Integria is the parent company and distributor of global leading nutritional and complementary healthcare brands, headquartered in Australia. They offer a range of natural products both as wholesalers and through their own direct to consumer channels where they also connect healthcare practitioners with patients. They have their own ranges of retail and practitioner-only brands, with each brand having its own website.

Customers and practitioners alike turn to Integria and their brands for trustworthy advice, high-quality products, and an excellent online experience. By transitioning to Kontent.ai’s, Integria enables their teams to deliver consistent, relevant content to all their sites with ease.

A strategic leap forward

Integria is the parent brand for a number of different brands, all with their own unique content. Before switching to Kontent.ai, each of these brands had content that was individually managed on separate instances of an open-source CMS. 

In that state, content changes and updates often required support from other teams, freelancers, and agencies, making it challenging for internal teams to update content as quickly as they would like.

Integria made the decision to significantly enhance their digital capabilities to better serve their customers and enable their internal teams. Their project involved work on multiple fronts, including a rebranding, identity and access management, ecosystem integration, and replatforming to a single CMS for their 6 key brand sites. They enrolled the help of Kontent.ai solution partner, Bound, to turn their project into a reality.

Building a content hub

From a content perspective, two key challenges needed to be addressed. First, Integria needed to consolidate their content into a single repository and build a content hub that could serve all their brand sites from a single source of truth. Next, they needed to choose a content solution that would be easy for their internal teams to use on their own, without requiring help external teams to do content updates or edits.

Kontent.ai, as a headless CMS, is designed to solve both of those challenges. Since Kontent.ai takes a headless approach to content management, Integria could use it as a content hub for all of their brand sites. Each site can request content from Kontent.ai, which then serves that content as a JSON object. This solves the issue of needing a single content repository for multiple sites and brands.

Integria created boundaries for their content within a single project by using Collections, a Kontent.ai feature. They use Collections to delineate content by region, with an additional Collection used for shared content.

Working contextually with Web Spotlight

The next challenge, however, is one that isn’t always solved by headless CMSs. Headless CMSs are designed to separate content from its presentation, enabling developers to work with their choice of language or framework for building the final presentation layer. For some CMS vendors, this can lead to a less than optimal experience for the content creators. There can also sometimes be a challenge onboarding new users to a headless CMS, since it can be quite different from “traditional” CMSs they’ve used before.

Integria and Bound chose Kontent.ai because it offered all the benefits of a headless CMS while simultaneously avoiding these difficulties around the authoring experience. Kontent.ai’s Web Spotlight gives editors and writers a way to work with their content in context, showing them how content will look when it’s published. It also allows editors to work with their content in a familiar tree-like structure, making it easier for users unfamiliar with the headless approach to orient themselves.

Working together with Kontent.ai engineers, Bound and Integria were able to create a solution that allowed editors to work with content for all their different sites using Web Spotlight. This made it significantly easier for editors to work with all their content in one place, and visualize how that content would look.

Bringing it all together

With a new headless CMS selected, Integria and Bound could work on putting together the other pieces of the puzzle. Bound helped build a brand-new front end using React.js, with custom and reusable components across all of their brand sites. Content for these components comes from Kontent.ai, and the visual appearance re-themes based on the URL.

Additional data sources were also integrated (including Microsoft Dynamics 365 FinOps for ERP and Sana for e-commerce) into the final user experience to provide a seamless user experience between brand sites and e-commerce shops, and Okta was integrated as an identity platform to enable gated content and authenticated access for specific customers.

In the end, Integria’s project saw benefits for employees, customers, and their infrastructure. Employees now serve multi-site, multi-regional content from a single solution. They’re able to create, edit, and update content on their own in less time than before. And they have all the benefits of a headless approach to content, while also being able to work with their content in the context of their sites.

Customers benefit from improved UI, easier usability and accessibility, and content that’s always up to date and relevant. These improvements have led to an increase in engagement metrics across their sites. And with a best-of-breed tech stack, all of Integria’s sites have improved performance, security, and scalability, which has led to an improvement in Core Web Vitals scores. A win-win-win for Integria, the providers they support, and their customers.