Is your online cross-border platform already headless with a Contentful CMS? Nice! This means you’re able to quickly serve content to all your touchpoints. However, the amount of translations you need can be a real bummer. Luckily we created a marketplace app so you can still use all the awesome Contentful functionalities. This allows you to publish per language and keeps the go-to-market time as short as possible.
A cross-border platform ànd a smooth transition to headless
Brands and manufacturers are under pressure to deliver new digital experiences faster and faster to customers that expect more and more. More often these customers find themselves in multiple markets and use multiple touchpoints. This asks for cross-disciplinary teams of marketing and development and for flexibility of the IT applications.
You see the term headless pass by often as the answer. Is this a futureproof solution? Yes! Does it solve all the problems? Not always… Especially cross-border organizations that use a lot of localized content might still experience a lot of complexity.
As a content marketer you don’t want to lose time with your campaign in Germany for example, because you need to wait for the content of the other regions first. Even though the necessity for headless is often clear as day, the vast amount of translations can still be a barrier.
How does headless work? We store all content in one central location and serve it via an API connection to the presentation layer of each touchpoint within the customer journey. A faster go-to-market speed for marketing and a relief for IT when they need to connect new applications for example. Check out our on-demand webinar about headless cms.
How does localisation work in Contentful?
By default there are two ways within a modern headless CMS package: entry-level and field-level. Field-level comes close to the traditional way of managing content for websites. This means a clear overview when editing a complete page, with the option to switch between different languages. Unfortunately you can’t publish the different language versions of this page independently of each other (asynchronously).
Entry-level is completely headless and works a bit different than we’re used to. The idea is to split content to granular level. Think of the content as individual components like the title on the homepage. Each entry is set up in one language. A big advantage is the reusability of these components on multiple places within the website and you can publish them individually (or asynchronously). The downside is that you can quickly lose the overview due to the fast accumulation of entries when you work with many languages.
In short, field-level localisation works the best for the content editor but it also means more work because all the translations need to be ready in time. One translation can’t stay in an “edit state” for example, as everything is published at once. This is possible with entry level, however, this can quickly become unmanageable when you have a lot of languages.
Full control with the A-Sync localiser app.
A fast go-to-market time for all touchpoints is often made available by a headless CMS like Contentful. To keep the speed in a cross-border environment, your team would like to work page-centric and push market specific content live without the wait on other translations. The a-sync localiser app makes this possible within Contentful!
It allows publishing pages per language while you can still use the support and powerful functionalities of Contentful. The best of both worlds; you have the comprehensible field-level overview and the entry-level asynchronously publishing and keep the possibility to connect entries and reuse them.
You can find the app in the Contentful marketplace.
A-Sync Localiser Demo Video
Do you want to efficiently work with Contentful in multiple markets? The a-sync localiser app of Incentro is available in the Contentful marketplace to help you with complete control. Make it possible to publish per language, keep an audit trail, implement a content firewall and much more. How does this work? Watch our product demo video:
An example of seriously reducing localisation workload.
An Incentro customer faced a big organizational impact when they wanted to switch from page-centric content creation to headless. They needed to quickly scale up their content-editor team to get all their content in the new Contentful CMS on entry level. With an estimated 1500 blog articles * 50 linked entries * 33 languages this would constitute a staggering 2.4 million entries.
This was not possible within the scope of the project. Field-level localisation was therefore the most practical option but with a big challenge: asynchronous publishing was a must due to the compliance content approval process. With the Contentful extension of Incentro they were able to publish per language without waiting until the other 32 languages were ready to go. This takes the 33 out of the equation and places localisation of 75k entries within the manageable scope of the project.
