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What Connected Devices Mean for Business and Content Management

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Jun 20, 2019 | Brent Heslop

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While 2030 may seem a long way off, in the age of fast-paced business transformation smart organizations are already looking at least that far out when it comes to planning. One of the most impactful trends we’re anticipating in the coming decade is the overwhelming adoption by businesses and consumers of internet-connected devices that will automate and personalize almost every aspect of modern life and work.

However, if we learned anything from Spider-Man’s wise Uncle Ben, it’s that with great power comes with great responsibility. In other words, the opportunities posed by adopting connected devices and the internet of things (IoT) do not come without some inherent risks.

Knowing such, let’s explore what IoT is and what it means for businesses today, what precipitated its popularity, what devices we can expect to come online in the near future, and which key opportunities and risks every company needs to be aware of when planning for the future.

What Is the Internet of Things?

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The internet of things is an interlacing web of “smart,” physical devices that can be powered on, connected to the internet, and, quite often, connected to one another.

For consumers, these devices can include anything from light bulbs to coffee makers, headphones, TVs, security systems, wearables, self-driving cars, and plenty more. Consumers can often link many of these devices together to collect data and perform automated actions in what’s come to be known as a “connected home.”

The IoT also exists outside the consumer world. Healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, transportation, telecommunication, and other industries connect smart parts and devices to the internet and each other to power analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation.

In 2017, 27 billion devices were connected using IoT. This number is expected to increase to 125 billion by just 2030, which will put about 15 connected devices into the hands of every consumer. The $170 billion IoT market is expected to grow to $561 billion by 2022.

We’ll see a proliferation of connected devices in our future. Now the questions are: Which ones and why now?

Which Devices and Why Now?

The explosion of IoT devices can be chalked up to a perfect storm of technological and societal changes.

Today, one can get quality processors, sensors, and other hardware elements that power connected devices at an affordable price. In addition, AI is developing smarter insights and automations by the day, broader and more powerful networks put connectivity at an all-time high, and the decreasing cost of storage means collecting and analyzing big data is no longer a hindrance.

It also helps that our society has largely adopted digital technology as part of everyday life. We’re more mobile than ever and have come to expect the convenience and time savings that automated, personalized technology provides. Right now, 53 percent of the global population is connected to the internet—and that number is sure to grow as connected devices get more affordable.

Smartphones, TVs, and wearables are some of the more established IoT devices that have moved from the niche sector to become widely discussed and adopted. Popular trends like digital assistants, in-home robots, and smart energy management offer opportunities for companies who want to break into consumer IoT devices. In-home electric car chargers, “wireless in-ear computational earpieces” orhearables, and even smart gardening devices make up the niche space while apparent up-and-coming trends include smart lighting, smart appliances, and more.

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IoT Means New Business Opportunities

While it’s hard to imagine every business opportunity the new age of connectivity will present, right now we don’t think proactive customer service, more powerful content, and data-enriched products, marketing campaigns, and internal processes are a bad place to start.

Bigger Data Improves Product Development, Marketing, and Internal Workflows

Data has become a currency. Consumers and organizations alike realize that if they’re willing to grant access to their data, the payoff will be smarter, more personalized devices. This presents an excellent opportunity for businesses who know how to cash in on big data. One one side, third-party services that can effectively store, protect, manage, analyze, and use data will boom. At the same time, companies can use their data to understand their audience better and develop and market products that serve them well. Internally, data will empower businesses to understand and automate their own systems to optimize efficiency and output.

Content Will Play an Even Larger Role in Business Success

IoT presents more opportunities for content to be surfaced—and in entirely different ways—than ever before. AI-powered and voice-activated devices will become foundational search tools. While this opportunity certainly means your content could become more useful in more situations, it also means marketers will have to overhaul the way they target searches. At the same time, IT will have to structure content in such a way that it can be served seamlessly from a smart watch’s screen to a washing machine’s digital display to a voice-activated device’s response.

