With the explosion of digital channels, it’s easy to get caught up in the importance of social media, mobile apps, and other digital experiences that happen outside your brand website. But websites still play a critical role. 

According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, website traffic and website engagement make up two of the five most frequently used metrics to measure content performance.

But brands that rely on antiquated website strategies are falling behind evolving customer expectations. These older strategies favor pre-scheduled static site releases that serve dated, cookie-cutter experiences. They ignore user preferences for differentiated experiences and can drive potential customers away.

In this post, we’ll share some quick tips to modernize your brand’s web strategies to deliver customer-winning experiences.

Treat your website like a digital product

Treat your website like a product and you’ll reach your customers in a whole new way. With a product-centric approach to web strategy, brands become more responsive to audience preferences, industry changes, and competition.

Forget annual or biannual website launches. Modern website strategies take an agile approach to this process by considering websites as an evolving digital product instead of a routine project. This model enables organizations to update their online presence and webpages to continue driving business value.

Changes in brand, product, and service information are bound to happen. When they do, you need a solution in place that’s ready to reflect updates across your brand’s entire digital landscape. A modern website strategy ensures edits can be made and deployed quickly without the excessive delays that are common with scheduled releases. 

Bring cross-functional teams together to succeed 

To support frequent site updates, companies must carve out space and resources to build cross-functional web teams. Ideally, talent should be pulled from Product, Engineering, and Marketing teams. Leadership roles within these teams should be reserved for product managers. These stakeholders will work in parallel to push new features and content to the brand’s website to meet business needs. 

Composable architectures are superior to monolithic solutions

A team of capable builders committed to agile methodologies will only get your web strategy so far. These teams require technology that allows them to build at scale and speed. A composable tech stack offers a modern, streamlined alternative to complex, rigid, and often expensive monolithic solutions.

Composable stacks combine best-in-class microservices and are designed to meet a brand’s specific web needs. Brands that adopt composable architectures enjoy the freedom to select technology solutions that fit their workflows, developer preferences, and projects. Should any of these change, teams can add, modify, or remove tools without breaking the entire site. 

Use a content platform to unify your tech stack

Whether your company is a budding tech startup, small business, or an ecommerce powerhouse, content drives your web experience. Modern content platforms and content models provide a foundation that supports existing types of content and experimental projects based on digital trends. 

A content platform, a more modern version of a headless CMS, lets you manage content securely from one location. For example, the Contentful Composable Content Platform, connects content across teams and tools and uses a cloud-native, API-first approach to support headless content delivery across channels. This enables digital teams to reuse content and create dynamic, immersive website experiences that are part of larger omnichannel experiences.

Help teams work smarter, not harder 

Content platforms help teams stay flexible, fast, and connected. They mitigate risk and empower developers and creatives to take greater ownership over what they create and ship. In the productivity sector, the parallel workflows that content platforms support play a key role. Teams can avoid messy or lengthy handoffs during different stages of the product. This is largely possible because content creators can write and edit while developers code. 

Content modeling — a key component of a good content platform — breaks assets into a modular structure so that components can be reused and repurposed. In this way, manually recreating assets for new initiatives and diverse channels (smartphones or mobile devices, voice assistants, AR/VR, digital signage) becomes a thing of the past. Teams can say goodbye to copy and pasting content repeatedly or redesigning heavily used assets like landing pages. Less confusion and repetitive manual work encourage productivity and greater user satisfaction.

Choose tools that extend beyond your website strategy

No one part of your digital strategy stands alone. Choosing tools that enable more integration on the backend will make it easier to deliver connected, omnichannel experiences on the frontend.

Content platforms exist as more than just frameworks for your web strategy. They can direct and streamline your content strategy and content marketing strategies which might include social media marketing, omnichannel distribution, and search engine optimization (SEO).

As an API-first platform, Contentful easily integrates with custom or third-party apps, so teams don’t have to leave the platform to access bespoke capabilities. They also don’t have to rummage around for the content they need — everything is in a single, easy-to-use hub.

To get the most out of your content models and content platform while meeting business goals, Contentful’s App Framework and App Marketplace enable teams to quickly pull in a new tool or build out capabilities directly within the platform.

Contentful makes it easy to modernize websites and your larger digital strategy

Contentful has solutions for all members of digital teams, from creatives through developers. With our cloud-native, API-first composable content platform, you can construct innovative web designs (like an eye-catching homepage) or create content that supports diverse digital marketing initiatives. What’s more, you can extend these capabilities beyond your web strategy to integrate your entire digital strategy and ensure content is carried consistently across customer touchpoints. 

Stuck with a static website? Download our website strategy guide for a roadmap to modernize with the help from a composable content platform.

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