December 3, 2020

Scatter turns six – Here’s a glimpse of our product journey

Scatter - Content Marketing Platform - Journey

Phew, it’s been six whole years since Scatter has been around! But it weirdly feels like we’ve been here both, since yesterday and for a lifetime. And what a ride it has been. We’ve expanded from one office to four, moved from emails to our very own content delivery platform, and shifted our focus from seeding publisher content to crafting quality content that educates, entertains, and engages. At every stage of this exhilarating journey, our content marketing platform has and continues to be a pivotal part of our offerings.

From day one, our goal has been to harvest the power of the right products to help brands improve the way they create, store, and manage their content. Along the way, we’ve conceptualized and developed, tried and tested, and learned and lost; but we haven’t given up. When we ask ourselves, ‘what fuelled this hunger to evolve and expand?’ we’ve found that the answer is – to keep up with a rapidly changing marketing ecosystem and make this experience successful and rewarding for our clients, partners, and ourselves.

How our content marketing platform has evolved over the years 

Adwrap

Adwrap - Content Marketing Platform

When we started in 2014, our first product – Adwrap – catered to brands’ advertising needs. Adwrap worked as a marketplace for published articles, where brands could pick and choose from our database of articles across subjects and plug-in their advertisements. This enabled brands to reach their target audience by leveraging publisher articles as a medium.

During Adwrap’s brief lifetime, however, social algorithms began to change. Social media usage was expanding, and marketing strategies aimed to garner genuine consumer interest, rather than merely high jacking it through blatant ads. As we addressed this shift, our next product was born.

Syndication

Content Marketing Platform

News plays a crucial role in shaping people’s views and opinions. Whether it is starting their day with a cup of tea and a newspaper or ending it by tuning into the ‘top stories’ news bulletin, the news helps people stay informed. And staying informed led consumers to start making informed decisions when it came to choosing products and services. And to enable brands to tap into this consumer behavior is where Syndication came in.

With Syndication, brands were able to republish expert articles and news pieces from reputed publishers on their blogs and website, with the copyright, of course. It proved to be an effective way of providing consumers with reliable and timely information via the brand’s website and helped brands gain the credibility and authority they deserved.

Content Recommendation

Content Recommendations

As part of Scatter’s Syndication efforts, we created a tag-cloud approach to make it easier for brands and marketers to pick the right articles. Through this, we suggested tags and keywords that provided marketers with a pool of content on specific topics and enabled them to choose content that was relevant to their brand, product or service, and was of interest to their consumers.

Content Editorial Calendar 

5_Content-Editorial-Calendar

Of course, constantly changing consumer behaviors meant that just any content wasn’t enough to engage smarter, more mindful audiences. Our many conversations with brands and experts opened our eyes to a gap in the marketing ecosystem, which could be bridged by creating bespoke content and more dynamic content marketing efforts.

Content quickly became more than words and SEO trends. Brands wanted to use content to develop a voice, connect with audiences, and earn their trust by talking about topics that mattered to them and impacted their lives. The idea was to engage with consumers at every step of their buying journey. To achieve this, brands had to be a part of every conversation. With this in mind, we created a monthly content calendar to help brands do just that.

At the beginning of each month, we send out a calendar highlighting topical days, trending events, and static moments, along with thought-starters that can spark concrete ideas. This enables brands, marketers, and content creators to tap into relevant opportunities, plan strategic campaigns, and create a streamlined publishing calendar with thoughtful content so that they can continuously engage with their audience.

Scatter Recommends

Over time, we’ve managed to perfect our content suggestions by turning them into routine practice. Today, our daily newsletter – Scatter Recommends – reaches the inboxes of 5000+ subscribers each morning. A product of machine learning and human capabilities, it covers the latest trends and events for the day, week, and month, and with content ideas. This ensures brands never fall short of conversations to have with their audiences.

Workflow Management System (WMS)

While we managed to cater to our partners’ timely and consistent content needs with the products mentioned above, there was still a significant challenge that our partners and we faced – tracking and managing high volumes of content daily. Scouring through multiple emails for the latest version of a file was time-consuming and arduous. After several rounds of discussions and with a highly skilled in-house tech team at the helm, our exclusive product emerged – Scatter WMS (Workflow Management System).

RelatedHow Scatter built a technology-driven Workflow Management System

Developed in August 2018, Scatter WMS has eased the content delivery and management process internally and externally. From invoice tracking to creating full-fledged campaigns, accessing project information to checking sales and accounts reports, everything can be done on the same platform, effortlessly.

Scatter WMS also features a ‘Dashboard’ to help clients explore calendar ideas, topics of interest, and social media trends. What’s more, to evaluate and execute compelling content, the platform has in-built SEO and plagiarism tools that help ensure every piece of content is of high quality.

Scatter Content Box 

7_Content-Box - Content Marketing Platform

In 2019, we put our next product – Scatter Content Box – into play, expanding our tech-driven content marketing platform. Every business, small or big, frequently uses a glut of digital assets – PDFs, creative files, videos, logos, design documents, etc. Having worked with content for years, across formats and campaigns, we saw the need to have one place not only to store these assets but make managing and accessing them simple, quick, and efficient.

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Scatter Content Box, our digital asset management platform, simplifies how brands and marketers can store, organize and manage the many assets they use daily. Enabled with optical character recognition, this cloud-based solution drastically reduces search time, makes sharing files with internal teams and specific members easy, and even offers access features. Capable of automatically tracking the most recent version of a digital asset, it can reduce error and boost real-time marketing efforts. Scatter Content Box offers everything marketers need to ensure smooth and seamless collaboration as we continue to work remotely.

Looking back on our content marketing platform and how they have come to life, our source of inspiration has been the shifts in the marketing ecosystem. Feedback from our partners and the motivation to create meaningful tools that help further marketing efforts have also helped bring us to where we are today. And just as we always have, we will continue to develop products for not only brands and marketers but for freelancers and content creators as well. And we’re excited about what’s in store for Scatter’s future.

Contributors to this blog post: Minal Malli, Sanchea Dsouza, Swapnil Adsul, Indraja, Sagar, and Sahil

Related Links

Scatter Content Box – AI-based digital asset management solution