A headless content management system (CMS) empowers businesses to take advantage of this opportunity by allowing them to create content just once and publish it everywhere. Because a headless CMS has no built-in front-end system that determines how or where content will be displayed, content managers can quickly optimize and serve consistent experiences on websites, apps, chatbots, connected home devices, voice assistants, and more.

If you’re looking for a headless CMS that also lets you seamlessly integrate a powerful personalization engine of your choice to segment and optimize content, AI-enabled widgets that analyze and improve performance, and enterprise-ready security and business features—we invite you to take a look at Contentstack.

Proactive Customer Support, Simplified

As the number of connected devices and people steadily ticks up, so does the need for support. The opportunity to provide customer support can backfire for businesses that don’t have the resources to scale. That is, unless they’re able to turn the IoT inward and establish AI-enabled customer support that knows what a customer needs before they even know it themselves.

A handy side-effect of connectivity is that companies finally have insight into how their products are performing long after they’ve been integrated into users’ homes and businesses. Now, the company instead of the consumer can initiate a customer service interaction based on what they’re able to see pertaining to device performance, usage patterns, and more. Customer service will go proactive instead of reactive.

A great example of proactive customer service in action is Michelin’s truck tires, which contain IoT-enabled sensors that monitor air pressure and wear and tear. With these sensors, Michelin can alert transportation companies to any issues well before a dangerous malfunction occurs.

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The Risks IoT Presents for Businesses Today

Just like any significant shift in the business or technology ecosystem, the trend toward IoT-enabled devices comes with its downfalls. However, with careful planning and thoughtful technology adoption, we believe the major risks that outmoded security and content management present can be effectively mitigated.

Your Current Website Isn’t Going to Cut It

According to GlobalWebIndex, the average digital consumer owns three different internet-enabled devices (for now). And Nielsen found that, in 2018, American adults spent nearly four hours per day consuming media on them.

Today, people are switching between gadgets and displays whether they’re working, consuming entertainment, or making a purchase. The businesses that will win their attention are those that can serve the right content, on the right device, at the right time during the digital experience.

Unfortunately, if you’re using a traditional CMS, you won’t be prepared to do that.

With a traditional CMS (think Drupal, WordPress, etc.), content is saved to a built-in database and displayed to the built-in front-end delivery system. Because the content and its delivery are permanently connected, there is little opportunity to personalize the messaging for different segments or optimize the display for different devices.

However, a headless CMS with CRM, DAM, and marketing automation integrations (Contentstack’s Experience Extensions revolutionize this concept) makes it easy to gather consumer data from a single source of truth, use it to personalize content right inside the editor, and segment delivery for optimal results.

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Even the mother of all search engines, Google, is reinforcing the omnichannel imperative with mobile-first indexing that checks out the mobile version of your website first when it comes time to determine search engine ranking as well as a focus on voice-search-optimized content.

Security Concerns Are More Than Justified

Even in 2019, only 48 percent of companies can detect security breaches in their IoT devices—despite increased spending and a general acknowledgment that IoT security is a business’ ethical responsibility.

In the age of IoT, data security is more critical, yet weaker, than ever. That’s because as more devices get connected to the internet, security coverage becomes thinner for each and hackers gain more opportunities from which to attack. During Q3 of 2017, organizations in the UK suffered an average of 237 attacks per month—up 35 percent from Q2 and 90 percent from Q1 of the same year.

On the bright side, Contentstack helps enterprise organizations keep their valuable content assets safe with features like network security, a virtual private cloud, data encryption, log data retention, two-factor authentication, password protection, and stringent compliance and GDPR measures.

What Will IoT Mean for the Future of Your Business?

When estimates state that the average person will own and use at least 15 connected devices by the year 2030, one thing we know for sure is that businesses must be thinking about the risks and opportunities of IoT today.

Will opportunities like proactive customer support, more powerful content, and data-enriched products, marketing campaigns, and internal workflows be enough to convince you to optimize your business to take advantage of smart, connected devices? Or, will the risks associated with a substantial content re-platforming project and possible security concerns keep you away from the IoT?

While we can’t tell you how to plan for the future of your business, we can provide one of the most important tools for future-proofing your content assets and management efforts against major disruption. We can provide Contentstack’s revolutionary headless CMS.

