Connect with audience: User-centered content strategy via Headless CMS

You've probably heard the phrase 'content is king,' but without an audience, content is just a message lost at sea.

The real focus should be on the user. Content is a tool that guides users to make informed decisions. To effectively communicate your message, you need a user-centered content strategy.

Going headless is a powerful way to connect with your audience. Let’s explore how this approach can help you create and manage content that truly resonates.

It is a user-friendly content operations strategy that focuses on creating and delivering content that meets the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the target audience.

The goal is to enhance the user experience by providing relevant, valuable, and engaging content that addresses the audience's pain points, questions, and interests.

You need a UX content strategy that aligns user needs, technical requirements, and information architecture, using a headless CMS.

Let’s dive into the key elements:

As I said, the information architecture contains all the information needed to content be easily found. Implementing it with a headless CMS enhances this by decoupling the content management system from the presentation layer. This separation allows for more flexibility in how content is delivered and displayed across various platforms and devices.

Traditional CMS uses a technique of card sorting, to create information architecture and navigation system, treating content as a static output. However, headless handles this in a different way since headless content is no longer static outputs like blog posts or product listings.

Instead, content is data, structured into objects and entities, and broken down into components that can be assembled and presented in various ways.

This requires a detailed mapping process, ensuring the content structure meets both current needs and future goals. Not only does this process establish a new IA, but it also identifies the appropriate content and determines the structure by which content should be structured.

Here's a detailed look at how this integration works and its benefits:

Information architecture contains every single piece of information important to handling content. Here are all the components that can help you build customer-centric websites and apps.

Information Architecture plays a crucial role in defining a user-centered design (UCD) process by ensuring that content is organized, structured, and labeled effectively.  Being able to define user persona, and to understand user intent by following all steps in the UCD process are useful to create well-structured information architecture and also create UX writing prompts.

Let’s quickly review the steps to building a well-structured information architecture.

To create a website that puts users at the center of the experience you need to identify the people who will use your website and under what conditions they’ll be using it.

Gather qualitative and quantitative data about your users. Analyze how they interact with your content and what they want to accomplish.

Analyze the collected data to find patterns and similarities among users. Create distinct groups based on similar characteristics such as goals, behaviors, demographics, and preferences. Now you are ready for the next step.

Develop detailed personas for each user segment. Each persona should include:

Link the customer goals and needs to specific information requirements. Determine what information each persona needs at different stages of their journey. This step helps in structuring content to align with user needs and ensuring that relevant information is easily accessible.

Create user journey maps for each persona to visualize how they interact with your content. Identify the key touchpoints and decision-making moments. This visualization helps organize information flow and design navigation that supports the user’s journey.

Maps should include:

Step 4: Integrate persona profiles into IA design

Use the persona profiles to guide the overall IA design. Ensure that the content hierarchy, labeling, navigation, and search functionality align with the personas’ needs and behaviors. Design with empathy, considering how each persona will access, understand, and use the information.

This is a part where headless CMS in because its architecture supports allows you to create personalized content with user first approach out of the box.

Besides decoupling backend the content management backend from the frontend presentation layer, allowing for greater flexibility in content delivery, there are more headless CMS structure benefits that you can leverage for a customer-centric approach.

Handling content as a meta, brings a lot of advantages, from content creation, over managing to distribution, so these are features you get if you use headless as your user-centered content strategy framework:

Content modeling is a method that helps you define, plan, and execute content. In other words, with this approach, you can bring to life your persona profiles data by applying content modeling basics:

Learn more: Content modeling in a headless CMS

Structured content organizes information in a consistent format with headings, subheadings, lists, and metadata, making it easy for users to find and understand the content. This predictability aligns with UXD and facilitates management and retrieval.

There are three key touchpoints when it comes to content structure:

Learn more: How to get Structured Content in headless CMS

Since your content is treated as data, CMS acts like a centralized content hub, and stores all content in a central repository, organizing topic-specific content, and making it easier to manage, update, and distribute across multiple channels.

Here’s how you can benefit from structuring your content into topic-specific clusters:

Learn more: How to build a Content Hub with a headless CMS

Let’s get practical. Now it’s time to use all this knowledge to align technical requirements with a UX content strategy. You’ll need to fulfill both, content and technical requirements.

So let’s start with content requirements.

Use content modeling to define and design your content model based on your persona profiles data.

Detect all content types needed, such as:

When you determine your content needs you are ready to use BCMS Templates (a pre-defined content structure), to make a content model for each content piece.

When you are done creating templates, you have a pre-defined content structure. Based on that structure, you can create entries. Each content template can be customized with fields representing different content elements using BCMS entries.

Let’s take this blog entry as an example:

The properties of a template determine the structure of an entry. Each entry will display the properties defined in its template. Aside from the pre-defined meta, each entry has a content area.

Entry for this blog article is structured this way:

Pre-defined meta:

With a pre-defined blog article like this, you can benefit because you actually get an SEO-friendly template that helps both (Google and users to find and understand your content.

Content area:

The content area serves to customize this entry. Pre-defined meta is structured the same for every single blog post but in a content area, you can put blog copy by using rich text editor, media manager, and BCMS widgets as reusable content blocks that you can use on any page of your website.

Learn more: Reusable structured content - everything you need to know

With these two steps, your content requirements are fulfilled, your content is structured, content types are defined, and the only thing left to do is to make the technical side functional.

You need to set up APIs to deliver content to various front-end applications. By using the BCMS key manager you can configure API endpoints to fetch content.

Each key gives you the option to manage permissions for templates, plugins, and functions, and to establish information architecture relationships and workflows.

You want your content to be seen, so you need to choose a frontend framework that will consume the CMS content.

There are official BCMS frontend integrations that can help you fetch content from BCMS using the API.

But since BCMS is a front-end agnostic CMS, you can connect your content to any front-end development tools developers use.

Practical steps:

By setting up a BCMS, you can create flexible, scalable, and user-centered content. Focus on understanding your audience, delivering personalized experiences, and optimizing for performance and SEO to maximize engagement and satisfaction.