As digital touchpoints become more leveraged, kiosk interfaces and smart windows proliferate across the business landscape from retail and healthcare to travel and food/restaurant services. Kiosk and digital signage interfaces allow for real-time engagement opportunities with consumers on-location for immediate access to information, services, or even a quick diversion. Yet to support these information-rich endeavors, brands must rely upon an agile, powerful, future-proof content ecosystem. Enter the headless CMS. A headless content management solution represents a back-end first content management strategy that allows content deployment to any front-end interface/kiosk, smart screen, etc. It allows brands to manipulate their content from a singular location and distribute it across multiple channels without the need to duplicate efforts or lost control.
How Kiosk and Smart Display Content is Different
Kiosks and smart displays don’t function like websites or mobile applications. They are often found in public or semi-public places, and their interaction capabilities are limited. These are intent-based devices designed for a singular action or a form of engagement. Therefore, the content created for them needs to be highly visual and condensed and often updated and changed depending on situational use retail sales, wayfinding in an airport, check-in kiosks at hospitals, or order kiosks for take-out restaurants. They aren’t built upon page renders; they allow for modular, task-based engagement with content. Changing and managing customized content through a traditional CMS could be overwhelming and even futile when trying to apply it across hundreds of locations and screen variations. A secure headless CMS provides, via APIs, exactly what’s needed for this operation one piece of content can go live in all locations and endpoints while maintaining the strict access controls and data protections necessary for public-facing devices.
The Need to Structure Content for Touch/No Touch and Aware Displays
Kiosks and smart displays come in various forms from touch-sensitive to motion-sensitive to voice-activated technologies. Each requires a different form of content to allow for user engagement appropriately. Touch screens need touch-friendly content arrangements; voice displays must ensure that enough attention is given to audio requirements over visual representations. A headless CMS allows content teams to structure content in such a way that it engages best with the requirements established by each. For example, a single structured content type can house text directions, logos, GIFs, and audio files each meant for different access. This is a great advantage as it allows the same source of content to render various outputs based on what technology it’s connected to or the intelligent environment surrounding it, reducing redundancies in the content creation and increasing the efficiency of the presentation.
The Need for Quickly Updating Content Across Multiple Devices
Kiosk networks might exist across the city, or they might be nationwide; regardless, keeping them all in sync is essential for successful promotion, messaging, or policy changes. A headless CMS can control centralized operations as its serve content via an API that either polls or pushes updates to connected devices once they’re ready. In addition, by setting up webhooks, CMS content changes can trigger kiosk events so specific kiosks or entire fleets get immediate updates. There’s no need to change the same content, page by page, or wait for a batch update when real-time change opportunities and instantaneous deployment abilities exist. When a new food item needs to be provided as an option at 200 kiosks around the country or a new health advisory needs to be changed at 20 hospitals, the ability to do so from a single source in mere seconds is priceless.
Control Over Content By Location and Audience Segmentation
Smart displays and kiosks are more and more location-, audience- or time-based. That’s much easier with headless content management systems (CMS) because filtering and targeting options are endless via metadata like geography, audience role, language and even time. For example, a retail kiosk activated in Miami can show Spanish-language deals via geo-targeting based on Miami, while in New York, the same kiosk can show English-based content via inventory on the shelves. All can be created and managed in one content team environment, fields/tags determining where/when content should appear. This way, brand standards are kept in place but nuanced offerings are loyal to audiences regardless of how the project is approached.
Ability To Go Offline & Content Delivery Resilience
One of the most frustrating aspects of smart displays and kiosks includes locations that do not have great internet service. A headless CMS can be configured to integrate with layers of caching, local storage and service workers to ensure that content does not disappear when a device goes offline. Even when a device is online, it can sync with a headless CMS, caching what’s there and using offline fallback content as needed. This is great for kiosks in rural areas or airports where internet access is hit or miss and for smart displays that cannot afford to lose information. Content delivery can be configured with failovers and fallbacks in mind so that even when someone cannot access the latest version, they can still get something that hopefully meets their needs.
Reduced Friction for Content Authors and Business Operations Field Teams
Kiosk content always needs to get updated quickly and consistently. A headless CMS allows for non-developers marketers or field op managers to change what’s displayed without an IT appt. necessary. Authoring platforms are simple-to-use for text/media/logic management without worrying about what developers are going to do on their end relative to hardware integration and front-end rendering. Instead, front-end activities and back-end activities can occur simultaneously as approval workflows, scheduling options, and versioning all exist with modern headless CMS platforms. Thus allowing for the reduced friction of operational stalls as content can be happening almost simultaneously in two realms.