Contentstack offers advanced features like digital asset management, version control, approval workflows, optimization plugins, and more for content creators as well as enterprise-level availability, security, and scalability for IT teams. Go ahead, use our ROI calculator to find out how much you can save annually with Contentstack or take it for a test drive and build out a (free!) proof-of-concept today.

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Jan 17, 2023

Contentstack demonstrated 295% ROI in Forrester study

Today’s consumer expects a seamless and personalized digital experience when interacting with brands. As we’ve discussed before, a monolithic (or “legacy”) CMS lacks the flexibility enterprises need to keep up with changing consumer demands. “A lot of the technologies that were initially driving digital experiences [were designed with] one single experience in mind,” said Jeff Baher, head of Global Product Marketing and Growth at Contentstack. However, Baher said, with the rise of mobile internet, social media and smart devices, “there’s just an entirely different set of requirements for being able to reach customers and create digital experiences.” The digital experience has expanded, and the customer journey can now unfold across multiple channels. Increasingly, enterprises are adopting composable architecture to build digital experiences for their customers, and a headless CMS is the beating heart of it all. But can the benefits of implementing a headless CMS be measured? We recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study measuring the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of the Contentstack headless CMS platform, and the results speak for themselves.MethodologyThe Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) methodology was developed by Forrester to help companies quantify the value of IT initiatives, such as moving to a headless CMS. TEI gives leaders more concrete data they can use to make the right decisions for their organization.In order to effectively measure the benefits of the Contentstack headless CMS, researchers at Forrester identified four organizations currently using the Contentstack headless CMS. 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How to use microblogging to market your business

A microblog is a brief article meant to generate fast responses from readers. It is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family, share your thoughts and experiences and stay up-to-date on the latest news. But it can also be a powerful marketing tool for businesses of all sizes.Creating interesting and persuasive marketing copy can entice potential customers to learn more about your product or service. And by sharing your thoughts and ideas on microblogging platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, you can reach a larger audience quickly. There are many ways to share short microblogging messages, including audio, video, images and text.How can microblogging help my business?Microblogging can help your business in several ways. For starters, communicating news and information about your business on microblogs is a great way to connect with customers and followers. As social media became more popular, companies began to use microblogging as a way to engage with customers more quickly. 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Oct 19, 2022

What is Agile content marketing?

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Oct 18, 2022

How to choose an omnichannel marketing platform

Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to create customer-centric experiences that are personalized and consistent for each consumer across all channels. This modern way of thinking about content management can help your business build stronger relationships with customers and increase sales.Today's marketing professionals need to pursue an omnichannel experience that customers can use whenever, wherever they want. This approach means creating a consistent experience across all devices, whether customers use a desktop computer, a mobile phone, a tablet or a smartwatch. By designing an omnichannel experience, companies can ensure that their customers have a positive and seamless experience no matter how they interact with them. 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At the same time, customer-centricity considers the customer's preferences and needs. Adopting this paradigm can be challenging for some marketing solution providers that cut their teeth on multichannel marketing. It's not enough to provide the same branding message across your customers' channels. A customer-centric solution helps you tap into your customers' historical behavior to understand their needs better. To provide your customers with the best possible experience, you will also want to consider how user-friendly and easy to navigate a potential solution is. The platform's ability to integrate with other software applications used by your company is also an important consideration. Once you have considered these factors, you can compare the different omnichannel features that are available. Reading reviews and comparing attributes is essential to ensure you choose the best platform for your business.Features of the best omnichannel platformsHere are some of the top features to consider when choosing an omnichannel marketing platform:The ability to provide a personalized customer journey across all channels: An omnichannel marketing platform should allow you to manage your marketing activities efficiently and effectively across all channels. This approach can save time and money.The ability to connect with customers across all channels: An omnichannel marketing platform should allow you to connect with customers across all channels, including online, offline, and mobile. This can help to improve customer loyalty and increase sales.The ability to understand customer behavior and preferences: An omnichannel marketing platform can help businesses better understand customer behavior and preferences. You can use this information to improve marketing and ultimately increase sales.What to avoid in omnichannel marketing platformsWhen considering an omnichannel marketing platform, it is essential to know the available features and choose the platform best suited to your business. However, there are also some things to avoid when choosing a platform.Be sure not to choose a platform that is too complex or difficult to use. The platform should be easy to navigate and use so that you can manage your marketing activities effectively.Also, avoid platforms that are too costly for your budget. It is crucial to find a platform that offers good value for your money.Finally, avoid platforms that do not offer good customer support. The platform should be easy to use, but if you encounter any problems, you should be able to get help quickly.Learn moreLearn more about omnichannel content management in this informative guide.Is your CMS holding you back from creating the omnichannel experiences your customers expect? Schedule a free demo to see how Contentstack’s headless, composable content experience platform can transform your digital marketing strategy.

