What Structured Content Means for Your Customer Journey

The increasing demand for omnichannel delivery has accelerated the shift towards headless CMS and, consequently, an increased use of structured content. But what is structured content, and how does this affect the digital customer journey?

What Is Structured Content?

Structured content is information organized in a predictable, consistent way, typically classified with metadata.

In a CMS, this means that content types (e.g., “product,” “article,” “employee”) have a standardized set of data fields (e.g., title, image, teaser text). This consistent structure enables efficient reuse of content across various channels. For instance, an article's title and teaser can be pulled via an API for an app, while the full content is displayed on a website.

Content is commonly managed through forms or block editors, where each element is structured. This approach separates content from presentation, which is crucial in a headless context.

Atomic Content Design

Atomic content design is an advanced content model that breaks content down into the smallest reusable units, or “atoms.” Each atom is a separate, well-defined piece of content that can function alone or be compiled into larger documents. This method maximizes reuse and ensures consistency, often by pulling from a central repository.

A prime example is the Norwegian Directorate of Health, which uses atoms to build articles while keeping medical facts separate and updated across all channels. This model is the logical conclusion of structured content atomic content design.

Structured Content and the Customer Journey

Structured content fundamentally improves the customer journey through content reuse, freshness, availability, and modern delivery trends.

1. Content Reuse and Personalization

The core benefit is "Produce Once, Distribute Everywhere." Content—from help text and product details to images—can be instantly repurposed across multiple touchpoints (physical screens, social media, and emails).

Something to think about: Don’t Choose Headless When Building a Website? »

• Adaptive Media: Images can automatically be delivered in different sizes and qualities, with features like focal point ensuring key elements are always visible, regardless of the output format.
• Connected Experiences: Structured content allows for easy linking and relationship mapping between content items. Exercising tips from a blog post about sportswear can e.g. follow a customer to a product page for shoes and then appear in a newsletter.
• Dynamic Personalization: Combined with marketing automation, structured content enables the same content to be dynamically reused and personalized based on user location, interests, or device.

2. Availability and Omnichannel Delivery

Structured content is key to achieving true omnichannel presence. A new product announcement can be created once and delivered headlessly via API to a website, a mobile app push notification, and even an IoT device (like a smart coffee machine recipe) with minimal effort.

This allows editors to manage the content centrally while developers maintain channel-specific clients that display the structured data, ensuring a seamless experience across all touchpoints. The customer journey is thus managed across channels by both editors (content) and developers (configuration).

Learn more: Why Your CMS Is the Most Valuable Tool for Your Customer Journey »

New Industry Trends to Note (2026+)

• The Rise of Generative AI (GenAI): Structured content is essential for effective GenAI integration. AI models require clearly defined, structured data to reliably generate new content, summarize, or personalize existing content at scale while maintaining brand voice and factual accuracy. Unstructured content hinders this capability.
• Composability/DXP: The industry has moved toward Composability—assembling the best-of-breed tools (CMS, e-commerce, analytics) into a custom Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Structured content is the connective tissue, providing the standardized data format (APIs/microservices) needed for these decoupled systems to communicate effectively.
• Content as a Service (CaaS): Structured content facilitates the ultimate goal of CaaS, treating content not as web pages, but as a utility that can be accessed and used by any service, anywhere, on demand.

Summary: Create Content, Power Every Experience

Structured content, enabled by a headless CMS, simplifies the maintenance of the entire customer journey. Editors centrally manage content fields, while developers handle the diverse delivery channels. This allows non-technical users to influence content flow and placement across apps and other touchpoints without needing developer intervention.

Structured content is essential for presenting different, relevant parts of your content at the right time on the right touchpoint, making the customer journey more personal, relevant, and successful.

First published 27 January 2021, updated 21 January 2026.