Marrying headless CMS with IA content strategy

There is no ‘one size fits all’ for selecting a headless CMS

The world of Web Design has come a long way since the early 2000’s. Website owners are spoilt for choice when it comes down to publishing content and which channel or CMS they should use to engage and communicate with their communities.

On the CMS front, there are plenty of CMSs and DXPs that Digital departments can pick with plenty of online reviews. Equally some digital departments may start with a strategic UX, Product or Content led approach to re-rationalise their information architecture(IA).

In this article we will see that there isn’t a one size fits all approach. We will learn that there are ‘golden’ guiding principles so the right system is selected whilst ensuring the content strategy and UX strategy are future friendly.

After all, no one wants to go through a transformative digital RFP/ITT led re-platform project to only find out that it isn’t fit for purpose!

The Web has evolved!

We’ve all reflected and realised that the web isn’t 3.0. It isn’t turning into a Virtual Reality world where users are engaging with brands and each other through goggles (or at least not yet — Apple VisionPro, we’re looking at you).

But channel proliferation, email, iOS/Android apps, instant messaging and social media continue to grow in popularity and are often better places to engage and or create two dimensional conversions between users, brands and each other.

Equally, 2023 has seen Chat-GPT and the emergence of Google Bard as new paradigms of how users not only access content and data but also generate it based on prompts and inputs.

Big Tech has also provided other ‘gifts’ like single sign on (SSO) and a variety of solutions to replace usernames and passwords and improved ways to pay via Apple and Google Pay meaning that more institutions can monetise content. What this means is that often the line between a CMS and DXP is blurred as content and transactional behaviour are intersectional. Certain businesses and institutions are either capitalising on these trends or planning to do so across multiple channels.

Emerging and existing technology businesses have developed new concepts and CMS systems promising ‘composable’ technology that is able to deliver a ‘headless’ experience separating content from publishing with performant APIs, integrations, personalisation that leverage channel specific value based on the device or service the customer is engaging with. Convergence between CMS and CRM is no longer a nice to have!

One of the main premises of headless publishing is the easier setup and superior publishing/authoring experience.

Understanding Headless CMS

Firstly, there are three types of CMS options:

1. Monolithic CMS — Traditional CMS that does not separate the presentation layer from the database and main CMS.
2. Decoupled CMS — Where the CMS introducers an API to separate the presentation layer but the CMS will still maintain the HTML.
3. Headless CMS — Here, the CMS does not have a rendering engine at all, and leaves the separated presentation layer decide on how to display the content suitable for the platform.

One of the main advantages of a Headless CMS is how they approach content. Content is no longer treated as semantic less content but as data. The advantage here is that content data is structured to work better with JSON-LD, RDFa and Microformats so content is more accessible to search engine snippets and accessibility tools like screen readers. It’s essentially giving content semantical meaning so it can be manipulated, leveraged and parsed in different shapes or forms.

Within Headless, different elements listed are considered distinct content types (author title, image, caption, body text, etc.). Content models are comprised of and can reuse these content types to become tailored to the unique needs of each organisation, so that content creators aren’t stuck with the overly prescriptive page templates of a traditional CMS.

Some Headless CMS have real-time content collaboration on documents similar to Google Docs for example with the benefits being a multi-authoring environment with many contributors working on making more compelling authoring.

Also, many new CMS providers natively incorporate AI into CMS publishing offering efficiencies at scale.

A Headless CMS is able to generate ‘static content’ to speed-up content access so the database is used less and user queries are routed to a flat file instead. This can happen because the CMS separates the presentation layer out of the CMS. Headless CMSs can generate data as opposed to HTML which is more efficient particularly for multi-channel experiences and for where content needs to be personalised and or accessed/manipulated by a search engine or third party tool.

The movement of Headless CMSs tend to work with new JavaScript libraries such as Next.js and Nuxt.js which provides the CMS with the ability to redefine the routing of content, generate static content, single page applications and universal applications.

Security of any digital system should be a priority for any business. Many headless providers enabled high levels of data security such as SOC 2, GDPR compliance, single sign on and granular access control. Due to the nature of a decoupled user interface, applications built using a headless approach are far less exposed to attack.

Website owners are spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting the right content management system (CMS).