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Sep 22, 2022

How to launch an online store in under 90 days

There are two absolutes in a digital economy: impatient, demanding customers and the need for an e-commerce presence. If you don’t have an e-commerce presence or the one you do have fails to meet customer expectations, you’re likely considering how to solve your problem.What’s been your experience with a software development effort? If you’re like many, it conjures images of:Rounding up the best qualified (and already overworked) team membersSlogging through endless team meetings on top of your other job dutiesWorking through months of coding, testing, refining and debugging to field a minimum viable product (MVP) e-commerce siteWe’ve all been there and have the T-shirts to prove it. But how would you react if we said it is possible to launch an e-commerce venture in under 90 days? Not a work-in-progress, bare-bones MVP placeholder, but a fully functional, customer-centric, remarkably agile e-commerce site built by a team of six people using four independent technologies in less than three months.Why build a working example?How do you address the incredulous responses to the “up and running in under 90 days” claim? As professional baseball player Dizzy Dean said, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.” So, we decided to prove the power and ease of using composable commerce tools by building and demonstrating a working e-commerce site at ContentCon 2022, our annual conference.Why tie the project to the conference? A swag store was the natural choice to launch at a conference as attendees could access the store, select their items, create digital receipts and collect their items at the vendor’s booth.“We wanted to use this as an example to give you guys an application that you can actually interact with that we’ve built with our four technologies to show it’s really not that difficult,” said Piyush Patel, chief ecosystem officer at Algolia.The team planned the project as more than just a conference presentation, however.“This is just the starting point,” said Gary Ballabio, VP of technology partnerships at Cloudinary. While every business will have its own requirements, the team used their four technologies to create a proof of concept “but also [to create a reusable platform] for anybody to use afterward, for everybody to branch off and use really for a starting point themselves.”How do you launch an e-commerce store in under 90 days?How did we pull this off in less than 90 days? By partnering with three other industry leaders, BigCommerce, Cloudinary and Algolia. We each contributed part-time team members and our software to the project. Here’s a rundown of the platform software each company contributed:E-commerce enablement by BigCommerceImage and video management by CloudinaryHeadless CMS by ContentstackInstant searchability by AlgoliaThe next step was setting up our goals and success measures with the technologies chosen. The resulting project parameters were simple and to the point:Our working premise was that the four technologies working together would meet all project requirements.The site would include four pillars: content, search, commerce and media.Each technology partner would provide part-time technologists, not full-time developers.In a nod to the reality people face developing and deploying software today, all team members were remote, spanning time zones from India to California.Assess the ability of each technology’s integration framework to facilitate information flow seamlessly between platforms.Deliver a solution other e-commerce ventures could use as a starting point.We wanted the development effort to reflect the real world, not be an academic exercise. “This really mimicked what many of your organizations have to deal with on a day-to-day basis,” said Nick Barron, senior director of partner enablement at Contentstack. “We’ve got a lot of remote employees; we’ve got a lot of dispersed teams that live in little siloes, specialties and little centers.” So, a 100% remote team was an ideal test environment.The results? We met all our goals and delivered the e-commerce site in well under 90 days. The team became so enthused and productive that we finally called a hard stop as we had more than enough to prove our concept.Here are the project’s summary stats:How it worksHow do you bridge the integration gap between different technologies to deliver functional e-commerce sites and other applications quickly and easily? The short answer lies in using application protocol interfaces (APIs) to manage communication between technologies. Configuration settings replace software customization, allowing users to compose the processes and actions needed to make the application meaningful to customers and the business.Here's a high-level look at how the ABC Swag e-commerce site brings a new product to life.The product manager creates the product in BigCommerce, entering the required