Content Strategist - 3 Month Contract in London

At Horizontal Digital, we hold ourselves to one key belief: You’re only as good as your worst customer experience. This mantra drives our digital consultancy to think beyond the easy answers and instead create websites, apps, portals, and other experiences that solve customer needs for Fortune 500 companies in intuitive and empathetic ways.

We use these values to fuel superior results:

• Lock arms: We forge relationships that make our impact 1,000x stronger. This means working across departments and engaging both our clients and our communities to deliver the greatest good.
• Show hustle: We’re not ones to sit on our hands and wait. Instead, we anticipate opportunities, collectively roll up our sleeves, and find ways to execute the exceptional.
• Embrace change: From new technologies to workplace philosophies, we welcome the unexpected and constantly anticipate what’s next.
• Elevate empathy: We listen before we take action. This means understanding a variety of perspectives and holding ourselves to a higher standard of accountability.
• Never settle: We motivate each other to push past the easy answers and collectively arrive at bigger, more inspiring ideas.

At Horizontal, content isn’t just copy; it’s structure, strategy, and story. Content can deliver our clients a competitive advantage, and we partner with clients on that journey.

As a Content Strategist, you’ll play a key role in helping global brands organise their content supply chain in smarter, and more scalable ways. You’ll work at the intersection of creativity and systems-thinking, designing the frameworks that allow content to be reused, localised, personalised, and delivered across multiple channels with ease.

Ultimately, you'll help clients understand what good content operations look like and guide them through the messy middle of evolving from the unruly maze of decentralised content to something governed.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone who sees content as more than words on a page, someone who understands how content moves, scales, and delivers value. You’re curious, systems-minded, and excited by the idea of building content ecosystems that are just as elegant behind the scenes as they are on the surface.

You don’t need to have all the answers, but you should have the frameworks and mindset to help us ask the right questions. We’re especially interested in those who’ve worked in, or helped lead, the shift to composable and headless architectures, and who understand the organisational transformation this requires.

As a Content Strategist at Horizontal, you'll be both a practitioner and a consultant. Your work will span from high-level strategic planning to hands-on execution, working with our clients to:

• Understand how content supports business goals and user needs
• Lead workshops and discovery sessions to define content approaches
• Assess and define content operations and governance models
• Create IA, taxonomies, metadata structures, and content templates
• Collaborate with UX and tech to ensure content is feasible, localisable, and scalable
• Bring clarity to complex publishing ecosystems

Key Responsibilities

Content Strategy

• Shape and lead enterprise-wide content strategies that support business goals and user needs
• Build governance frameworks to ensure quality, consistency, and accountability
• Define KPIs to measure performance and drive continuous improvement
• Champion innovation in how content is created, managed, and delivered
• Lead workshops and discovery sessions with clients to help identify and define content needs, priorities, and roles
• Embed SEO thinking into content strategy - aligning structure, metadata, and messaging with search intent and discoverability goals
• Help clients navigate the shift to composable and headless content architecture

Content Management

• Design workflows that make content easier to create, approve, and publish
• Set up rights and permission structures that support secure collaboration
• Develop strategies for publishing content across global platforms and channels
• Establish content lifecycle practices—from creation to archival
• Map current vs future-state content operations and help shape practical roadmaps for change

Content Architecture

• Create scalable taxonomy structures aligned with business and customer needs
• Build metadata frameworks that power discovery and personalisation
• Define best practices for how content is stored, organised, and managed
• Support localisation through smart multi-language architecture
• Work closely with UX to ensure IA reflects real-world user journeys, not internal silos
• Use semantic modelling approaches to support more intelligent content orchestration and connected experiences

Content and Data Modelling

• Build structured, reusable content models that support omnichannel delivery
• Leverage modular components to reduce duplication and speed up publishing
• Design schemas that enable dynamic, personalised experiences
• Make authoring easier while optimising delivery performance
• Help shape our internal approach to structured content - including how we use Sitecore, Salesforce, and connected platforms
• Contribute to developing internal documentation and reusable content models that help our teams work more efficiently across projects

AI-Generated Content

• Help our clients understand the practical realities, opportunities, and limitations of gen AI in content work
• Design thoughtful, human-aware strategies for using AI in content creation
• Create hybrid workflows that blend human creativity with machine efficiency
• Define quality, consistency, and ethical guardrails for AI content
• Build systems that allow AI to work within your content structures

Collaboration & Enablement

• Train content authors and stakeholders on strategy, tools, and best practices
• Create documentation and guides that make content governance simple
• Work together with developers, UX teams, and marketers to bring experiences to life
• Stay ahead of industry trends and share new thinking across the team

Why This Role Matters

Content is the glue that holds great digital experiences together. In this role, you’ll be the person who makes sure content is not only beautiful and useful but structured, scalable, and ready for whatever comes next. Whether it’s a global campaign, a product launch, or an AI-enabled journey, you’ll be the strategic mind behind the content that drives it all.

Qualifications & Experience

Must-Haves

• 5+ years of experience in content strategy, information architecture, or digital content operations
• Strong knowledge of content modelling, taxonomy, and metadata frameworks
• Experience designing and implementing content workflows and governance models
• Familiarity with multilingual content strategies, localisation, and translation workflows
• Solid understanding of personalisation and content segmentation strategies
• Experience working with DAM systems and managing digital assets at scale
• Exposure to or curiosity about AI-generated content and automation in content production
• Comfort collaborating with UX, dev, design, and marketing teams in Agile environments
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills

Nice-to-Haves

• Understanding of SEO, structured data, and content performance analytics
• Exposure to CDPs and data-driven content delivery
• Proven experience with enterprise CMS platforms preferably Sitecore (XP, XM Cloud) and/or Content Hub, Salesforce
• Experience designing content for omnichannel environments (web, app, email, etc.)
• Familiarity with the role of semantics and linked data in content systems
• Experience working across diverse industries such as hospitality, government, logistics, or financial services
• A degree in Communications, Information Design or a related field or equivalent practical experience