The category of Headless CMS continues to enjoy ongoing success, as evidenced by the increase in market entrants, the venture capital continuing to flood the sector, and the growing number of sites adopting it.
However, when viewed through a more competitive lens and the continued dominance of monolithic solutions like WordPress, it is clear that a lot more needs to be done to increase the market share of the category.
In this guest post from Alan Gleeson, the CEO and Co-Founder of Contento, he argues that one route to accelerated adoption is a collective effort to better educate non-devs about the benefits of a Headless CMS and how it can deliver value for them.
In short, if Headless vendors want to “cross the chasm” from “early adopters” to the “early majority” a lot more needs to be done, and appealing to non-devs represents a credible route to do so.
The Context
The growth in Headless has primarily been developer-led. After all, it is a more technical approach to website building, and the initial benefits were often ones that appealed more to developers.
However, when it comes to new website builds or upgrades, other key stakeholders will typically be involved in decisions relevant to a CMS - the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or other non-technical leaders, ranging from the Chief Finance Officer (CFO) to the Head of Content.
Sometimes, they may delegate the website upgrade decision to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), but in many others, they won’t. After all, they’ll be largely entrusted with managing and maintaining the site post-launch.
For more senior marketing leaders, it will be a case of ‘once bitten twice shy’ for those who’ve been involved in other CMS deployments over the years. These marketing leaders will be time-pressed and under pressure (who isn’t?), with the majority having a relatively narrow understanding of the Pros and Cons of different CMS solutions.
I should know. I was a CMO myself for many years. And this is a key point - most marketing leadership functions in B2B /SaaS or tech companies are very broad.
The role covers a lot of ground, from resourcing to lead generation to attribution to marketing collateral. Attention spans are short; thus, most marketing leaders have a small window to assess something new - like a CMS.
Dropping a marketing leader onto a tech-centric Headless CMS website referencing webhooks and composable architectures is simply not the way forward. Is it any wonder so many CMOs still default to WordPress when pressed? After all, in terms of brand awareness, it is still “the main show in town.”
Some Challenges to Overcome
Firstly, the name 'headless' is a bit of a strange one. It is even more confusing when the accompanying text describes a primary benefit as being able to ‘feed multiple heads’ - it is just not intuitive (especially when the vast majority of Headless CMS are deployed to manage a single website).
It is time to sit under the wider Content Management System umbrella and label the “traditional approach” as “the old approach”. Let monolithic vendors deal with a qualifying prefix. The modern approach to CMS could just become known as a CMS, with the older way known as “the legacy CMS”. Are we seeing many monolithic CMS market entrants these days?
Secondly, as alluded to previously, website marketing copy and educational content, ranging from blogs to videos, have historically been very developer-centric. While this made sense in the early years, I’d argue it is time to redress the balance and for all Headless CMS vendors to start appealing to a much wider non-technical audience ranging from CMOs to agency owners.
The early adopters of Headless tended to be larger companies with well-stacked dev teams and where some of the key benefits of Headless were of most value:
- Performance: Ability to get page load times under 1s
- Omnichannel: One source of truth for content feeding multiple heads
- Flexibility: Enhanced developer flexibility
- Scalability: The scalable architecture.
The next phase needs to expand beyond the Fortune 500, so the API-based approach is considered the norm rather than some new tech “just for enterprise”. These benefits are valuable for a much wider market, especially when security improvements and more streamlined workflows are added. And the messaging must become more sophisticated beyond technical features and address broader topics like Return on Investment (ROI), migration costs, and how features drive commercial benefits.
Overcoming These Challenges
Why is it important to address these challenges?
When viewing the market through the lens of strategic competition, one could consider it as the new market entrants (Headless) taking on a long-established and entrenched incumbent (primarily WordPress).
Given the rich WordPress ecosystem, you have a fairly formidable competitor and one of the few well-known brands in the space. While WordPress is viewed quite negatively by many devs, it also has an entrenched supporter base, and its popularity means most marketing leaders will have had some exposure to it on their journey to a leadership position—better the devil you know than the one you don’t.
In a time-pressed marketing function, is it any wonder that many marketers chose WordPress despite its known issues?
However, as someone who has witnessed some of the challenges with WordPress first-hand and the problems it can cause, we must do more to raise awareness of other more viable options like Headless.
Finally, I’m not claiming Headless is significantly better than WordPress. Context is everything, and any CMS selection has to factor in a lot of different criteria. The core argument is that WordPress is an easy option to fall back on, even if it is ill-suited to the demands of a growing marketing team seeking to scale their website. If more marketers knew the benefits of a well-built Headless CMS site, they’d likely select the option in larger numbers. And that is the thrust of my argument.
The Solution
At Contento (a new Headless CMS), we’ve tried to better accommodate both personas. Because if the devs are happy and the marketing team is happy, we believe our users will enjoy a better experience.
Website Design: Our site seeks to communicate effectively with marketing leaders as well as developers.
Blog Content: Our content is designed to speak to marketing and content leaders.
Product UI/UX: Our UI/UX ensures the primary users post-launch can manage the site without a significant developer dependency.
As Josh Angell, or CTO, argues
“That’s why we’re doubling down on getting the content modeling right and building out first-party SDKs for all those hot frameworks. It’s why we’re hand-rolling an SEO module right in the core of our platform. It’s why we’re obsessing over the UX of the interface and following the principle of “make everything so obvious my kids can use it.”
However, we can do more as a wider community of Headless vendors.
Branding
I genuinely believe we should try and align and consider renaming the category - even “modern CMS” is more accessible than “Headless CMS.”
Content Marketing
We should produce better educational content for non-devs so they are better informed about why Headless is a better route (in many instances) for their needs.
Product Design
We need to invest more time in ensuring Headless CMS solutions better meet the needs of marketing (and content) teams. Are our solutions really as intuitive as we claim?
Financials
We also need to do a better job of helping clients evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership and the likely ROI, especially with a site migration baked in. Headless CMS pricing is impenetrable for non-devs, further complicating the issue for those evaluating their options.
The CMS cost may represent a small portion of the overall cost, but that is not the point. It is to recognize that developer costs and other specialist support are needed, and helping prospects to better understand the overall costs, including all constituent elements, will help with adoption.
Summary
The category of Headless continues to go from strength to strength. However, to enjoy wider market appeal, it needs to ensure that the value of the approach can be communicated more widely. Ensuring other key decision makers involved in CMS evaluation can better understand the benefits represents a good starting point.
In short, as a community, Headless vendors need to do a better job appealing to Non-Devs, arming them with the information they need to sell the idea internally.
About Alan Gleeson Alan Gleeson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Contento, and previously acted as a fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for some of Europe’s leading B2B SaaS startups.
About Contento Contento is a modern Headless Content Management System optimized for marketing and SaaS websites.