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Cambridge Design Partnership

Driving Innovation Through Strategic Marketing for Cambridge Design Partnership

About Cambridge Design Partnership

Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) is a world-class end-to-end innovation partner. They support both global brands and fast-growing start-ups, turning bold ideas into market-ready products and services. From insight and ideation to prototyping and production, CDP fuses scientific rigour with design ingenuity and engineering excellence across consumer, healthcare, and industrial sectors.

Their people-first, employee-owned model ensures a uniquely collaborative culture — one that removes traditional silos and focuses on extraordinary outcomes for clients.

The Challenge

Despite having a high-performing in-house marketing team, CDP needed additional strategic support to elevate their digital presence, improve audience targeting, and bring greater alignment across internal teams.

They approached Big Bear to support in four key areas:

  • SEO strategy and implementation
  • Paid social (LinkedIn Ads)
  • Website optimisation and content
  • Internal stakeholder alignment through workshops

The goal? To sharpen their messaging, align cross-functional teams, and drive more visibility among their ideal client base.

Our Approach

1. Deep-Dive Stakeholder Workshops

We began with a series of in-person workshops involving key stakeholders across the business. These sessions helped uncover valuable internal insights and built consensus around CDP’s core client personas. By facilitating collaboration between technical experts, the marketing team, and leadership, we were able to:

  • Define clear Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs)
  • Refine value propositions for each market sector
  • Shape strategic messaging to be used across website and campaigns

2. Marketing Buy-In Across the Business

One of our core objectives was to bring the broader CDP team along on the marketing journey. We worked closely with the CMO and marketing leads to involve key team members from across the organisation. This not only increased alignment but also fostered buy-in, helping to turn marketing into a company-wide priority rather than a siloed function.

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3. SEO Strategy & Competitor Analysis

Our SEO work began with a full audit and competitor benchmarking exercise. From this, we identified:

  • Priority keyword clusters across sectors
  • Opportunities for on-page optimisation
  • Gaps in competitor content we could capitalise on

These insights informed a new content strategy and helped CDP climb search rankings in key innovation categories.

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4. LinkedIn Ads and Paid Campaigns

We supported the execution of paid LinkedIn campaigns tailored to each ICP, using refined messaging from the workshops. These campaigns were built to generate brand awareness and drive highly relevant traffic to CDP’s website.

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5. Technical Website Support

Alongside the internal development team, we assisted with a range of complex website updates to ensure the platform was SEO-friendly, fast, and easy to navigate — creating a stronger foundation for future marketing efforts.

The Results

  • Clear, consistent messaging across sectors and campaigns
  • Greater internal alignment and cross-team collaboration around marketing
  • A robust SEO foundation, helping CDP compete more effectively in organic search
  • Improved campaign performance on LinkedIn through refined targeting and messaging
"The session was incredibly helpful and gave us a much more structured way to think about our business strategy and messaging. The messaging guide you provided was exactly what we needed to move forward with clarity. A huge thank you to the whole team!"

Millie Ashton

Consultant Industrial Designer

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