You're using Contentful. What's next?

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one with these questions. Many teams face the same challenges when they’ve just gone live with a new CMS. Fortunately, Contentful has several tools to improve your content. In this blog, we’ll cover two of those tools that can have a direct impact: AI Actions and Personalization.

AI Actions: Speed Up Content Creation

After launch, teams may find that creating and managing content at scale can be time-consuming. Contentful’s AI Actions provide a way to automate some of this work.

With AI Actions, you can generate product descriptions from structured data, summarize articles, or translate content into multiple languages. The AI is here to assist you, content can always be reviewed and adjusted to match the brand voice before publishing.

Let’s take a small example. Suppose you’re publishing an article in multiple languages. Normally, this process would involve writing the piece, approving it, sending it to translators, adding translations back into the entry, and finally publishing it.

With AI Actions, that process can become quicker: after review, translations can be generated automatically and then be sent to editors for quick verification, saving a lot of back-and-forth work.

AI Actions can be as simple or as advanced as you need them to be. You can start with basic built-in actions like translation or summarization, or create custom AI Actions that use your own prompts and logic. For example, you could create an action that:

• Generates SEO titles and meta descriptions based on existing fields

• Adapts tone and style for different audiences

• Reformat content for different channels, like newsletters or social media posts

AI Actions in Contentful can be configured based on user roles. This means only certain team members can create or edit prompts, keeping them consistent across all content and preventing individual editors from making unapproved changes.

Personalization: Deliver the right content to the right audience

If you want to take it to the next level, you can use Contentful Personalization to decide which content users see based on who they are or where they’re from. Instead of showing everyone the same homepage or campaign, you can adjust your content for different audiences, and that way create a more engaging experience.

With Contentful, this is achieved by combining content with audience data. Your CMS remains the single source of truth, while your frontend decides which variation of content to show based on location, preferences, or anything else.

Imagine you’re running a travel website. With personalization, the same homepage can feel completely different depending on who’s visiting:

• Visitors from cold climates might see a tropical destination with palm trees and beaches.

• Visitors from warm climates might see a destination focused on mountainous hiking trails and lakes in the mountains.

The core website doesn’t change as you still offer the same trips and deals, but the way the content is presented depends on the visitor. That simple shift can make your platform feel more personal and engaging, increasing the chances that someone will book their next adventure with you.

Note: Personalization is not part of the standard Contentful plan but is available as an add-on.

Does Personalization Affect SEO?

The short answer is: only if it’s done incorrectly. As long as the base content stays consistent and search engines can crawl a stable, canonical version of the page, you will be safe. Personalized elements (such as images, headlines and CTAs) can then be rendered dynamically based on user data without altering the underlying structure.

What should you do next?

You’ve completed the first step: you set up Contentful. Now you can choose your next goal:

• Want to save time? Explore AI Actions.

• Want to deliver more relevant content? Start with Personalization.

Looking to add personalization or AI capabilities to your Contentful setup? Or thinking about a new headless CMS implementation? Get in touch. We’d be more than happy to help you explore what’s possible.