Multichannel Publishing for Enterprises

Every enterprise needs a user-friendly and engaging website to showcase itself. But this isn’t the only way to reach your customers in the current omnichannel environment. After a potential customer visits your website, they might interact with your brand on social channels, a mobile app, an e-commerce shop, or any other potential channel.

Multichannel publishing enables enterprises to meet these customers where they are by publishing content to more than one channel. In this blog post, we’ll explain what you need to know about multichannel publishing for enterprise businesses, and highlight the key capabilities that a headless CMS needs to support it effectively. 

Just Having a Website Doesn’t Cut It Anymore

Websites were once the only digital real estate available for innovative companies. However, that is no longer the case, as multiple channels, from mobile apps and social media platforms to voice devices, augmented reality, and others, have emerged as areas where customers choose to interact with their favorite brands.

Customers expect seamless interactions no matter which digital channel they choose to engage with a business, and enterprises are under pressure to meet those expectations. Many of your competitors are probably already seeing success with multichannel publishing, too. 

Launching coordinated campaigns across websites, Instagram, LinkedIn, email, and mobile push notifications; customer support chatbots and help centers integrated with messaging apps; and company-wide updates through intranet portals, mobile apps, and smart displays in offices are just a few of the ways enterprises are embracing multiple channels. 

Even B2B-focused brands accustomed to using a few tried-and-tested channels have had to adapt to a new world where their customers are just as likely to be browsing social media as visiting their corporate website. 

Challenges in Multichannel Publishing with a Traditional CMS

Multichannel publishing can enable businesses to seize opportunities and engage with customers in multiple locations. However, it doesn’t come without challenges, particularly if businesses rely on a traditional or legacy CMS to manage content. 

Managing Content Consistency Across Platforms 

Delivering a cohesive and consistent brand experience across channels is essential for enterprises. Unfortunately, those relying on a traditional or legacy CMS that can only deliver content to one channel will struggle. The restrictive templated approach, lack of centralized content management, and version control issues mean that delivering a consistent content experience is almost impossible, leading to confused customers and reduced trust. 

Handling Large Content Volumes

Enterprises often manage vast libraries of content across different regions, languages, and channels to consistently publish content to multiple channels. However, managing these content libraries and experiences is difficult when relying on traditional CMS architecture, as many traditional platforms suffer from poor scalability and rigid architecture that doesn’t seamlessly integrate with other tools. 

Content Fragmentation

Publishing content across multiple platforms using traditional CMS architecture often leads to fragmented content management, with teams forced to work in silos. This eventually results in more consistency challenges, publishing errors, and duplicated effort. 

How a Headless CMS Supports a Multichannel Publishing Strategy

Enterprises using a traditional CMS might struggle to realize the potential of multichannel publishing. However, by adopting a headless CMS, they can successfully execute a multichannel publishing strategy. 

Centralized Content Management

A headless CMS centralizes content and allows businesses to manage content for multiple channels from a single repository. Additionally, they can create content once and publish it everywhere, streamlining content operations and making multichannel publishing much easier. 

Structured Content

A headless CMS separates content from its presentation format and instead organizes content into modular, reusable components. Instead of creating separate content for each channel, structured content ensures that every piece of content information (text, images, metadata) is stored in a consistent, reusable format that can be easily adapted to different channels. 

APIs for Distribution

A headless CMS uses APIs to deliver content to any front-end or device, making it the ideal solution for a multichannel publishing strategy. Whether it’s a website, mobile app, digital kiosk, or wearable device, APIs ensure that content is dynamically delivered where and when it’s needed. As such, businesses can create omnichannel customer experiences by delivering consistent content on every channel.

Future-Proof Architecture

While the current multichannel strategy might be relevant today, things could change as new channels emerge. With a headless CMS, businesses can integrate new technologies to help improve their content strategy and continue to publish to new channels when they get created. 

What Makes CrafterCMS Different From Other Headless CMS Solutions

Multichannel publishing is possible using a headless CMS, but not every headless CMS does it in the same way. CrafterCMS is an enterprise-grade headless CMS for large-scale sites and apps and is the ideal solution for multichannel publishing. However, CrafterCMS offers a few advantages over other headless CMSs.

Best-in-Class Content Authoring

CrafterCMS offers best-in-class content authoring through a user-friendly interface. Content authors have the tools to create, update, and publish to any digital channel with drag-and-drop experience building, WYSIWYG content editing, multichannel preview, and more.

Decoupled Architecture

Unlike other headless CMSs, CrafterCMS provides a decoupled architecture that separates content authoring and management from content delivery. This architectural flexibility enables teams to work independently, enhancing agility, scalability, security and content delivery performance. 

Push vs Pull Approach

Most headless CMSs only allow you to pull content to your app via APIs. However, true multichannel publishing means actual publishing, not just querying via an API. CrafterCMS supports both push and pull operations of your headless content. CrafterCMS supports pull operations including querying content via APIs, and also pushing content to any channel directly, supporting multiple use cases. 

There are some situations where content needs to be pushed to a channel, such as to social channels or feeding content into a AI harvesters or to an internal AI workflow to support retrieval augmented generation (RAG). 

Deployer Mechanism

CrafterCMS includes a deployer service that not only pushes content to multiple delivery channels, but also triggers search engine indexing, runs scheduled deployments, executes pre-defined actions every time a deployment succeeds or fails (e.g., send out deployment email notifications, trigger static site generation to create Markdown or static-generated content for those channels that need it), and such. Like all CrafterCMS components, Crafter Deployer is an API-first headless service that is extensible to meet any enterprise multichannel publishing requirement. 

Try CrafterCMS’s Multichannel Publishing Capabilities 

CrafterCMS offers the features and flexibility to deliver content experiences across multiple channels. Try out CrafterCMS to see how you can create headless content projects for every channel you need.