Many marketing teams will be familiar with this scenario: the new product campaign is supposed to launch simultaneously on the website, app, newsletter, and social media. And the outdated CMS makes it a nightmare: the same content has to be created three times separately, the already heavily stretched development team has to be asked for help with every minor adjustment and three weeks pass before the campaign can finally go live. Meanwhile, the competition has long since reacted. What started as a decent content strategy becomes a costly bottleneck. A typical example of how outdated content management systems slow companies down instead of empowering them.

Legacy CMSs create three key obstacles for growth-oriented companies.

• Intertwined structures that entangle teams in inefficient content processes—each channel requires separate processing, leading to bottlenecks and slowed workflows. 

• Costly dependencies, as every technical adjustment ties up developer resources and blocks content teams. 

• Outdated UI and a lack of personalization features make it difficult to efficiently adapt to modern market requirements. This combination of technical limitations and operational inefficiencies makes older systems difficult to use. The solution: a headless API-first CMS that offers the necessary adaptability and expandability to meet today's market requirements.

Modern headless CMSs differ fundamentally from monolithic content management systems in several aspects. The key difference lies in the strict separation of frontend and backend, which completely separates content management and presentation. This API-first architecture makes content available across platforms and prevents content silos, as the same content can be seamlessly delivered to web, mobile, social media, or IoT devices.

Leading systems such as Hygraph, Storyblok, Contentful and CoreMedia strategically utilize this modular, microservice-based structure. This gives developer teams more freedom to flexibly define content models, customize APIs, and quickly integrate new channels—all with independently updatable components. Another advantage is that technical adjustments no longer have to be carried out exclusively by developer teams – marketing and content teams can also perform many of these tasks independently. At the same time, content teams benefit from decoupling: they can create content once and deliver it consistently across all channels, enabling true omnichannel experiences.

The practical advantages are illustrated by these exemplary technology approaches from various headless CMS providers. Contentful, as a composable content platform, enables developers and companies to create content in a modular fashion and integrate it seamlessly into various channels via APIs. Storyblok minimizes technical barriers with no-code/low-code features and a real-time visual editor—teams can track changes live, test different views, and share preview links without leaving the platform. Hygraph relies on a native GraphQL approach for faster performance and precise data retrieval, allowing developers to retrieve multiple sources through a single API request. CoreMedia automates complex processes such as personalization, localization, and image processing through native AI features.

The fact that many of these systems are also available in the SaaS model ensures sustainable cost-effectiveness. Minimal operating and maintenance costs, high scalability, and modular architecture keep the total cost of ownership low in the long term and lead to significant long-term savings compared to monolithic systems.

Content management systems have long been more than just tools for content management—they create added value in numerous areas of a company. The value of a CMS is reflected in the advantages it offers through key features such as user-friendliness, flexibility, scalability, integrability, and security.

Usability over complexity

A CMS should offer every team an intuitive user interface. This maximizes the output of editors and minimizes dependence on developers. The result is optimized, cross-team workflows.

Adaptation instead of rigid systems

Customized content models and reusable components provide the flexibility needed to quickly adapt to changing business requirements. CMS systems support a wide variety of platforms and channels, ensuring a consistent brand message and a seamless customer journey across all touchpoints.

Growth requires scalability

Presenting growing product catalogs across various channels and in international markets poses particular challenges for companies. An expanding company therefore needs a CMS that evolves with it and offers a scalable infrastructure. A CMS helps with the localization and centralized maintenance of multilingual content, as well as with the automatic distribution of region-specific product variants, and takes into account complex pricing for a global, consistent market presence. Cloud-native CMSs remain fast and reliable even with complex content and growing traffic.

Seamless integration

Open APIs and pre-built integrations enable effortless connection to existing tech stacks—from e-commerce platforms to marketing automation tools. This allows developers and editors to work with their preferred tools and frameworks.

Protection at all levels

CMS systems offer user-defined content stages, roles, and targeted access control for users to map complex editorial processes. Legally compliant document archiving, as well as regular updates and simplified maintenance on the technical side, ensure smooth and secure operation. This increases security against data leaks and attacks.

The partnership between Simplicity and Turbine Kreuzberg is an example of the successful implementation of the right CMS solution. As a pioneer in the industry behind the fashion brands OPUS and someday, Simplicity's content management requirements quickly outgrew their previous solution. This led to the task of evaluating new content management systems (CMS) at the end of 2020 and then implementing the one that was most suitable for this project.

Challenges

Simplicity used Spryker's commerce solution with a built-in CMS. This proved to be rather cumbersome and too complex for Simplicity's use cases. They needed a more agile CMS to gain greater adaptability and speed of innovation in a highly competitive market.

Solution

Storyblok offered the ideal solution: a user-friendly yet powerful CMS that provides ultimate flexibility to meet growing demands. Step-by-step integration ensured optimal implementation of Storyblok into Simplicity's existing tech stack. 

Storyblok's high adaptability and modular approach enable seamless integration of the new CMS into existing platforms and easy replacement of individual components for true composability. This allows you to deploy targeted best-of-breed solutions. 

The Visual Editor allows Simplicity to experiment with new designs and UX features, develop them further and flexibly implement market trends. At the same time, workflows have been optimized with reusable content blocks, while open API interfaces ensure data sovereignty across all content and channels. Simplicity gains the flexibility it needs to keep pace with its growth.

Which modern content management system is right for a company depends largely on the individual requirements placed on the CMS. The actual added value of a CMS is evident in various areas of the company – whether in the efficiency of content creation, flexibility in delivery to different channels, support for multilingualism, or the integration of new technologies such as AI. Since monolithic systems can only provide many of these added values to a limited extent or not at all, they are not a suitable option for growth-oriented companies.

A CMS that fits a company's strategic goals and workflows not only offers technical functionalities, but also creates sustainable business value. Therefore, the selection of a CMS should always be based on which specific values—such as scalability, user-friendliness, automation, or future-proofing—offer the greatest added value for the company. 

Switching to a new, modular CMS solution is a crucial step toward future-proofing your business and successfully meeting the growing challenges of the market.