information like SKU, product name, product specifications and more.BigCommerce automatically creates the product detail page (PDP) in Contentstack, notifying the product marketer that it’s available for enrichment.The product marketer adds enriched content, including images, videos, 3D models and more, to the PDP from Cloudinary.Contentstack updates Cloudinary assets with metadata describing the location of each asset used in the PDP.When Contentstack publishes the product, it sends all the details to Algolia to index and prepare for searching.As the product manager or marketer makes changes based on analytics like sales, clicks and customer questions, the system automatically manages them, eliminating human error and increasing system responsiveness.Why it worksOf course, technology underpins everything, but people and a cooperative spirit are the two things that make technology valuable and usable. At Contentstack, we call this “Care Without Compromise™.”Here are some observations from the other team members about why the project worked:“The ability to reach out to the other vendors with questions made everyone’s job easier,” Patel said. “I think that’s the lesson we learned is, have help.”Ballabio said the team members were technologists, not full-time developers, working part-time with new tools and working full-time with the tools they were familiar with.“It is a testament to how well documented and how well set up those other tools are for them to pick it up and to create this proof of concept together,” he said.The project also illustrates the dedication of the companies leading the Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless (MACH) evolution to solve their customers’ problems. This dedication extends to getting help from other technology partners when necessary.Powered by composable architectureWhat made it possible for our part-time team, working remotely in their area of expertise, to build this e-commerce venture in record time? Composable architecture. Composable architecture takes advantage of APIs and scalable web services to create a digital-first enterprise.A simplified definition, to be sure, but it’s more important how composable architecture helps enterprises than how you define it. According to Architecture & Governance, Gartner says, “supporting composable architecture means architecting your business for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.” What business cannot benefit from adaptability and resilience?Acceptance of the MACH/composable architecture approach to e-commerce continues to grow. More organizations are finding they can no longer meet the demands of today’s consumers with traditional monolithic systems and dated development methodologies. To survive and thrive, they are making the move to composable systems. According to a recent Salesforce State of Commerce report, 80% of businesses that don’t currently have headless e-commerce technology up and running plan to implement it in the next two years.Composable architecture using MACH components enables teams in any size company to develop, deploy and maintain responsive e-commerce ventures in record time. We demonstrated that combining headless CMS, media enrichment, e-commerce enablement and instant search replaces monoliths with superior solutions.Connect Without CompromiseContentstack and our partners are taking Care Without Compromise™ to another level with Connect Without Compromise™. We want to assure our mutual customers that our tools will work as described. Should any customer experience issues, we'll work with our partners to find a solutionHow does this differ from our Care Without Compromise? Think of it as a combination of technology and best practices.Marketplace: An extensive ecosystem of features, services, apps, integrations and accelerators.Automation Hub: Simple, no-code, cross-stack business logic you can implement immediately.Blueprints: Extremely detailed best practices and implementation guides to get you from zero to operational in the shortest time possible.For example, if you want to set up a store using the same technologies we used to build our ABC Swag Store demo, we have a blueprint that will give you a jump start on creating a similar application for your business.The passing of the age of the monolithsIt’s fair to say that the age of the monoliths has passed, replaced by the age of composable architecture. Rather than waiting weeks for developers to create a simple integration in a monolithic system, businesses can model, evaluate and deploy them in minutes. We think that’s worth celebrating. If you agree and want to learn more to move your business forward, we offer these options:See the ABC Swag Store in action.  For a deeper dive into the building of the ABC Swag Store site, watch our webinar series, “The ABCs of Composable Commerce.”Want to build your e-commerce venture or headless CMS? Learn more and schedule a free demo. 

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