Helping a generalist IT outstaffing studio move beyond commoditised competition into a defined category they can lead in.
Context
Software development and staff augmentation studio with two problems at once. Lead flow was tight, not enough new briefs coming in. And the ones that did land were small, one-off jobs on thin margins, barely above break-even. Pressure on both volume and value.
The cause was that the studio was competing in IT outstaffing, where dozens of agencies make the same promise, and the only levers left are price and speed. The portfolio said the same thing: media, gaming, education, SaaS, beauty, retail, manufacturing, no shared thread.
The job wasn't just more leads. It was a steadier flow of bigger ones.
Before / After
Before
"Scale your engineering team, made simple." Value proposition centred on removing recruitment and HR friction. Portfolio spread across unrelated industries with no shared thread.
After
A dedicated landing page speaking the language of fashion brands directly — e-commerce platforms, AR/VR experiences, ERP automation, digital showrooms, omnichannel integrations. Portfolio curated down to fashion-only work.
Approach
Step 01
The competitor analysis was conducted across direct and indirect players, along with market and positioning mapping, to identify points of differentiation and areas for strengthening. What the studio already had but wasn’t leveraging was a cluster of fashion-industry projects we took for scale. Communication, service positioning, and channel strategy were developed based on the hypothesis.
Step 02
Listing + active review management across the global agency-discovery sector.
Listing, review management and promotion in fashion-specific channels.
Shopify Partner Directory — where merchants discover partners, ranked by experience and proven success on Shopify. Shopify Plus Partner status is a strong trust signal for premium and DTC fashion brands.
Step 03 · Tier 1
The widest, most reachable English-language intent: fashion is the top e-commerce category, online penetration is high, and the UK holds the densest concentration of fashion-Shopify agencies — so brands actively search for fashion-tech partners here.
20 scored target accounts worked in parallel as a dedicated account-based motion.
Targeted outreach to the core accounts inside the ABM list.
Step 04 · Tier 2–3
Targeted on ERP-automation, PLM and digital-showroom intent — matching the studio's strongest fashion capabilities to a market dense with brands and manufacturers.
Entered through the platform ecosystem — the Centra fashion-commerce partner network.
Long-tail optimisation across dedicated service pages, capturing specific fashion-tech queries rather than generic "software development" terms.
Optimised long-tail CPC (≈ £1.5 UK / €2 DE / €2 IT) on a lean $400 test budget — high-intent service queries on dedicated landing pages, with strong Quality Score keeping clicks cheap.
Step 05
Both markets were tested at the same time through mass email outreach to gauge response. Relevance was not confirmed in this case — so neither was scaled.
Step 06
As the data came in, underperforming spend was cut and the budget refocused on what was actually converting.
Cut from 4 to 2 — dropped the suppliers whose mass outreach wasn't returning qualified leads.
Wound down to free up budget.
Freed budget redirected into paid advertising, behind the markets already showing intent.
Results
4
signed contracts in 12 months
2
via ABM
1
via contact form
1
via directory listing