Selecting the right CMS

The proliferation of new technology and evolution of channels and apps have unleashed new possibilities particularly to the more imaginative marketing, product and publishing teams out there as the type of technology that is available now is much more affordable than it used to be and there is more choice on what system to use and who builds it. We at Cyber-Duck haven’t been resting and have identified a number of different platforms. The list isn’t exhaustive but some of our main preferred providers are:

1. Acquia Headless — Empowered by Drupal, the worlds leading enterprise open source CMS, the Headless and Hybrid Drupal CMS enables content flexibility to deliver omni-channel digital experiences. It uses Site Studio for a drag and drop experience. The main advantage of this CMS is its flexibility to incorporate into Acquia DXP and CDP providing a single view of the customer and ability to segment and orchestrate the UX based on persona data.
2. Sanity - An open source headless real-time CMS, that you can customise with JavaScript and React. Sanity.io is a fantastic platform for content management that offers a great user experience and flexibility. It’s user-friendly, easy to navigate, and has a beautiful and intuitive interface that allows for efficient content creation and management.
3. Storyblok - Provides the infrastructure to create and manage content using the Storyblok UI or the Management API. It is not tied to one specific presentation layer, such as a website. Its headless nature allows the content to be served in a presentation agnostic way.
4. Statamic —A modern, clean, and highly adaptable CMS that can run full-stack, headless, on flat files or databases, & as an SSG. It doesn’t have a database until it is needed and it’s a front-to-back CMS until you need to go headless. It’s dynamically powered by PHP & Laravel until you need to go static. It is also full-stack until you go JAMstack. Statamic is also hostable on a modern PHP server but you can have it as serverless too.
5. Directus — Directus is an Open Data Platform for instantly turning any SQL database into an API and beautiful no-code app. It is is highly modular and extensible. It benefits from a real-time API and App dashboard for managing SQL database content. The Directus Flows module provides custom, event driven data processing and task automation right within your headless CMS.

Headless CMS considerations — From setup, data portability, integration ability all the way to content modelling, module capacity, clean code output to form processing, the authoring environment, extendability, analytics/CRO and SEO integration and capabilities. Community support is also key.

Key principles clients look for when selecting a CMS

The graphic above considers some key aspects when selecting a headless CMS. As we mentioned above, there is no ‘one size fits all’ and each CMS has its pros and cons. For example, if there a need to marry the platform to a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and a Cloud Data Platform (CDP) for a single customer view, Acquia / Drupal Headless could be the way to go, particularly due to its ability to support enterprises with Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems to propagate unified and consistent content across Marketing channels.

1. Setup — Many organisations will look at easier and more streamlined setups to minimise customisation and development efforts.
2. Ongoing development costs — One consideration will be licence costs (of the CMS where applicable) compared to how much effort and billable an organisation needs to pay an agency or contractor.
3. Data portability— The ability to export/import data is going to be very important to avoid vendor CMS lock-in.
4. Stability of CMS — How stable is the application? Some newer CMS providers are highly innovative with ‘killer’ features but might not have the stability, security and scalability for enterprise.
5. Headless capabilities — Is the CMS truly headless or does it simply decouple the content layer? Whilst there isn’t a right or wrong approach here, some organisations may prefer the former or latter.
6. Content modelling / IA — The design processes will ultimately conceive a new Information Architecture (IA) and content model based on what creatively is possible. This is where you should involve a Technology Architect or Creative Technologist to start exploring which CMSs are best for your project based on the technology available in the market.
7. Speed — How fast is the application from a compiling and loading perspective and does it generate fast loading content? There are a number of facets to explore here. What you don’t want is a very slow and cumbersome CMS and you’ll equally want to avoid slow content for the end user based on a poor template engine.
8. Clean code — How ‘clean’ and compact is the front-end code? A CMS’s ability to generate clean code and or ‘object’ driven elements that work marvellously across channels will be key to success for most businesses.
9. Modules — How extendible is the CMS. How many modules, widgets of features does the CMS have? This is important. Some systems will have tons of modules and others very little. If speed of development is a concern, this could be a major factor in deciding what CMS to go for.
10. Maturity — Is the CMS mature and proven in the market place? Many IT Directors or CTOs will mandate a ‘household’ technology name. Newer entrances, as innovative as they are, may struggle to get adoption despite their innovative functionality.
11. Community support — How much support does the CMS have? This is one of the most critical points. All software will have minor issues and the ability of the community’s ‘power’ to highlight and fix issues is going to be critical.
12. Open Source or Close Source - Propiertary and licence based CMS can be an issue for a lot of organisations where there are policies in place to use open soruce only. This is particularly an issue for public sector and government organisations.

