WWW… Wednesday! Contentful

by Taylor Slattery | June 14, 2022

Maintaining an online presence has become quite the task. It’s no wonder many companies have dedicated roles in order to meet the constant demands of content generation. On top of that, it’s no longer enough to run some Facebook ads and call it a day. Modern users are much savvier and much less centralized on any single platform. It’s now important to maintain a presence across a wider variety of platforms while delivering content with genuine value. Without the right tools, doing so requires a massive investment of time, which can take away from the quality of the content itself.

Using traditional CMS solutions and preparing content for each social channel, site, and app separately is not only labor-intensive, but incredibly redundant. A huge chunk of time is wasted on the task of reformatting content to meet the needs of each platform and things like branding updates are tedious, to say the least.

Contentful is a headless content management platform that uses an API to communicate with each content channel so you can author your content once and publish it to any number of platforms seamlessly. Because we often publish the same types of content, Contentful also simplifies these repeated tasks by allowing users to establish content types that function as a template. This automates the task of maintaining consistency in formatting for things like blog posts and articles.

Contentful also utilizes a centralized library for assets. This single source of truth allows members of different teams like marketing, design, and development to easily find what they’re looking for without introducing inconsistencies. Because these assets are centralized, brand updates become a breeze. Updating elements to match the latest brand guide is as easy as swapping in the latest set.

A single piece of content can involve any number of teams. While copywriters fine-tune the text, designers are perfecting the layout before handing things off to the developers to implement. Contentful allows for the assigning of custom permissions and roles that makes coordination between different teams seamless. Each member has access to exactly what they need so they can work in tandem to realize the content without needing to wait on others. This allows for true separation of tasks like design, development and copywriting so each team can focus fully on their portion.

A major benefit of content that is platform-independent is that it’s more future-proof. Contentful already features a large collection of integrations but as new platforms and tools emerge, the flexibility of a headless system only becomes increasingly valuable.

You can learn more about Contentful and try it for free here.