Canadian Company Launches New Calendar Tool
It was February 22, 2019. 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. This is how Forekast was born.
Adding events was a tough task initially. We used 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 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 games 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 favourite 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 LinkedIn 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 a resource for creators. Whether it’s helping them spot a trend, a date to post something, or to be a part of the conversation online, Forekast is ready to show users what’s going to be trending.
Author Bio: Justin Kerby is the Co-founder of Forekast, a tool for PR, social media, and marketing professionals. He’s also the founder of Something Great Marketing, a Vancouver-based marketing agency that specializes in social media content creation.