Today's consumers have lofty expectations for their digital experiences. In fact, PWC found that 73% of people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. So, brands must rise to the occasion with personalized, engaging omnichannel interactions.

To provide a superior customer experience (CX), many enterprise-level companies are investing in a variety of technologies to help them better understand individual customer characteristics, such as needs, challenges, and future direction.

Despite the investments companies are undertaking, marketers are still challenged with delivering mutually beneficial digital customer experiences.

A Composable Platform Enables Companies to Adapt at Speed

The commerce landscape is shifting rapidly, and marketers need technologies that are keeping pace. This speed of change may also cause frustration for marketers relegated to working with less flexible and secure content management systems (CMS).

For example, it may take 1-3 months to bring a new landing page design to production with a traditional CMS. Given today's speed of business, three months simply isn't competitive. That's why a composable digital experience platform (DXP) is so valuable.

A composable solution allows for the integration of any selected third-party platform as part of an organization's digital ecosystem. And unlike monolithic CMS platforms (single-vendor suite solutions), as customers demand more complex and personalized digital experiences, a composable platform is flexible and scalable to seamlessly meet both short- and long-term business requirements.

According to Gartner, "By 2023, organizations that have adopted an intelligent composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation."

Expanding on this concept, a composable DXP that envelopes hybrid headless architecture provides brands and retailers with a high-performance solution. It eliminates the limitations of a traditional CMS—difficulty with enterprise-class requirements, no WYSIWYG editor for marketers—and it is better suited to meet most digital commerce needs.

Why is this combination so effective?

Hybrid Headless Architecture Works for Marketers

Different than pure headless, hybrid headless architecture empowers marketers to nimbly execute digital content initiatives. By separating content management from content delivery, marketers can deliver content to any platform without the dependence on IT or web developers. This framework advantage diminishes workflow bottlenecks and helps to escalate business growth.

For both marketers and IT, a hybrid solution offers the benefits that include a separate back-end and API use that permits different channels to access stored content—and it supports front-end coding and presentation template functionality, which enables marketers to deliver content to a channel without extensive programming requirements.

Ultimately, hybrid headless architecture can deliver improved customer engagements and drive greater sales revenue. It gives marketers the ability to deliver more responsive and engaging digital experiences with increased control over content deployment.

Let's take a closer look at four key reasons marketers need a composable DXP.

Reason #1: Front-end Flexibility

Legacy content management systems were mainly designed to propagate content on web pages to be read on a computer. As content types and devices where content is consumed expanded, the inflexibility of these systems has hastened the move to decoupled content deployment.

Composable platforms enable marketers to work with a variety of tools to distribute content widely. This translates to front-end delivery no longer being limited by the capacity of a legacy CMS. Content can extend to any channel or device.

As a result, you can release a single piece of content on a variety of channels without the need to customize it for each digital touchpoint. Using a composable platform allows marketers to deliver content without relying on IT programmers.

Marketers can leverage the flexible front-end frameworks of these advanced DXP systems to go beyond static web pages associated with a traditional CMS. You can also use the best programming languages available, freeing the adherence to proprietary development rules. It makes it easier to develop stunning, seamless customer experiences that can be deployed on mobile apps, websites, digital signs, etc.

Reason #2: Marketing Velocity

Time-to-market or marketing velocity is crucial when social media-driven trends can sweep around the digital world with lightning speed. Marketers must respond to these changes in as close to real-time as possible to ensure their content stays fresh and relevant.

A traditional CMS makes it difficult to rapidly distribute content because marketers need programming assistance to prepare content for omnichannel distribution. A composable approach allows marketers and developers to move faster and propel marketing velocity throughout the lifetime of the implementation.

Reason #3: Improved Efficiency

Another advantage of hybrid headless architecture is the ability it gives marketers to produce and maintain content without developer support. This type of composable platform enables marketers to create content and experiences without the need to send a ticket to IT. It also establishes the opportunity to realize cost savings by reducing redundancies in the content delivery process.

A composable approach facilitates the ability of programmers to focus on other business-critical IT-related initiatives and liberates marketers to maximize efficiencies with better workflow processes.

The efficiency benefits of a composable CMS compared to a traditional CMS can be summarized as follows:

• Rather than relying upon IT to code new content assets, such as a landing page or product website, marketers can create content directly in a composable CMS.
• Because duplication of effort is lessened and marketers can design and deliver campaigns directly, fewer staff members need to be involved in the process. Additionally, organizations no longer require extensive teams of experts familiar with the operational requirements of a legacy CMS.
• A composable platform has the elasticity to easily integrate with your existing business systems. Given that they don't have a fixed structure for which to code, your programmers have the freedom to code for a wide variety of integrations, including those with more complex systems.

Reason #4: Omnichannel Marketing

With the exploding number of digital channels marketers need to support, it is difficult to anticipate new customer touchpoints. A composable platform delivers the necessary agility to deploy content to any channel by publishing in a decoupled manner.

An enterprise-focused composable solution is the next step for any company to future-proof their digital ecosystem and render digital customer experiences that are incomparable.