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Case study: content writing for the CIPD’s E-Shop website relaunch

The CIPD (Chartered Institute for Professional Development) is a professional body for HR and people development. They provide training, resources and certifications to those working as HR professionals or in leadership roles. 

As part of a broader website project, their content team was updating their E-Shop to improve its SEO performance and fit an updated structure. This meant they needed to rewrite all the listings for their training catalogue. One of their team members had worked with me in the past while at a previous employer and recommended my services.

Website relaunch content writing for the CIPD

This was a highly involved website relaunch content writing project with several factors at play. Here’s a rundown of what that looked like:

A high volume of work

This was a BIG project. There were over 80 course descriptions to rewrite. Some of these were on the shorter side (around 400 words), while others were more involved and over 1000 words long. 

Compact timeframe

There was very little flexibility in this project’s timeframe. The content marketing team were very organised and had a strict project plan. They shared this with me at the outset so I had full visibility of their needs. They briefed me in good time, which meant I could organise my working plan and retainer clients around this project. As if to make things more challenging, the Christmas and New Year break fell partway through the project, reducing the available time. 

To deal with this, I created my own timing plan. I also gave the content team visibility into when they could expect work from me. I then worked through the files in an organised manner and kept the team regularly updated.

Multiple stakeholders

The CIPD is a large organisation, and several people were involved in my work’s sign-off. In addition to the digital marketing manager, I dealt with the SEO manager, the in-house head of copy, L&D experts, and the marketing lead. We held weekly status calls to share feedback, review progress and agree on the next steps.

Website relaunch content writing requirements

With all these project management aspects, it’s easy to forget the work itself! My brief involved:

I carried out all work on the CIPD’s Teams platform and had full access to their project timeline with full visibility of key milestones.

Results

I delivered all work ahead of time and helped out when additional course descriptions were needed at the last minute. The relaunched E-shop is now available online, providing leaders and HR professionals with a selection of bitesize courses, training and more involved qualifications. 

You can see the E-shop here.

Here’s what my key contact at the CIPD, Hannah Barragry, had to say about working together:

“From the offset, Laura was friendly, proactive and flexible. Despite the project having many time constraints and often involving shifting priorities (and last minute additions) Laura was professional, agile and organised at all times. Laura also worked very closely with other members of my team such as the Copywriting and TOV Lead and Marketing Manager. She was brilliant at both demonstrating her expertise whilst also ensuring the team felt heard and that their comments were incorporated into any changes.

Since the website has relaunched with the new copy we have seen in reduction in abandon basket rates and an increase in direct sales.

On a personal note, Laura was a lovely and fun person to work with. Thank you for all your support, time and expertise working on this project with us. Looking forward to working together again in the future.”

Need help with website relaunch content writing? I could be exactly who you’re looking for. Book a call to find out more about me and how I work.

Case study: content writing retainer for SaaS

Breathe is an HR software company, providing HR SaaS to SMEs across the UK. Their target markets are SME business leaders and people responsible for HR management and administration.

With a gap in their content team and the need to continue creating and updating content to fit their busy content schedule, I worked on a content writing retainer with them for two years. A year later, I worked on a further retainer of 11 months with them.

As a freelance content writer, I was able to provide several services to support the team. Here are a few highlights:

Blog repurposing

Great content deserves to be seen but needs regular spring cleaning to keep it working hard from an SEO perspective. The team at Breathe gave me a list of blogs to repurpose as part of my content writing retainer. With access to their Monday.com board, I delivered blogs in line with their updated keyword targets and any other changes, while running due diligence checks on stats and legislative information to ensure all content was correct. Naturally, I ensured keywords were incorporated naturally and effectively for SEO dynamite.  I also provided page titles and SEO descriptions. Some of this work involved merging multiple posts into single blogs. Every post was delivered to schedule.

Blog writing

Refreshing existing content is an easy win, but writing new blogs is a surefire way to show your audience you’re on top of current topics. Again, working from the team Monday.com board, I delivered a series of blogs in line with keyword and title requirements. Some blogs had very specific briefs, others were left open for me to write as I felt fit. Again, every blog was written to a tight schedule, and I turned edits around in a flash.

“Her work is well-researched and very well-written. I would highly recommend Laura’s services” – Carl Sadecki

Gated content for SAAS

Information-rich gated content is lead-generating gold. However, it needs to be up to date. The Breathe team briefed me to update a selection of their guides – all of which related to employment law, leadership and team management. I researched the topics, sense-checked the data and ensured links and statistics were still relevant. If there were stronger links or better statistics, I updated these. In some cases, social attitudes were shifting – especially if the content was written pre-covid. In this case, I edited things and alerted the team, so they were aware of my changes.

Content writing training for team members

I was asked to run a training session with a newer member of Breathe’s content team to help with their development. During the two-hour session, I shared my methodology around content creation, particularly focusing on research and helpful tools to help with blog writing. The feedback I received was that the session was very useful and shaped how the writer builds their content to this day.

Content writing retainer results

I worked with Breathe in two separate contracts. During my first content writing retainer, I wrote 82 articles for Breathe. These have been read by more than 870,000 people and generated more than 4,000 clicks through to other content, including requests for software trials and demonstrations.

“Laura has been a great asset to our content team over the past few years. She fully understands our brand voice & our goals, always creating insightful and interesting content that is enjoyable to read. Laura has re-invigorated some of our older blogs with her engaging writing style, as well as shared her valuable knowledge in updating some of our core website resources. Laura also kindly ran an incredibly useful training session with me when I was new to content writing, sharing some golden pieces of advice that I implemented & still use today. I can’t recommend Laura highly enough, nor thank her enough for all her hard work and help.”

Aimée Brougham-Chandler

You can see some of the work I completed for Breathe here.