Technology & Integrations that clients require

1. Forms - How easy is it to generate forms and capture data? Most Websites will need to capture, process and integrate forms into various CRM systems. Sometimes it makes sense for the CRM to work ‘hand-in-glove’ with a CRM or other MarTech tools so knowing what a CRM can do ‘out of the box’ will be important.
2. Content capabilities — How easy is it to generate sort and filters for content? On many Websites, content needs to be ‘objectified’ (e.g. turned into objects) so that the user can filter, find and sort content. This type of enhancement (to the user experience) is only possible if the authoring or publishing capabilities allow the publisher to enhance and tag the content in the first place. This type of capability should be mapped out early-on.
3. Analytics — How much tracking or expansion into third-party tools does the CMS provide? Whilst a CMS is not an analytics tool, certain organisations have various requirements for both admins and users.
4. CRO — Does the CMS provide features around A/B testing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO)? There are many third party tools on the market that provide CRO based capabilities. Some CMSs have them built-in while others do not.
5. Integrations — Is it easy to combine the CMS with other software? The definition of integrations can be extensive. From MarTech to CRM, form integration and AI tools. Quite often you will find that if a CMS has an API, you can extend its capabilities quite far.
6. CRM — Does the CMS have a track record of being able to work with CRM systems? Many organisations will want to ensure that the CMS is able to work with a leading CRM like Salesforce or Dynamics. This is because when publishers ‘publish’ content and generate landing pages, they will want native connectivity from forms into a CRM system. The scope does not stop here. Many CRMs will then provide personalisation capabilities either natively or through third party tools. How this works with a CMS is key to many ITT/RFPs.
7. SEO — Does the CMS provide native SEO capabilities? Many CMS systems have a lot of inbuilt CMS tools to aid publishers. The scope of what SEO capabilities a CMS has will depend based on one vendor to the other.
8. Hosting — How scalable is the CMS from a hosting perspective? Does it have native hosting?

Editing experiences that clients want

1. Editing experience — How well does the editing experience work for you and your team? Is there an ‘in-situ live’ editor, WYSIWIG, panel authoring and or drag and drop editing? Many clients are used to a Wordpress Gutenberg type editor which may or may not work. It is important for the Digital Agency to advise the client on what is in the market and how each CMS vendor differs.
2. Workflows — Some client organisations may have 1–2 internal CMS publishers and others might have 1,000 or more. Some organisations might start of small but may grow. What is important is to consider there are appropriate workflows for approval and compliance.
3. Reusability— How easy is it to generate reusable templates and content? Businesses need flexibility with templates but also a ‘design system’ of components within the CMS that editors and publishers can use ‘carrying’ across elements such as footers and call to actions (CTAs) that can be edited once.
4. Content checking — Can the CMS check for duplicate, spelling and accessibility issues? Many systems can even provide AI ‘helpers’ using Chat-GPT or other AI technology to enhance the editing experience. This encompasses grammar, spelling and auto generation of ALT tags all the way to suggesting content and adding images and/or new content based on ‘in-situ’ prompts.
5. Rich media capabilities — Is the CMS able to parse and even edit media content? The definition of media capabilities within a CMS is quite wide reaching and will depend on your requirements. Rich media capabilities within a CMS may include embedding social widgets like Tweets, LinkedIn and Instagram posts to Youtube videos, audio files and podcasts. It is important to check how media can be embedded within your shortlist of CMS systems and what type of preview capabilities the media or images you generate yields within social posts for example.

The type of customer experience clients want

Besides the editing experience there are other key requirements that many businesses and institutions will have within a CMS:

1. Personalisation — How easy is it to personalise the user experience? Regardless of the size or scope of your project or product, many businesses will want elements of personalisation. There are many third-party tools that offer basic personalisation capabilities to websites regardless of the CMS you use. But for enterprises where digital experience platform (DXP) type functionality is needed (e.g. where users need bespoke content based on their profile and/or persona requirements) you may need to ‘connect’ to the user profile within the CRM and serve the user content based on subscription, login, purchase or browsing data. To select a CMS that can offer such capabilities, you need to define the requirements upfront and then select a vendor or suite of tools that can offer such personalisation. You may need to consider omni-channel and cross-channel personalisation too.
2. Loading times — How fast does the Website load for the end user? This is where ‘clean code’ and coding standards must be considered. Part of your due diligence on a CMS should be how compact, clean and semantical the code is. This is not only important for accessibility but also for SEO and achieving or exceeding your Google Lighthouse scores. After all, search engines like Google will prioritise fast loading Websites so it is not only in the users’ interest but also important from a marketing perspective. The CMS has a lot to do with the quality of code and should certainly be a key criteria particularly with the mobile experience and where you are publishing content to channels and audiences where Internet speed is critical.

