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Turning Thought Leadership Into a Strategic Lever: Splunk

How a competitive maturity assessment and thought leadership playbook helped Splunk turn quality content into organizational influence.

Splunk

Engagement Scope

Content Strategy 

Maturity Map

CONTENT AUDIT

 Measurement strategy

The Challenge

Splunk’s thought leadership team was producing quality work. The reports were meaningful. The blog had a clear POV. The ebooks were well-structured. But here’s what wasn’t working:

  • Content was getting created. Not always used. Some assets were fully activated. Others went dark post-launch.
  • Visibility was lopsided. Reports got PR love. Ebooks got buried. The exec blog wasn’t standing out in a sea of sameness.
  • Ownership was scattered. They owned content creation. But distribution? Promotion? Measurement? Not so much. And cross-team alignment was more hope than reality.
  • The team knew they were doing high-quality work. But they also knew it could be doing more — if they could make the case clearly, with data and direction to support it.

TL;DR

Client: Splunk - enterprise software leader in security & observability

  • Problem: Thought leadership content was smart, but siloed, underleveraged, and not driving progress across teams.
  • Solution: Dual-deliverable engagement: a Maturity Map (competitive benchmark) and a Perspectives Playbook (strategy + ops recs).
  • Shift: Helped Splunk reframe its content as a tool for influence, not just insight, and provided the team with the structure to act as strategic partners, not just producers.
  • Impact: Clear roadmap for content evolution, stronger internal alignment, and new momentum for cross-functional collaboration.

The Shift

This wasn’t a "content audit." It was a strategic reset. The team didn’t need more templates or workflows. They needed:

  • A way to benchmark where they stood — and how competitors were showing up
  • A shared language to talk about maturity, not just volume
  • Strategic insight that helped them navigate internal politics and power dynamics
  • Tactical recommendations that showed how to evolve content without doubling headcount

We gave them both the data to defend their value and the clarity to raise the bar.

The Work

Maturity map

Maturity Map

A 5-level content maturity framework benchmarking Splunk’s practices against five competitors.

We analyzed:

  • Content mix – Are they hitting the right formats for the right audiences?
  • Distribution practices – Are assets discoverable or buried?
  • Promotion & impact – Are marquee reports pulling their weight?

Mapped against competitors, the framework revealed where Splunk excelled and where it lagged behind. The map anchored the broader strategy recommendations and helped set priorities.

Splunk Playbook

Thought Leadership Playbook

Focused on Splunk’s owned content (Perspectives blog, research reports, ebooks), this guide covered:

  • Strategic refinement – How to make the content more relevant, more human, and more useful for decision-makers
  • Executional upgrades – Format recs, hooks, headline structure, and linking assets across touchpoints
  • Workflow + collaboration – How to influence brand, PR, integrated marketing, and campaign teams without stepping on toes
  • Competitive content analysis – Side-by-side review of blog and ebook performance vs. peer orgs

Included was a light audit of eBook UX, SEO discoverability, and integration into nurture and sales flows, as well as specific opportunities to connect content across the funnel.

The Outcomes

This wasn’t a “drop the deck and bounce” moment. This work gave the Splunk team real traction.

Third-party validation on where they stood, and what great could look like

Validation to back up asks, including better visibility, more activation support, and stronger collaboration

Tools to reframe conversations from “here’s a new report” to “here’s a strategic lever”.

❝

Ann Smith

Sr. Content Marketing Lead

Yeah, this is fantastic. This is exactly the kind of thing that we needed... It's great stuff.

The Takeaways

  • Splunk didn’t need more content. They needed more clarity, more influence, and more momentum behind the content they already had.
  • You can’t evolve content in a silo. Even great work stalls without cross-functional support.
  • Benchmarks beat opinions. When you show how you stack up, decisions get made faster.
  • Thought leadership isn’t just publishing. It’s positioning, and positioning needs strategy.
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