Internet of Things ( IoT) includes everything connected to the Internet. Usually, it is referred to as devices that talk with each other over the Internet. In simple terms, IoT is made up of devices like simple sensors to smartphones and wearables connected. As of today, more than 100 million Alexa powered devices have been sold. According to Statista forecast, there will be more than 75.44 billion Internet of things connected devices by the end of 2025.
IoT and Marketing
With all the advancements in the field of IoT, many devices are now available for marketing channels and to promote marketing collaterals. Before that, most marketing channels were based on Web and Mobile apps resulting in accessibility limitations. Now we can push marketing collaterals to numerous smart devices and use them as marketing channels. One example of this is driving marketing content to smartwatches and smart LED installed in the car dashboard. Enabling IoT-based marketing channels give great advantage to promote marketing collaterals and increase the reach to the broader audience segment, who are using IoT devices.
New Platforms – Newer Challenges
A significant challenge that arises here is to create and manage content for numerous marketing channels and pushing that at the same time. For Web and Mobile apps, it was easy to create and manage content using traditional content management systems for each channel, e.g., for websites, WordPress is the most popular CMS. Now we have to make content display ready for smartwatches or car dashboards, and we want to have it controlled and accessible through Alexa-based home devices. But we can’t do this with the help of a traditional CMS services that is designed for web and mobile devices only because in this kind of CMS, content is coupled with HTML tags and UI components that might not be relevant in IoT based devices.
Introducing Headless CMS
The solution to this problem is to use Headless CMS. A headless content management system, or a headless CMS, is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API for display on any device. The term “Headless” originated from the concept of chopping off the “head” (front end, i.e., the website) from the “body” (back end, i.e., the repository).
How Does It Work?
Traditionally, publishers with lots of content available on web CMS, ports that content into web view of mobile IoT applications, which means although the app has a different experience than a website, we are still looking at a web page within the app. With a headless CMS, we can use the full capacity of mobile/IoT applications and have complete control over the display of that content for a particular device.