For the enterprise with business units by product line, customer base, and geography, the need for a scalable landing page solution is paramount. Landing pages are the revenue-generating digital manifestations of the products and services rendered, and they act as entry points for lead generation. As a result, they need to be aesthetically pleasing and exist in targeted fashions for many audiences across multiple lines of business and geographies.
However, an enterprise relying upon a traditional CMS infrastructure to do so finds it a slow, tedious approach. Every landing page requires a developer, essentially, to duplicate previously created designs, undergo incremental edits over several rounds, and communicate across various platforms consistently. When this is done dozens, if not hundreds of times, it certainly does not become a revenue-generating endeavor.
A Headless CMS alleviates such challenges for an enterprise. By decoupling where content is managed and where it is experienced, enterprises can keep the necessary elements consistent for brand governance and compliance in one place while allowing for business units to generate and maintain their own pages quickly within a larger, more stable framework. Therefore, this option creates a scalable landing page solution for the enterprise’s global needs while fostering local access to creativity and innovation.
Content Centralization Without Creative Constraints
One of the greatest risks and challenges of a multi-unit operation comes from the need for a balance between creative need and corporate control. Too much corporate control stifles creativity on the business unit level, but too much freedom allows for a watered-down brand experience.
A Headless CMS solves this problem, as it enables central, organized housing of content. Build on the Storyblok platform to ensure global brand assets are unified while still allowing local teams flexibility. All worldwide brand content logos, fonts, impactful imagery, approved images, and significant message pillars remains consistent across all landed pages requiring them. Yet a structured content model allows for business units to change their content for the respective audience or market.
For example, a global athletic apparel company may have global logos and fonts for a centralized database but allow its individual business units to alter certain elements for the end market (i.e. a Manchester United-approved apparel line can allow its marketers to change the color of a shoe to red through a controlled contribution). The end-user will see a consistent brand, but with localized adaptations.
Landing Pages Created in a Flash
Time is of the essence, and whether brands need seasonal pages for the appropriate timeframe, product debuts, or promotional activities, the longer it takes to create the page, the more likely it will miss the window of opportunity. Traditional CMS requires linear approvals, developer need of access for coding applications, and bug fixes for coding, making such an access process tedious and time-consuming.
Front-end developers can create CSS-driven reusable modules within a Headless CMS for different pages landing pages, product pages, collection forms both singularly and multiply. Then business units can choose from the components or create their page without waiting for developer access.
Additionally, because no design has to come before the content (or vice versa), several teams can work simultaneously, utilize previously approved components, and launch marketing efforts in days instead of weeks. For example, if a beverage company needs to create its summer campaign across 12 international regional business units, each business unit can roll out its version without starting from scratch through a previously approved effort.
Enabling Cross-Channel, Cross-Market Distribution
Landing pages are rarely standalone experiences, they’re typically part of a cross-channel, cross-device customer journey, and in many cases, cross-market. This means that brands need landing pages that might need different language overlays, compliance features, or requirements based on varying expectations of culture.
With a Headless CMS, organizations can build once and distribute agency. Thanks to API distribution, one content source in the CMS can be pushed to responsive sites, mobile apps, partner portals, and touch-screen kiosks alike. In addition, with localization workflows, copy is translatable and adjustable, images can be swapped, and local sales or legal obligations can be seamlessly integrated.
For example, a global travel company may want to showcase a new package on a landing page. A Headless CMS can help them publish the main package offering for consumption but push to their UK, US, and Australian markets the localized versions with currency adjustments, applicable seasonal images, market-driven language and interest (i.e., different weather patterns) while ensuring brand standards remain effective in look and feel.
Improving Team Collaboration Across Departments
Many teams contribute to building a landing page. The marketers decide what purpose the landing page should serve; designers render what it will look like; copyright authors create copy; dev teams install necessary back-end plugins; and compliance teams make sure all is in order before launching. With so many steps to the creative process, hand-offs can be a chaotic disaster without tasks defined.
With a Headless CMS, teams can rely upon exact workflows and role-based permissions to monitor this undertaking. For example, if a compliance team member needs feedback from a copywriter or designer to approve or reject content, they can tag someone in the Headless CMS. Copywriters can submit pieces for design feedback without fearing that the designers have not opened anything yet because they are all in the same location. Simultaneously, developers are spared from redundancies of content management since their integration process is much more involved.
Take, for instance, a worldwide skincare brand whose creative teams in one region are crafting the content for a seasonal sale page while compliance teams from another make sure currency corrections are accurate and marketers at corporate validate campaign compliance so everyone can work independently simultaneously without endless email chains.
