What allows one company to gain an edge over another? Better utilisation of time. With the proliferation of technology, that is exactly what automation has helped businesses do. When human effort is no longer required to do work that software programs can perform, more effort can be directed towards ideation and innovation, which machines are as yet incapable of miming. But have we even allowed technology to do what it potentially can at this moment? As part of our Workflow Management System, we created a dual-purpose editorial calendar; because, like Batman and Robin, all good things come in pairs.

In the world of content marketing, automation can smoothen out human errors from the process of workflow management. On realising this, we decided to incorporate it with one of the most basic aids every professional relies on – content calendars.

Here at Scatter, we felt that content calendars haven’t really kept up with our changing requirements: back-to-back content creation, simultaneous distribution of different campaigns, the need to come up with topical content… and dear god, so much more!

Since we saw the potential for improvement, we decided to take the matter into our own hands. Because missing a content marketing opportunity means losing out on being a steady presence in your consumers’ lives.

Editorial Calendar – Upcoming Events

The section labelled ‘upcoming events’ is meant for the creation part of the editorial calendar process. It is a roster of events, festivals, important days, fun celebrations, and more, built in to ensure your brand does not miss out on any relevant opportunity to engage with consumers through compelling content.

This section provides tailored content ideas that suit your brand category. Here’s how you navigate through it:

But hold up; in a world spoiled for choice, we’re not going to leave you with just one option. While the first choice allows you to search via a date-wise chronological order, the second way of finding ideas relevant to you is through our recommendation engine.

This machine-driven system allows you to remain on top of every content marketing opportunity through conversations that are relevant to your brand.

The recommendation engine creates a tag cloud of conversation opportunities based on the current trends and your brand’s category; the colour and size of the tags help you immediately differentiate between the varying frequencies of the trends. Each opportunity is further linked to recommended content ideas that can help propel communication with the audience.

To begin with, the default setting will show you all the trending conversation opportunities for the current month. Here’s how you can check for ideas around what’s trending on social media:

And just like that, curating ideas becomes simpler; no more sifting through pages and pages of search results looking for topical content pegs relevant to your brand!

Editorial Calendar – Publishing Calendar

Moving on to the second segment – the publishing section of the calendar; this is related more to the process that follows content creation. It helps you track all the content pieces as per the delivery and publishing dates mentioned in the content plan. No more mobile reminders and endless checklists to make sure you take a scheduled piece live!

Here’s how you can get a glimpse of the content deliveries planned for the month:

Clicking on the title gives you access to the text file where you can either approve or publish a content piece. This will also help you get an idea of the stage of creation your piece is currently in.

So there’s your trailer. Keen to get a first-hand experience? Get in touch with our team. Don’t let outdated practices leave you in the dust!