The situation
Sutherland sold digital engineering services and products to large enterprises. The expertise was real, but the market could not easily see it.
The digital engineering services portfolio ran to more than 30 products and service lines. Competitors’ leaders were visible; ours weren’t. The website left half the portfolio unexplained, and sales had a case-study library of more than 100 documents with no clear way through it.
I was the content lead for that portfolio. This is what that covered.
What I did
Executive voice. I ran the CEO’s LinkedIn directly: worked out what they actually thought about the market, then wrote it in their voice until the posts sounded like them and not like marketing. I also placed guest articles under executive bylines, so the thinking turned up in publications buyers already read rather than only in our own feed. Once it was working with the CEO, I built a repeatable model and rolled it out across the rest of the C-suite.
Positioning and the website. I worked with the subject matter experts on each product and service to get the positioning right, then rewrote the pages through the site revamp. Every product and service page was built to rank in SERP as well as to convince, with keyword work done page by page. For the digital engineering vertical, I briefed and quality-checked the freelancers and external vendors producing the pages.
The case study library. I rewrote and restructured more than a hundred case studies so every one led with a customer outcome and followed the same shape. Then I built an inventory mapping each story to its industry, vertical and product, so a salesperson could find the right proof in a minute instead of asking three people.
Video. Product videos and event videos. They ran at the stand and gave the team something to start a conversation with, and afterwards they had a second life as ad creative.
Nurture. I worked directly with demand generation to write the email sequences running behind campaigns.
What happened
Engagement on executive content went up 42%, and the model outlasted me, other executives were still running on it after I stopped writing for them.
The case study library went from a hundred documents nobody could use to something sales used by default, with every story mapped to an industry, a vertical and a product. The rebuilt stories and the videos then ran as campaign creative and at events, and both generated MQLs and demo bookings.
Thirty-plus products and services went live with positioning I’d written and search terms I’d chosen. I was promoted to Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing during this period.
What I’d do differently
I’d have set up measurement at the start instead of six months in. We could see engagement and we could see campaigns performing, but nothing connected the content to pipeline in a way I could show someone. That made the work harder to defend at budget time than it should have been, and it’s the first thing I’d fix now.
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