Approaching content strategies including capability, resourcing and technology choices

How you as a business plan to manage the quality of your content is also a key part of this CMS choice.

Some organisations have a large content team. Some have a one man band. Others use the marketing colleague ‘side of desk’ model or are fully decentralised with multiple editors from across the business. The capability to gatekeep quality content to go to the right audiences, needs to be managed.

For example, you can set up a fantastic omnichannel technical experience with content components pushed to multiple audiences. If you have many editors, they are likely to be subject matter not content or communications experts. So, someone needs to make sure this content is high quality in the first place. And someone needs to make sure it’s right for the audiences it’s going to and isn’t being duplicated. The CMS can help you with gatekeeping of this quality. And you can marry the choice of CMS with how you plan to resource how quality content is created — training up more subject experts, hiring more content designers, or baking content quality assurance into job roles.

UX Content Strategy Framework (UXCSF) diagram. Cyber-Duck uses this model to intersect between user centeed design, governance, and technology to implement the right type of CMS solution for an organisation

Defining business and user requirements

To effectively define the business and user requirements, it is necessary to write a solid RFP/ITT.

Quite often large scale innovation or transformation projects require an understanding of user journeys of both customers, team and third parties to really map out the ‘as-is’ states and the desired ‘to-be’ states. Quite often service journeys will need to be mapped out to uncover user requirements around content. This can only be achieved by agencies working closely with stakeholders to map out the objectives and facilitate such service journeys.

Defining the requirements based on the original project or programme brief

A rudimentary output during the definition state is an updated or new Information Architecture (IA).

Traditionally, card sorting techniques are used to map and sort out a detailed IA and navigation system to clarify how content will be accessed and searched.

With the advent of the Headless CMS, the traditional mapping exercise of pages needs to be flipped as taxonomies of content within a headless world will be more object and entity based as opposed to be static page led. The IA outputs will not only lead to a new IA but also to a way to establish content models which is the process of understanding how content should be structured and what objects are needed.

What also needs to underpin the definition of a new IA and selection of a CMS is a Publishing Manifesto. This will ensure there is a vision from key stakeholders on how all the complexities will come together to provide a coherent and pragmatic set of principles to govern and strategise who the internal or external publishers are.

During this state it is important to figure out and distil the technology architecture based on interdependences that the content and data will have. Besides selecting the right type of content platform, it is key to work with technology teams to establish what third party systems and technology are required, what type of integrations are needed and the type of publishing capabilities the business needs. Depending on what sort of content migration is required, the number of digital entities or repositories, a strong delivery and agile approach will be needed to define the acceptance criteria of what constitutes a successful content implementation strategy for launching the platform.

A publishing manifesto will include key principles to help clarify what success looks like, the channel publishing requirements including what modalities are required (e.g. personalisation across channels) and how search engines for example relate to the content and what accessibility principles should be encapsulated and why.

Discovery towards a content strategy

Defining the content strategy is the first step that aims to collate the organisations aims and KPIs around the content and desired user experience. The definition state will help to uncover the content models and will bridge the gap between the ‘experience’ and ‘technology’.

The importance of a vision around content governance cannot be understated as it is relatively easy to start afresh with a new content framework but what is challenging is maintaining a content strategy in the long-term as a business evolves and new people come and go.

The discovery phase includes a deep dive into the UX, content audit, user research, KPIs, blueprints and product vision

Content governance includes rules on what is published, by who, where they publish, how they publish and who audiences are. This will clarify workflows, resourcing and governance. The governance plan should also include champions with carved out time to manage the content framework moving forward and ensure that the principles from the strategy are adhered to and updated. But before a content governance plan is put together there are several crucial steps that require a deeper discovery process.

