Content as a Service: Definition and Implementation

For modern and successful online marketing, it is essential to serve a wide range of channels. After all, you want to reach as many customers as possible and convince them of your products or services. From your own website to social media channels to apps.

Each of these platforms has different requirements for the content you provide to your followers on them. Manual adjustment, planning and control of your content can become very time-consuming and labor-intensive - but it doesn't have to be. In this post, we introduce you to Content as a Service (CaaS) and show you how it can support you in your content management.

What does Content as a Service mean?

Let's first clarify what you can understand by CaaS. It essentially refers to the storage of your raw content at a central storage location. This can convert the stored data into the required format and make it accessible via an API. You can then use these data on different platforms, such as your website, IoT devices or apps.

CaaS shares your content with all platforms you have selected for this purpose via APIs.

You can therefore imagine CaaS as a Headless CMS that enables you to distribute your content to any desired front-end. It separates content, layout and structure from each other so that the uploaded content can be retrieved on demand from different channels.

So CaaS supports you

The more platforms you want to serve with your content, the more complex their management becomes without Content as a Service. Either you deal with each platform manually or you use different tools to manage them, which in turn cost you money. With the flexibility that CaaS offers you, you can create the experiences for your customers that they expect from your company and that convince them to buy, without manual effort. Another advantage of a CaaS tool is that you can integrate exactly the tools you need. So you are not dependent on pre-installed solutions that may not meet your requirements, but can put together your ideal CaaS like a modular system. This allows you to work on your content more productively and efficiently. This enables you to react quickly to technical changes and secure your content management for the future.

In addition, you can easily integrate new channels through a CaaS tool, through which you can directly communicate your messages. It also offers you the advantage of creating the best possible customer journeys since the layout and design are not one-size-fits-all solutions, but are tailored to the respective platform. Your CaaS also facilitates collaboration with your colleagues from different departments. This is due to the fact that your content pool works separately from the content distribution. The integration and coordination effort decreases, allowing you to launch your marketing campaigns more quickly and cost-effectively to your customers. Additionally, you can reuse the once imported content at any time. This ensures that all relevant data is available exactly when they are needed.

How to successfully implement CaaS

What's next? The implementation! To be successful with CaaS, you need a suitable CaaS tool. You can achieve the streamlining of your Content Management through the Headless CMS provider Storyblok. With CaaS, you provide powerful and appropriate content for each of your communication channels. Through various APIs, you generate the best possible user experiences and can work simultaneously on your content before you publish it. The visual editor allows you to track exactly how changes will look, so you can adjust text, color, or image sizes before going live if you don't like them.

You can see what your changes will look like in the visual editor.

Your developers can also create their own components and templates that you use for your content. But Storyblok can also be used as a central content hub to bind your customers to you. The use of the tool is intuitive, so all users can find their way around quickly.

The use of the Storyblok backend is intuitive.

This is ensured, among other things, by the fact that the page tree can be generated hierarchically. Your content is built up on a page-by-page basis and can be found in a way that is analogous to the structure of your website or other platforms. You can sort your data by type and also link them together if there is a connection between them. Associated comment and approval functions bundle your content-related communication at one central point. You can see in the history who last worked on which documents or pages.

Storyblok not only simplifies the management and distribution of your content, but also helps you get the most out of them. These features save you time and money and allow you to focus on interacting with your users and the successful sale of your products and services.

CaaS – Rethinking content supply

As you have certainly noticed, Content as a Service follows the pull principle, where normal content management systems follow the push principle. Instead of individualizing your content manually and laboriously and “pushing” it into the respective platform, with a CaaS tool you ensure that the platforms and users can “pull” all necessary information and images from the Headless CMS as needed. It is ensured that the data sovereignty lies with your company at all times and that you have control over the content that is used. By switching from a CMS to a CaaS, you improve communication within your company and also the success of your marketing campaigns, thus influencing the success of your company. So let's go - create content that fits exactly.