“Done right, content marketing can be additional manpower for your organisation”

Content marketing business in India has seen a tremendous evolution in the last 5 years. From a point where it was important to evangelize content marketing to marketers to a point where everyone wants to do content marketing in their own limited ways.

Scatter is one of India’s leading content management platforms and services who are associated with many blue-chip brands across India. They have created over 50,000 pieces of content for 200+ brands and partnering with over 700 freelancers and reputed content creators. The main offerings from Scatter is to help brands scale content creation and manage their digital assets by combining best-in-class content strategy, smart storytelling and a suite of proprietary mar-tech solutions. With a bunch of energetic teams starting from product, engineering, strategic alliances, editorial strategists, content producers and customer success managers, Scatter has kept reinventing themselves with smart ideas and engaging content for their clients.

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In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Abhishek Sharma, Chief Revenue Officer, Scatter, speaks at length on content marketing and how this space has transformed in the last few years with increase in digital consumption and changing consumer behaviours.

Content marketing is seeing a good growth trajectory. How big is the content marketing business in India and what kind of growth have you witnessed for your brands?

Content marketing business in India has seen a tremendous evolution in the last 5 years. From a point where it was important to evangelize content marketing to marketers to a point where everyone wants to do content marketing in their own limited ways. It has definitely moved in the top priority for every marketing team.

We’ve seen growth not just in the number of clients that work with us, but also the importance of content marketing in their priority. Many of our clients are consistently increasing their budgets allocated to content marketing. While each brand has different needs, we are seeing an upward trend in intently maintaining content destinations and ensuring budgets to push those content pieces via various mediums.

It has been quite motivating to see the investments on content marketing almost double up for our long standing clients over these years.

What is the business model that you follow and how many clients you have partnered till date? What has been your thinking strategy to win new business?

Our business model has been to tailor make content strategies for our clients based on their business and marketing objectives. We believe content marketing is empathy at scale. If done right, it can lead to significant results being accumulated for your brand over time. We enable very lean marketing teams to outsource their content efforts to us as well as run successful operations for brands, where the dedicated content marketing teams can depend on us to bring scale and efficiency to their work. Our 3,000+ network of journalists, subject matter experts and writers give us the scope to tackle the most challenging of genres and topics at scale. We focus on ensuring the client reaps the benefit of working with the best content marketing minds in the country, leaving them with time to manage other priorities.

We’ve partnered with 225+ brands till date, mostly large enterprise firms with dedicated content teams that outsource work to us for top-notch execution.

For new business, we have always aimed at working closely with marketing leads and understanding the unique challenges they face in connecting with their potential and existing customers. For the last couple of years, the word of mouth and references have helped us add some of the biggest enterprise clients to our roster. In addition, our own content marketing initiatives on our blog helps us stay on top of Google rankings and generates 50+ business leads a month – ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

You have recently partnered with Salesforce India to enhance their marketing efforts? How has the journey been and has the brand got good traction post the partnership?

Partnering with Salesforce to create content for Indian sales teams has been a great step in the right direction for us. We could bring in the missing touch to their content to help them better empathise with the Indian sales diaspora and brought in a new style of content that has been very well received by the regional and global teams at Salesforce. It has also been a great learning experience, pushing us to do better in almost every facet of our processes and storytelling. The uptake on the India specific content pieces has been phenomenal and both teams are excited about increasing the scope of work into areas that were untouched for Salesforce in India.

How has content marketing helped to address business objectives with brands? When brands approach you what kind of objectives and challenges, they spell out in their briefs?

There are many use cases of content marketing. We believe that when content marketing is done right, it acts like additional manpower for your organisation. There are several instances that we’ve made content marketing work to address business objectives for brands. From upgrading self-help content across business divisions of a telecom player and thus, reducing call centre costs to running investor education website for an insurance player that now is part of Google News feed and organically generates enough visitors and leads to sustain itself – Tomorrowmakers.com. For our B2B clients, we work on customer lifecycle and sales enablement content that helps nurturing leads and attain closures.

Brands offer us varying challenges to solve for them – from building customer trust and empathy using content to improving the organic visits to the site. We’ve successfully implemented solutions for several COVID-age challenges like better and optimised help centre content to increase in SEO. At the moment, we are working with several Fortune 500 companies to manage their content destinations aimed at ushering new age customers through the customer journeys using a mix of top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel content. A lot of brands have reached out to us to specifically engage on project basis to create content around new product launches necessitated by post-lockdown era.

Artificial intelligence has come in a big way in the content marketing business? What are your views on it and how will it help to add value to the client’s business?

AI has been transforming several business processes and content marketing is no different. We’re excited to be a part of this journey that enables us to use AI to complement our storytelling and strategic initiatives at scale, besides our workflow management solution that we use to service all our clients using machine learning to check content for keywords and plagiarism. We use AI for content recommendations for our clients who outsource content to us as well as several publishers and agency partners who make use of these recommendations to create engaging content on a daily basis. Our new digital asset management platform, Scatter Content Box, uses AI to auto-tag all possible content that our customers have ever created and keeps it in a searchable state enabling several stakeholders working with our clients to have quick and easy access to all content- from social posts and photo shoots to guidelines and old video footage. Using AI has enabled us to bring in better efficiency and crunch the time it takes to perform certain tasks, thus adding back several hundred man hours each month to our clients’ schedule vis-a-vis them working with any other content marketing partner.

What is the future for content marketing in next 3 years? Where does India stand today in the content marketing space?

We’re in the midst of widespread content marketing adoption across the industry and the year 2020 has only added more rocket fuel to it. I believe most companies will start using content marketing widely aimed at achieving specific business and marketing goals – from generating leads to creating a solid connect with their existing and potential customers. We will see several clients have dedicated content marketing partners to run the show on their behalf, as we saw the rise of social media agencies and digital marketing agencies before that. The scope and scale of these efforts has been growing every year and I see that more than doubling over the next 3 years again. With many clients and many unique storytelling ways to speak to personified customer segments, it offers a new age scope to brands. The brands that are already on the bandwagon will start reaping solid benefits and Google has already started rewarding websites that offer value over tricks. Content marketing is here to ensure brands connect meaningfully with their customers.

What is your growth vision for Scatter? Where do you see Scatter in the content marketing space in the next 2 years?

Being a well-recognised full-service content marketing leader in the country, we are ready and primed to partner with many more brands looking at initiating as well as scaling their content marketing efforts. With a unique mix of technology, strategy and storytelling, we are all set to run tailored projects for all our clients across use-cases and their respective customer journeys. We particularly see a huge area of growth in our software as a service business with Content Box and WMS. These new-age tools help businesses shave-off 70 per cent of the time required in the content operations. I am confident we will see much larger growth on the software side of our offerings than the services side. We are confident to be the No. 1 content marketing company in the country and double our list of clients to 200 enterprise level clients for the services business.