Typically, a content audit will augment a new IA. Within the audit, a content strategist and user experience designer will work with an SEO analyst to uncover every single content piece within the content inventory. Often a data engineer will need to support here to ensure that all content repositories are identified to ensure the inventory is analysed in depth. We have seen situations where clients have had content concealed in various systems such as microsites, apps, intranets and on social channels. Being able to query, log and reference to the existing content is a first step. There are various tools such as Google Search Console, GA, Screaming Frog and others that are built to do this. Various Analytics and SEO tools will also provide further data on how often the content accessed (e.g. popularity) and if you have CRM data about the content, it can be further leveraged to provide a ‘true picture’ on the value of the content. The content strategy will also consider key links between the content and highlight SEO objectives to ensure that user intent from search engines is considered against ranking and keywords as otherwise you will end up in a situation where you might cannibalise your own rankings by having too much duplication of content or keywords. Further analysis should be given to external content too, as it may link to existing content and be valuable and or outdated.

The content audit will end up analysing, categorising, tagging and ultimately rating existing content. Its aim is to extract the quality content and golden content to delineate the strong and relevant content from the weaker and outdated content. Depending on the publishing vision and KPIs, it may be needed to ‘cull’ content in bulk based on dates, relevancy, the new IA and the desired user experience. It’s possible to tag content into themes and buckets to highlight what theme or pillar the content belongs to, who the audience of the content is etc. This can help later with CMS content modelling, taxonomies, and folksonomies to ensure the content is as findable and accessible as possible. Ultimately the content audit should provide a plan on what content should be migrated, created or changed for the programme or project you are undertaking.

The content audit will need to be summarised into a plan and will serve as the ‘manual’ for the content migration. At this point the developers will be deciding on the content types and data structures from a CMS perspective to ensure the new system is setup correctly to enable the content migration.

The content migration process will need to consider several facets to ensure the content is technically ready for the import. This import through various scripts and automation processes and tools will consider meta data, content formatting, converting content into objects, tagging, media import, cleansing content and data and ensuring existing content is editable and enriched within the new CMS. Topics like SEO, linking, semantics and meta data will be dealt within the content migration. If some of the content will be replaced by new content sources or personalisation variables, then this will also be dealt with at this point.

The developers will also need to consider templates and governance rules and how that will impact the implementation of the content platform and CMS.

Designing the content for the new platform

During the discovery phase a detailed audit will develop which will be married to a UX methodology like User Centred Design (UCD) to ensure that the content strategy and UX strategy are singing from the same hymn sheet alongside an updated SEO plan. This is why we call this methodology the UX Content Strategy Framework (UXCF): It encapsulates all the facets of content, technology and design.

The design stage is critical as it includes designing all the templates from a design hierarchy (or information design) to ensure that all the templates, content, media and data is findable, indexable and integrable (with other tools and platforms like personalisation). The templates will consider how the content can objectified to work with the CMS, search engines and third-party tools to ‘enrich’ the user experience. But a key objective is to ensure that content is not only usable, accessible but also formatted beautifully for the end user. This is where art direction, UI and content design come to play.

The design stage includes a detailed information architecture (IA) and content strategy, embracing the persona models and leading into functional prototypes

One of the key steps is to ensure that new and existing content is broken into semantical objects and data to enrich the user experience not only on the website but also on search engines, within AI tools like Google Bard or Chat GPT.

By constructing the content in a particular way, it is possible to develop rich and featured snippets that will ensure that the content is highly prominent on search engines.

Other considerations of content design should also stem from and other channels like social media.

Some of the key tenets of creating stellar content design is to use the core model to figure out exact content requirements based on informed user research, define the content hierarchy, figure out the inwards and outward paths to avoid content cul-de-sacs. Understanding and defining the tone of voice (ToV) in tandem with the brand strategy is also key to success. From an accessibility point of view, it will also be required to define the tone and readability standards of the content depending on who the audience is. This is where models like Flesch-Kinkaid can help to assess and define the complexity of the language and consider the reading age levels, English literacy and whether the content is as accessible as possible for people with impairments. As an example, utilising PDFs for long-form content, or placing key content into graphics or tables can complicate the user experience for marginalised users.

After the core models are developed and populated it is generally advised to create object orientated content as opposed to a full on ‘wireframe’ mode of design so that content can be delivered to as manage channels as possible such as mobile apps and social media for example. At this point it is key to consider content meta data, content display and the optional character and display mechanism for each channel. Design teams will generally work using Figma and can create multi-component layouts using real content that developers can immediately display within a headless enviroment.