The Capacity to Scale and Ensure Quality Consistency
As organizations grow, the demand for more landing pages increases. Without scalability, quality and consistency may suffer for such pages. A Headless CMS can scale, enabling an increased volume of content and additional simultaneous creators.
By having specific content blocks, high-quality elements can be repurposed across landing pages. With an asset library, branded images and videos exist in one place to ensure quality consistency. From metadata tags to accessibility checks to ensure mobile-friendliness, various automation rules allow brands to sustain quality measures despite increased efficiency.
For instance, a financial services organization might need hundreds of landing pages to support its various offerings and fragmented business units. A Headless CMS guarantees that quality is applied across the board, quality includes compliance, branding, awareness, and usable features.
Ability to Scale and Increase Efficiencies Over Time
A scalable approach to landing pages implies more than just swift creation of pages; it aims to increase efficiencies over time. By integrating a Headless CMS with analytics platforms, brands gain access to important insights, including but not limited to traffic patterns, conversion rates, engagement, user clicks, dwell time, and more.
Because a Headless CMS is componentized by nature, it’s easy to observe variances. One business unit can test one headline or hero image placement while another tests a different call-to-action or its position. All findings can be disseminated throughout the organization to use such data-driven insights to inform their effective application on their pages without having to reinvent the wheel.
For example, if a specific topic in one geography has higher conversion rates than anticipated, that same configuration can be rolled out in other regional markets with minimal effort. Over time, this creates a culture of constant improvement for the entire organization.
Enabling Non-Technical Teams to Operate Independently
Some brands require their marketing teams to frequently engage with developers for even the simplest of adjustments on their landing pages. This cause delays in the process and prevents teams from meeting deadlines for campaign launches. A Headless CMS layered on top of a front-end framework allows non-technical users to create, edit and publish without ever needing to view code.
An intuitive interface allows marketers to choose from pre-made templates, edit from copy and content fields, and see a rendered view of what it will look like online. Developers will still be able to access the CMS as well as the design system for the design system to maintain brand integrity and consistency within the brand, but they will not be pestered by basic content update requests. This accessibility encourages expedited timelines for campaigns and allows technical teams to focus on development instead of maintenance.
Reducing Operating Overhead Across All Departments
When there is no centralized system for all business units to leverage, each department crafts its own process, tools and templates to create their respective landing pages which increases price. A Headless CMS provides brand unity while also providing an opportunity to reduce operational redundancy.
With a centralized code base/infrastructure, less need for software licensing, reduction in hosting fees, and maintenance time greatly decreases. The facilitation of using the same templates/components/assets across departments means that assets do not have to be duplicated just to accommodate different groups. This operational savings can go to better spending categories such as audience testing for proper usage or significant creative enhancement with additional testing or investing new software in the future.
Conclusion – A Smarter Framework for Landing Page Success
For the enterprise options with multiple business units, the ability to create a scalable, repeatable landing page solution is no longer a competitive advantage but a means of operation to stay relevant and proactive before the competition has the chance to be reactive. With the consumer’s desire for more and the campaign window closing each day before it needs measurement and iteration, finding an environment that can build and deliver quality landing pages without fail on a global scale yet possesses the opportunity to localize is critical.
Enter the Headless CMS as the ideal middle ground via control and flexibility. Control relative to a Headless CMS allows for all business units to fall within the confines of brand identity considerations, compliance and regulatory mandates, coding and development needs without this control, brands face public relations nightmares. Yet flexibility from the Headless CMS allows for the sub-business units to tailor their own messaging, photography and CTAs (calls to action) to expeditiously engage with their desired audience. It’s a marriage that provides the best of both worlds for businesses to have everything they need without excess red tape.
With all content living under one roof, business units only need to access a repository that features relevant components and templates that can be adjusted based on campaign needs. This encourages rapid Turn-Around-Times while also allowing for easier uniform multi-channel distribution. Ultimately, the Headless CMS allows for what would be otherwise a siloed experience from creative to marketing to development in executing successful landing pages to become regimented and expeditious. Each team can work with guidance from one another in a flexible but directional fashion.
For any sized enterprise with multiple business units, this is how things happen faster, smarter and more successful over time. You don’t need to rely on one business unit’s one success story to validate another’s efforts. Instead, you can immediately learn from rapid dissemination of tactics enterprise wide and apply them across the board to keep each team aligned with performance expectations.
When speed is of the essence in a competitive digital landscape, the Headless CMS provides the infrastructure of success to allow impact pages to live across every single business unit on the enterprise level. No matter how many markets or products or audiences need attention, each unit will operate with similar access and flexibility yet be able to create pages that launch quickly, perform over time and remain on-brand.