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

I bet you have heard the phrase “content is king” a million times, but what is content without an audience? Just a message in a bottle cast into the ocean.

That’s why I think the user is king, and content is a service that helps the user make the right decision and helps it rule. So for a better government, you need a user-centered content strategy to get that message in a bottle and delivered directly to many who are concerned.

One of the best ways is to go headless. Why? Keep reading and you will learn how to create and manage content that is reaching its audience.

What is a user-centered content strategy

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.

To do so, you need a create a UX content strategy- an approach where with the help of headless CMS you ensure that your user needs, technical requirements, and information architecture are aligned.

Let’s dive into the key elements:

How Information Architecture and Headless CMS play a role in a user-centered content strategy

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 results in a more detailed mapping exercise for headless CMS, which pays close attention to both current and desired content taxonomies. 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 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.

Defines user-centered design process

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.

• Step 1: Research

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.

• Step 2: Create user personas

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

• Name and demographics: Give the persona a name and include demographic details such as age, gender, occupation, and location.
• Goals and tasks: Outline the key goals and tasks the persona wants to accomplish.
• Behavior patterns: Describe how the persona interacts with information and navigates through content.
• Pain points and challenges: Identify the challenges and pain points the persona faces.
• Preferred content types: Specify the types of content the persona prefers (e.g., articles, videos, infographics).
• Step 3: Map Information needs

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:

• Navigation systems (Global, local, and contextual)
• Taxonomy: Hierarchical structure for organizing content.
• Classification schemes: Organize content by topic, audience, or task.
• Clear and labeling system: Easy-to-understand terms for navigation and content categories.
• Metadata: Information about content (titles, keywords, etc.).
• Tagging: Assign tags to content for easier search and organization.
• Sitemaps*:* Visual representations of site structure.
• Wireframes: Low-fidelity layouts showing content and navigation placement.

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.

Headless CMS structure benefits

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 as a tool for user-centered design

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:

• Defining content types (e.g., articles, videos, FAQs) based on customer needs and business goals.
• Building content structure: Create a clear and consistent structure for each content type, including fields and metadata.

Learn more: Content modeling in a headless CMS

Reusable content structures

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:

• Organized: Arranged in a predictable, systematic way.
• Reusable: Can be easily repurposed across different channels.
• Machine-readable: Easily interpreted by software, facilitating automation and integration.

Learn more: How to get Structured Content in headless CMS

Headless CMS as a single source of information

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:

• Better navigation and accessibility: Content is organized by topic, making it easier to find information.
• Topical content facilitates easier collaboration between team members. This fosters better teamwork and ensures everyone is on the same page.
• Content management: Topic-specific clusters improve content management efficiency.
• Increase exposure to various topics and articles by discovering additional content within the hub.
• SEO benefits: A well-structured content hub can improve search engine optimization by creating a strong internal linking structure and improving the visibility of your content.

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

How to set up a BCMS to connect with the audience

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.

Step #1: Configure BCMS according to your content models

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

Detect all content types needed, such as:

• blog posts
• Authors,
• Categories
• product listings
• case studies
• banner image
• a page heading and subhead
• infographics or photos
• testimonials
• contact form…

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.

Step #2: Use BCMS Entries to structure your content

When you are done with creating templates you’ve got a pre-defined content structure. Based on that structure, you can create entries. Each content template can be customized with fields that represent 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:

• Title
• Slug
• Date
• Meta description
• Category
• Image
• Author

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 defined, and the only thing left to do is to make the technical side functional.

Step #3: API Configuration

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.

Step #4: Establish content delivery infrastructure

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.

In summary: Creating a user-friendly content strategy with BCMS.

Practical steps:

• Do research
• Plan content strategy
• Create content
• Define content models
• Install BCMS
• Define content models
• Structure content models
• Call API for help
• Build front end and go live

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.