How We Built the World's Best Marketing Calendar
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Read on to learn how we built the best marketing calendar in the world, used at companies like:
The story
Like my dad always said:
“If you see something that needs improvement, step up and fix it. We don’t wait for someone else to solve our problems.”
We try to live by that mantra here at Something Great. If something’s not working the way it should be, we take accountability. We don’t wait for someone else to solve issues, we step up and fix them. This story is a great example of how our agency embodies that spirit.
Marketing calendars suck, so we built a great one (and it blew up)
It was February 22, 2020. I had just awoken to what should be a fairly calm Friday morning at my marketing agency - but as anyone who works in PR, social media, or digital advertising knows, sometimes the storm comes without any warning.
As soon as I opened Twitter, I knew my relaxing Friday would be no more. One of the top trends on Twitter was National Margarita Day. For most people, that wouldn’t set off alarm bells, but as the social media agency of record for a large tequila brand in the USA, I knew we’d missed an excellent post opportunity.
My inbox had messages from our client’s VP of Marketing, asking about what we had planned. Our team was left scrambling, to say the least. At 8:00 AM we hit the road to find limes, rock salt, and margarita glasses. We put together a quick photoshoot and had our National Margarita Day Post out by 11:00 AM. A little late, very stressful, but all in all we got the job done.
After our close call, we decided to allot more time towards being an agency that was fully aware of every single event that was likely to be trending. I’d previously built a website with a couple of friends for our personal use to track rocket launches and space events, so we reconfigured it to fit our needs as an agency.
We designed, built, and published the best marketing calendar in the world. This is how Forekast was born.
We designed the site to function similar to how Reddit functions. The site scrolls chronologically by day, and events can be upvoted by site visitors. This way, the most popular events rise to the top of the calendar and keep you ahead of what’s trending. We automatically have top trending events added to users Google, Outlook, and Apple calendars, so there’s no excuse for missing a trending event, holiday, movie premiere or product launch.
Adding events to Forekast was a tough task initially. We sourced events from terrible national holiday websites that were full of ads and clunky interfaces, some built by the government with limited resources and others with inaccurate information that had to be fact-checked.
We scoured the web for product releases, conferences, movie premieres, and anything else that could be trending, and added events to Forekast to keep our team ahead of what was going to be trending.
Slowly but surely, our users came to the website and began adding events themselves. Anyone can create an account and add events to the site, though events now go through our moderation team.
Once it was set up, virtually every department of our Vancouver marketing agency used Forekast weekly, if not daily.
Our digital PR team used the site to plan the perfect days to pitch specific articles. They loved knowing they could pitch on a slow news day, or what days to avoid due to other important events.
Our social media team used the site to hop on trends and for content inspiration, which they now post about daily from the Forekast Twitter account.
Our web development team even used the site (mostly for personal use) because they wanted to know about major video game releases, tech announcements, and upcoming rocket launches.
Knowing how useful the project was to our team internally, we decided to invest effort into growing the community, as the site only gets better as it adds users.
Forekast now has over 10,000 users, all of whom have helped shape the way the website looks today. They add events, upvote their favorite trending holidays, and have even offered feedback on new features. An overwhelming demand for calendar integration was recently built into the platform, which users can access for a small fee.
For those who prefer email updates over checking the site, our newsletter, The Weekly Forekast, provides a rundown of the week’s top events.
As we grow, we have a very simple mission: We want to be the best marketing calendar in the world for creators. We've continued to improve the product, including launching a new Chrome Extension this summer.
Forekast is ready to show users what’s going to be trending.
We built it for ourselves, and as it turns out, our fellow marketers and business owners love it just as much as we do. Forekast is a great example of how Something Great goes above and beyond. If we see something that needs improvement, we step up and improve it. We don’t wait for someone else to solve our problems.
Something Great Marketing’s clients get free access to Forekast, or you can sign up for just $10/month at Forekast.com.
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