Need for Integration with Third-Party Data Feeds for More Dynamic Experiences
Certain kiosk and smart display use cases require integration with third-party data feeds which could include weather situations, inventory counts, customer check-in lists, flight departure times, etc. A headless CMS can serve as the content middleware that integrates such third-party feeds via APIs to contextualize with editorial content. For instance, a kiosk in a train station may be able to access a real-time API feed of train arrivals in addition to city events programmed in the CMS so that it can facilitate relevant information at the same time. When screens can dynamically access real-time data, it cuts down on the need for constant updates and makes users feel more engaged, less confused and better informed.
Security and Monitoring via Auditable Kiosk Content Management
Content management for screens meant for public viewing need security and oversight. A headless CMS comes equipped with role-based access controls, meaning organizations can choose who has the ability to view, edit and publish content down to the role, location or device level. Additionally, headless CMSs allow extensive audit logging of who made changes and when as well as the ability to implement security tools that monitor uptime for certain pieces of content, endpoints and access attempts. Should content fail to load or becomes off-limits, kiosks should be able to alert operators that something is wrong. The headless CMS ensures that the entire content pipeline is secure, monitored compliant and auditable which is necessary for many highly-regulated industries.
Future Proof When Architecture Is Modular and Scaling is Easy
As kiosks become more elaborate or more common across a brand with additional use cases over time, a modular API-first architecture becomes increasingly more valuable. A headless CMS makes it easy to scale without having to reinvent the wheel each time a new screen or interface is deployed. Digital shelf displays, museum interactive guides, smart mirrors in dressing rooms, etc. can all rely on the same componentized content structure to power their experiences. Organizations that adopt headless content delivery from the beginning of their kiosk journey will adopt a future proof architecture that supports rapid growth without increasing management overhead.
Touchless and Voice-Activated Experiences via Structured Content
As demand for touchless options increases with some avoiding physical contact for health needs and others for greater accessibility more kiosks offer voice-activated and gesture-controlled options. A headless CMS champions such initiatives through structured content, offering the required alternative text, spoken guidance or actions required. Because the headless CMS decouples presentation from rendering logic, web developers can dictate how the headless CMS presents the content for either voice activation or voice rendering, establishing accessible IO across more kiosk use cases.
Scheduled Content for Time-Sensitive Experiences
Kiosks and smart displays often possess time-sensitive content that only needs to showcase an existence for certain periods. Breakfast menus need to display at breakfast time, promotional offerings should be visible only during working hours and queuing information is only relevant when peak hours are underway. A headless CMS supports this with scheduled publishing functionality. Teams can determine when certain content blocks will be turned on or off, allowing displays to transform without human intervention based on predetermined time frames. This allows editors and writers to set it and forget it, knowing there’s a system in place to ensure relevance throughout the day.
Centralized Asset Access to Eliminate Redundant Content Creation
Unfortunately, smart display ecosystems often operate within a vacuum. Each screen/kiosk has its own content pipeline, often manually driven or via other systems, resulting in unnecessary asset deposits in each location, uncoordinated branding efforts and ineffective seasonal and relief responses when something needs to change. For instance, a digital menu board at a restaurant may have one set of images while an airport kiosk has another, even though the same food item exists in both places. Similarly, an in-store product display may have one offering while the company’s e-commerce site has another and both are right simply because they operate independently.
The solution is a headless CMS with a centralized media library where all visual and interactive assets, images, GIFs, etc., video, icons, CTAs, etc. all live, organized and managed. There’s no need to upload the same image four different times or create the same offering per channel; teams rely on one source of truth for each asset. Therefore, when a team member needs to update an image that various display locations share, that image only needs to be changed once. The change reflects wherever the asset lives. This means less redundancy in effort and real estate and ensures branding standards are met wherever they should be operating on any device in any location.
When headless CMS brings smart display content together instead of separating them, organizations can scale faster, be more agile and brand safe by turning formerly disparate digital displays into a worldwide network of contextualized assets.
Test and Iterate Display Content via Analytics Integration
Understand how people are using kiosks and smart displays to test and iterate the content experience. Add a first-party analytics solution or session-based event tracking to the front end to see if people dwell, scroll or tap on certain areas. In conjunction with structured content IDs from the CMS, this can lend insight into any engagement metrics related to which pieces of content perform the best. Testing elements and iterating over time can enhance overlays of interfaces, drive engagement and present a more effective experience for display content.
Conclusion: Bring Smarter Content to Smarter Screens
Kiosks and smart displays are becoming an essential element of how brands engage with users in brick-and-mortar locations. As this trend becomes more and more frequent, the need for content delivery systems to support such endeavors will only rise. A headless CMS empowers the flexibility, nimbleness and control to deliver impactful content across multi-sourced, disparate screens. The ability to structure content for reuse, push real-time updates and integrate with dynamic data while offline ensures users receive engaging experiences that are delivered with intention. In a world where every screen can one day become a digital UI, only headless content infrastructure can power what’s projected on these smarter screens with smarter content.
