Model product content type

When managing content on a website, we rely on specific content types, which serve as templates for creating various content items. This article will explore how to design content types specifically for financial products.

This material explains how to design content types for products or services that do not participate in commerce flows. It helps you build content models that are both reusable and adaptable.

You’ll learn how to:

• Create content types that your team can use across various channels.
• Make your content modeling decisions based on standards.
• Break down a complex financial product into a reusable content type.
• Strategically use taxonomies to help editors categorize their content.

By the end of this material, you’ll have the tools to create well-thought content type that will allow your editor team efficiently create and manager their content.

Build for multichannel Xperience by Kentico

Xperience by Kentico provides a multichannel experience, which means you can reuse the same content stored in Xperience on websites, emails, applications, or other marketing channels. When your team needs to add a new channel to promote your services, you don’t need to start the content modeling process from scratch just to display your content in this new channel.

You can see a conceptual diagram illustrating how different digital channels and applications connect within the Xperience by Kentico multichannel ecosystem. The delivery channels, such as two websites, microsites, an email platform, and a mobile app, each run their own features such as personalization, page building, form building, email templates, and analytics, can draw from two central platform layers: Contact Management, which powers customer‑centric capabilities like personalization and segmentation, and Content Hub, a reusable content repository that distributes structured content across channels.

As you can see, you can integrate Xperience with external systems, such as CRM and data warehouses—through HTTP APIs, message buses, or queues.

Define content types from reusable pieces

We recommend that you design your content model using semantic content types. Semantic content types consistently carry their meaning regardless of the context in which they appear.

The Product is a typical representation of a semantic content type. It represents an important content entity that stays the same whether you inform about it on your main website or campaign microsite, send a promotion via email, display its details in a mobile application or export the product data for a third-party product comparison website. The core data remains the same; what changes is how you talk about the product in different contexts.

During content modeling, you can define flows that allow editors to override core content (default product data) with channel-specific data, as you can see in the image above.

A reusable Product content item provides core information such as the product name, description, and an associated image. Editors reference this root product item from other content types, ensuring that shared fields stay consistent across experiences.

When they need to, for example, define a global* Call to action* item for this product, editors can optionally override specific fields, such as title, and leave other fields blank. This means these fields continue to inherit values from the product’s root content item.

Similarly, an email product promotion layout demonstrates how the referenced product fields populate the Product card, including the main message and imagery, or how a hero banner on the product page shows another channel‑specific use of the same underlying product content, pulling the shared values directly unless overridden.

Building a Product content type that is channel-independent is just one piece of the puzzle. The content type structure itself is another piece.

Xperience allows for content type composability, which means that you can compose even semantic content types from smaller, independent pieces of content. These smaller content pieces themselves can represent different content types. They become building blocks that quickly adapt to changing requirements.

For example, several products or services will likely share the same benefit. It doesn’t make sense to copy-paste the same benefit to every product that provides it. It’s better to create one instance of the benefit and refer to it from every relevant product. When editors need to change something in the benefit, for example, its icon, editors will update the benefit in one place – and Xperience itself will promote the change to every relevant product, as you can see in the following image.

The image shows Hero banner item on a website that contains a product title, subtitle, image, and a list all product benefits. When displayed in a mobile application, however, editors can choose to hide all details but the title and the imagery.

At the same time, editors will not need to recreate the same information across different content items. By adopting the mindset of “build once, reuse everywhere,” you design a model where editors can quickly adjust existing content, reuse it in a new channel, and save time and resources.

Follow data modeling standards

When it comes to content modeling, it’s always better if you make your decisions based on standards or conventions. Using standards and conventions makes content easier to manage and scale. Especially with e-commerce-specific content types, organizing the data into clear categories and using standard attributes that describe and explain the product help marketers create compelling messages that attract customers. Structured content, like this reusable product type, works well with tools like search engines and marketplaces. Following standards will save you time, help you avoid mistakes, and make systems more accessible for everyone to understand.

For example, you can find inspiration for content types at Schema.org.