Agency Feature: Scatter

How do we define Scatter?

Scatter was incorporated in 2014 and is one fo the largest content marketing companies in India. The team comprises 52 members and operates in Bengaluru, Dubai, Mumbai, and New Delhi. Scatter is invested in, by Haresh Chawla (ex Group CEO – Network18) and the Indian Express.

What's in the name? 

Today, marketers are observing the benefits of direct consumer conversation opportunities their social platforms, websites, blogs, apps, webinars, email databases, etc. offer. We believe content needs to be organized well and then scattered so that it makes optimal reach possible. That's why we decided to name our offering, Scatter. Besides, it has a nice ring to it. 

What do we do? 

Scatter delivers content services through a suite of in-house products. We aim to help our client partners align on marketing and business goals, build a strategy to achieve those goals, deliver content, and measure the content efficiency.

The suite of these products includes our workflow management system (WMS), content recommendation engine (Scatter Recommends), and digital asset manager (Scatter Content Box). 

Why we do it? 

There are two big reasons at a strategy level. The first is our firm belief that digital panorama offers marketers micro-communities with different content needs.

The second reason is to help marketers reduce their reliance on 'paid media' by assisting them to leverage their 'owned media.' We think this is very under leveraged and are working with marketers to unlock this value.

On the enterprise product side of our business, we understand the need for marketers to scale content publishing without compromising on speed or accuracy. Our platform allows for that and is developed because of our experience in content creation and delivery.

How we evolve? 

We started as a pure-play platform-based company. We then veered to an all services company. Finally, we've reached a mid-point where we are clear that we're a services company that delivers services on indigenously built enterprise platforms. In the early days, our objective was to help brands become publishers. As time went by, we realized that content marketing needs to achieve business and marketing goals. So, the brand publishing bit now had a commercial purpose and promise attached to it.

Today, we attempt to be a lot more strategic in our client engagement and use brand publishing as well as business goal alignment by understanding audience personas and their many journeys. Having said all of this, we're still evolving.

Social responsibility in social media 

We'll answer this question in two parts. The first, being we think users need to be at the center of your social media content.

The second part is what are we doing as Scatter on our social media? Given that we are a B2B organization, we're rather active on LinkedIn. Our target audience ranges from marketers to freelance content creators, and from potential employees to publishers. You will see most of our content is around educating our audience about content marketing, and it's best practices. We publish frequently and regularly on our blog, and LinkedIn helps us get our blog content discovered. Our firm belief is that our growth lies in the growth of this community. 

Also read: Agency Feature: Infinity Reach

The need of the hour 

Our belief is content marketing is a specialized science. We think marketers should build this talent within their teams on a war footing.

Marketers must also look at fully leveraging their owned media platforms and invest time and money in it. Many forward-looking marketers are beginning to do just that. The recent COVID-19 developments have added a new dimension in the ways we work and collaborate. This has forced organizations to speed up digitizing processes, and marketing teams have an excellent opportunity to deploy content tech solutions and platforms.    

We learned the hard way 

Clients will come to you with a range of requirements and sometimes push you to do things that are not your core strength. We think it's best to play to your strengths as this builds positive equity. The lure of doing more because a client thinks this is a natural extension may mean biting a bait, which leads to deadly consequences. 

They work with us 

Facebook,
Salesforce, Ford, HDFC Bank, World Gold Council, TransAmerica, Airtel, Zee5,
Nerolac, Amazon, Bosch, Home Credit, MG Motors

The industry as we foresee 

Content marketing will be at the center of all marketing in the future. If the 2000-2010 decade was about search, and the 2010-2020 decade has been about social media, we know the 2020-2030 decade will be about content marketing and content tech.

A day without Internet 

Given that we are all working from home, it will be liberating. If we knew which day it was, we'd download all we wanted to read on Kindle and video content from OTT apps. 

Lastly, are you hiring?

No