Whilst the above happens, the Web Developers will begin to setup the CMS, all the necessary fields and objects and ensure the functional requirements and acceptance criteria are considered.

Delivering the new content platform

The developers will need to be heavily involved in setting up and configuring the CMS. This work requires quite a bit of setup and some customisation within the CMS to ensure that the migration is performant against the acceptance criteria and all the various modules are setup correctly. This work also entails setting up tracking with the analytics journeys to ensure that the right data is being captured and triggered. A key part of the developer role is setting up the necessary integrations so where there is a DXP, subscriptions, e-commerce and personalisation the developer will need to ensure everything is setup correctly.

This is the stage where the content platform is at a stage or in a state that it is ‘delivered’ meaning that acceptance criteria is fully defined alongside the documentation and functional requirements and the developers are in the ‘build cycle’ which includes setting up tests and quality assurance.

At this point however, it is not just about handing over all the work to the developers. The content publishers and editors should be working ‘live’ with the developers to ensure that all content and design is compliant with the content strategy and UX strategy.

Driving the content forward and concluding

Marrying headless CMS with IA content strategy requires careful planning, ensuring technology and design teams not only selecting the right technology, integrations and migrating everything in a compliant way but also a priority on user research in tandem with the organisations goals to ensure that the most valuable content to the user, ensures high degrees of interaction whilst ensuring accessibility.

The final part of the 5 ‘Ds’ is the ‘Drive’ stage — this includes continued driving of improving including optimisation, reviews and monitoring.

The content strategy needs to be delivered and maintained successfully across multiple channels whilst ensuring a seamless and consistent experience. After all, the goal of a successful content strategy is not just to give users the right content at the right time and minimise friction but ensuring that different personas can ‘transact’ with an organisation successfully. Not every organisation or institution has subscription, e-commerce or forms of course, but what every organisation needs to do is project the right type of information and data to maintain its brand image and stature. If the technical publishing models are configured correctly and the content vision is implemented correctly through a successful content governance model, this is all possible.

It is important that the right integrations from CRM to other systems and personalisation are setup correctly alongside any other CMS modules. The right technical setup alongside a modern and performant publishing and authoring model (for the content publishers and editors) will ensure that content can be created effectively, efficiently and enjoyably.

This will create a culture where content publishing is a pleasure due to effective workflows, editing and approval processes. Once the right technology and platforms are selected, regardless of who the vendor is, the technology will need to be maintained to avoid technical debts. This is why it is important to select the right systems from the outset, and one that is supported by a community and a strong technical support team to ensure support and longevity.

Ultimately the above is critical but without a content governance model, everything can collapse. Organisations must ensure that there is a responsible team who oversees content governance, the rules of publishing and ensure there are regular reviews of the content and that principles are adhered to across publishing, the channels, whilst ensuring regular reviews and audits.

Summary

We are spoilt for choice with many capable CMS vendors that have fully-fledged headless content capabilities that can then be enhanced by single customer view capabilities (CDP) and DXPs to enable more transactional type engagement (such as subscriptions, learning management and/or e-commerce). This, coupled with a myriad of mature APIs, SSO and omni-channel content distribution provide an endless list of considerations.

However, how your organisation or institution, plans to manage the quality of your content is fundamental to CMS choice.

It is not just a question of selecting a platform from the outset, but having a strategic and a cohesive design, content and technology approach. This is to ensure the right type of technical setup is selected with a sound approach to data and content migration.

Institutions and organisations need to continually invest in governance, technology upkeep and innovation to ensure that the right systems and human processes are being used so users are engaged and KPIs are being met. Quite often, organisations will need to undertake journey mapping to uncover the content experience from start to finish encompassing not only end customers but also the publishing experience and how various integrations and APIs are leveraged across the board, encompassing data and utility. Once these blueprints are established it is then possible to determine what type of content platform is required.

To conceive a content strategy, audits and analysis will be required not only of content but also user research across customers, staff and suppliers. This coupled with a content governance model will ensure that a RACI is in place to set the scene on future upkeep to avoid the organisation getting into ‘content debt’ and ‘technical debt’ type situations.

Key to this is creating a ‘customer’ centric culture where user research is central to multi-channel ‘content consumption’.