools like podcasts, ebooks, and live content directly to your website. A key draw for marketers and designers working with headless ecommerce is that they don’t have to depend on someone else’s limited template library when building that narrative. Your team can now build an experience that is truly unique to your brand instead of relying on a free design template that thousands of other websites already use.
Is Headless Right For Your Business?
A headless ecommerce strategy offers multiple effective ways to build SEO-ready and conversion-friendly websites. Here are some reasons why headless CMS is the right choice for your business.
- You Already Have a CMS: Already having a functional CMS can actually be an advantage for businesses switching over to a headless system since they can keep the processes they’ve worked on without losing any progress. The CMS can continue as your site’s backend, removing the need for your team to learn a new CMS and instead giving them the ability to work on features for the all-new website.
The benefits of headless commerce for marketing aside, this advantage is especially useful for businesses that are working with particularly limited resources. Since there’s no learning curve, you won’t have to invest in training employees in a new system.
- You Have Dynamic Content: Tons of businesses are switching over to a headless Shopify ecommerce experience due to its inherent potential for dynamic content. This is because a headless CMS is the easiest way to disrupt if you’re looking to break away from the usual blogs and switch up your content strategy while protecting your store’s backend.
With 38% of marketers indicating that they’re planning on including infographics and other forms of engaging content in their campaigns, it’s clear that this is an industry-wide trend that shouldn’t be ignored. Your business needs a front end that can handle frequent updates. - You Want to Save on Development: Building new pages and features for your website can be a painful process that’s full of bugs and errors, particularly if you’re working with a large and unorganized team. Headless commerce can be a boon both for marketers and developers because of its component-based nature.
You’re never going to be changing the live files or database schema. Instead, you can reuse different sections to build up a page and update those components on the fly, allowing for features like automatically-updating comment sections and having gated content appear after logging in without reloading the page.
Get a Head Start With Coalition
Headless commerce is a paradigm shift for marketers, and it’s one that your business can absolutely not afford to miss. If you need help making the shift, contact Coalition Technologies for a free strategy review today. As an industry leader in digital marketing, we’ve helped thousands of businesses turn into juggernauts with tried-and-tested strategies, and we’d love to do the same for you. See our case studies and get in touch to learn more.
