In the web development world, few trends are spreading more rapidly than decoupled (or headless) content management systems. With some vendors growing at a rate of 500 percent year over year, it's no surprise that decoupled CMS has caught the attention of Drupalists and technical teams.
Marketers, however, haven’t caught the decoupled Drupal bug.
Although decoupled Drupal is about as nerdy as it gets, marketers shouldn’t ignore the headless trend. Read on to learn how marketers can use a decoupled strategy to overcome obstacles that are top of mind for every digital CMO, including:
- Reaching your audience on the right device, at the right time
- Leveraging best-of-breed solutions on one platform
- Retaining and acquiring customers
Hold On. What’s decoupled Drupal again?
Whether you call it headless, API-first, web services or decoupled, understanding what a decoupled architecture is, or how it works, can test any marketer’s technical chops. If you are interested learning more about Decoupled Drupal, check out our 101 Guide. In the meantime, here is a quick rundown of what is decoupled Drupal:
A decoupled CMS allows developers to utilize any technology to render the front-end experience (“the glass” where a user interacts with an application) in lieu of the theming and presentation layers that come with a coupled CMS out of the box.
In a decoupled architecture, the Drupal back end exposes content to other front-end system, such as native mobile applications, conversational UIs, digital signage, or applications built in JavaScript.
Right device at the right time
Marketers need to be where their customers are. To keep up with customer expectations, marketers have to send the right message, on the right device, at the right time.
For Princess Cruises, this meant fundamentally changing the way their guests accessed information onboard their ships.
Before boarding a Princess Cruise ship, every guest relies on their mobile device to connect, buy and inform. That’s why it only made sense to extend and transform the Princess experience with [email protected], a mobile application that allows guests to plan their day's events and activities, review the ship's itinerary, browse restaurant menus, and book shore excursions all from the palm of their hand.
The ultimate goal was to outfit every vessel in Princess Cruises’ fleet with a ship-specific version of [email protected] The digital experience needed to be reliable while ships set sail all over the world. Princess Cruises needed a way to centrally manage content across all channels and touchpoints to provide a uniform experience on mobile and digital signage onboard the ship and the guest stateroom TV.
Princess Cruises selected a decoupled Drupal strategy to serve content across numerous touchpoints and channels. By using Drupal as the brain beyond its technical systems, Princess Cruises can create once and publish everywhere. Today, every passenger facing screen on the ship is connected to [email protected], and therefore Drupal.