Seeing in a Headless World: Contentstack Introduces New Visual Building Capabilities for Marketers

They say seeing is believing. 

And what I’ve seen in 2024 has made this “The Year of Visual Builders and Editors.”

Hold your applause. I think the marketers in the room are fainting. 

But it's true. Going back a bit, we’ve seen the slow and steady march of tools that stitch together the missing visual threads for headless CMSes. The pace has picked up over the last 12 months. 

I won't debate the vicissitudes of “racing to the middle.” It's been conjured quite enough, thank you. Suffice it to say that headless platforms would inevitably introduce their own visual solutions to balance out the benefits. And why not? It allows them to deliver a more complete and connected experience that's closer to the source. 

In other words, it’s a good thing. 

Behind it, of course, is the unintended consequence of rapid innovation. It’s sad that our gushing, omnichannel exuberance for all things decoupled left “the marketing folk” in the dark. They were, after all, kind of essential to the whole content thing.

But hey, that’s the beauty of modern technology, right? Even if you rush like Reid Hoffman, it’s never too late to update your product.

I’ll hand it to Contentstack for pushing the boulder uphill earlier in the journey. They’re always striving to lead, and the company’s drive to position itself as a “Composable DXP” was a progressive move – one that reflects a deep focus on translating the voice of its customers. I think it’s paying off in dividends, providing a decisive edge as they introduce more features that up the ante for modern enterprises. 

Now, the company is further mending the marketing fences with the launch of native drag-and-drop visual capabilities in its composable CMS environment. Contentstack’s new Visual Builder is an experience-crafting toolset, combining the benefits of its industry-leading headless CMS with a powerful slate of visual capabilities. 

Purpose-built for marketers, Visual Builder accelerates workflows, enabling creators to actually see their work – both present and future – in a headless environment. The announcement was made today at ContentCon Europe in London, which featured speakers from noteworthy brands like Paula's Choice, LADbible, Miele, and more.

To be sure, other platforms across the headless and DXP spectrum are introducing an array of in-app builders and editors. As I said, this year has seen a flurried buzz of announcements surrounding this manner of tooling, which has recently reached a fevered pitch. But Contentstack’s visual tools are just the tip of its proverbial iceberg. Along with its headless CMS features, its new Visual Builder is augmented by brand-aware generative AI, personalization, and automation features that truly unlock the value for marketers. 

"I love that we're overcoming an obstacle for our customers,” said Neha Sampat, founder and CEO of Contentstack. “But what I love even more is how this capability combines with personalization, automation, and GenAI to be true to our North Star: The world's best digital experiences run on Contentstack.”

The new visual tools also promise a better authoring experience for users, giving them unmatched clarity around content creation while simplifying and accelerating each step of the process. Marketers stand to gain greater control and flexibility, armed with the ability to see, edit, and manage content with greater ease and accuracy. 

“We're not focused on one-and-done capabilities,” Sampat explained. “Instead, we work relentlessly toward complete solutions that allow brands – and the marketers and developers within them – to rise above the noise."

Natively visualizing the possibilities

As more organizations embrace headless CMS and roll towards composable, the need for business users to visualize their work has increased. The emphasis on backend experience creation has been mired in a swell of complicated planning and trial-and-error processes, all of which impacted the marketer mindset around headless. 

Contentstack's new Visual Builder aims to solve this problem, offering a complete set of tools for users to create and see their work in real time across any persona. It’s also keenly focused on delivering flexibility and simplicity through a range of features. 

Perhaps most notable are the drag-and-drop blocks, enabling users to seamlessly create layouts by adding or rearranging predefined content blocks on a page – all without the need for developer support or resources. This can include things like content cards and other components, providing an on-brand, customizable experience that keeps design and brand elements inside the guardrails.

Contentstack's drag-and-drop builder featuring card components

The new toolset also offers live and in-line editing capabilities, allowing content creators to make quick edits directly to a page with role-aware permissions for control and accuracy. The contextual UI highlights editable areas like headers and text areas, allowing users to swap images, update copy, and make other changes without breaking format. This is something that traditional web CMSes have offered and has been missing from the headless mix.

There’s also a trick timeline feature that provides a chronological view of your content, allowing you to compare versions side by side, collaborate around reviews, and improve the publishing workflow. 

Audience preview is another key benefit. It enables marketers to see content in real time to know exactly how it will appear in different campaigns or targeted activities. When combined with Contentstack’s Personalize capabilities, it allows marketers to see how content will appear based on customer behavior, experiment results, and other details. 

Contentstack's audience preview provides rich controls and personalization capabilities

All of the new Visual Builder’s features are deployed on a foundation of strong governance, ensuring that team members have the right level of access and administrators have control over their teams with role-based permissions. 

Powering experiences with AI, personalization, and composability

Today’s announcement at ContentCon London amplifies Contentstack's previous introduction of premium capabilities, all designed to help customers reimagine personalization at scale. This includes the aforementioned Contentstack Personalize, which infuses a segmentation and testing engine directly into its CMS to address fragmented content production.

On the AI front, Contentstack has already been blazing trails across its digital ecosystem. With its exclusive Brand Kit capabilities, the company is solving the conundrum around vanilla AI-generated content by making it brand-aware and hyper-relevant to organizations. 

Contentstack Automate is another piece of the pie, thwarting the challenges of operationalizing and repeating large volumes of personalized content with greater efficiency. 

And then there’s the force multiplier of composability throughout the system. With Contentstack, marketers can pull content not just from their CMS, but from other sources like a DAM or PIM to power their experiences at scale. This is reinforced by the platform's MACH-centricity, which enables greater flexibility with open and scalable architectures that allow marketers, developers, and organizations to assemble the right stack for their needs and connect data from almost anywhere. 

Underscoring all of this innovation is Contentstack’s "no fail" promise to customers. This includes its unique AI Accelerator program, designed to guide customers from zero to fully deployed with AI in 45 days or less. Contentstack Academy is also part of the knowledge investment, arming business and technical users with the skills and resources they need to build superior content organizations.

Why it matters 

When I last spoke with Neha Sampat and Conor Egan, Contentstack’s VP of Product, they were prepping for ContentCon 2024 in Austin. In addition to the local lure of the event’s destination (also the company’s home base), we discussed their collective vision for AI-powered personalization, and how companies are prioritizing it amidst a brand relevancy crisis.

Also stymieing that crisis: a lack of control for marketers to be more proactive and reactive. Despite the many developer-centric benefits of a headless CMS, these talented practitioners need the agility and nimble resources of robust visual building tools to realize their ideas and accelerate time-to-market – and ultimately attain the benefits of what Neha calls “Personalization Reimagined.” 

I’m not trying to demonize the developer here. Quite the opposite. While adding a visual builder to its feature set serves the marketer’s goals, the real gamechanger is the harmonization of capabilities for both developers and marketers alike – enabling them to collaborate around reusable components that set creators free with a visual drag-and-drop feature that is simple, elegant, and incredibly fast to use.  

"Now marketers can build and see what they're doing, which will help them achieve the Holy Grail of personalized digital experiences at scale, faster," said Egan. “But this isn't just a story about enabling marketers. The headless world rests on the shoulders of the modern developer and we've assembled the best tools and learning paths to make that happen.”

Now, we’re finally seeing in a headless world – and Contentstack is opening our eyes to what’s possible.  

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