How Contentful Changes the Way Your Teams Work — For the Better

Modern content teams are abandoning the traditional CMS for something smarter: Contentful.

Contentful is where practices that have been applied to managing databases for decades have been repurposed for content.

Treating content as data unlocks new benefits for content teams

Content and data are in the same family — text, images, videos, numbers, etc.. So when you use a tool that allows you to leverage best practices for managing data, you unlock things like content reusability, consistency, authoring efficiency, and platform agnosticism.

The way this works is through content modeling. Content modeling is a process where your existing platform is audited to break the large collection of content down into smaller building blocks, kind of like Lego pieces. These building blocks can then be reused in many places throughout your content platform to create a large assortment of end experiences in a way that's fast and easy to maintain.

Here's an example to better describe what I mean.

Keeping content in sync across your entire website used to be arduous

Imagine a situation where you have a speaker featured on your company website. This speaker has authored blog posts, given testimonials and quotes that appear all over your website, and also appeared in videos.

Now, let's say this speaker gets a new job and their title and company name need to change in every place their bio is listed (all of those blog posts, testimonials, videos).

With a traditional CMS, you'd have to track down every piece of content that ever mentions that speaker's name and hope that you caught everything. Sometimes websites have tens of thousands of pages. It becomes nearly impossible and incredibly time-consuming to be sure you're making all the right updates. Imagine you found a typo once it went live.

With a headless CMS like Contentful, a speaker could be its own entity or component, with a name, job title, and company. Rather than hard-writing that information in every blog post, testimonial, video, or quote, you can now reference the speaker component. This means that one piece of content with the speaker's information appears in many places. When it needs to be updated, you do that once, and it gets applied everywhere.

I've seen one piece of content in Contentful get reused thousands of times

Think about your core product or brand messaging — this is used everywhere. If this changes in Contentful, it's no longer a scary, uncertain hurdle to overcome.

Ok, why else should I use Contentful?

"Headless" means that you're not bound to any platform specifically to bring your content to life, whether in a mobile app, modern website, onsite experience, e-commerce, or support/knowledge portal. This is a huge opportunity to build the best possible experience you can and tailor it specifically to your business's needs.

We've led migrations to Contentful that produced incredible improvements in page speed, accessibility, brand consistency, and authoring efficiency

No longer bound to a broken, slow platform, the business could bring its content to life with best-in-class technologies.