Dave is a Founder and Digital Strategist at Big Bear Creative, with more than 20 years of experience across digital marketing, technology, performance marketing and commercial strategy.
He works with businesses that need to make better decisions about where to invest, how to improve performance and how digital marketing fits into the wider commercial picture.
At Big Bear, Dave works across strategy, PPC, SEO, AI search, website performance and digital growth. He has a particular focus on hospitality, helping hotels and hospitality businesses increase direct bookings, reduce reliance on third-party platforms and build stronger long-term marketing foundations.
Dave’s role sits at the point where marketing, technology and commercial decision-making meet.
Rather than looking at individual channels in isolation, he focuses on how the complete digital journey performs. That means understanding how people discover a business, what influences their decision, where they convert and what may be preventing better results.
His work can span Google Ads, SEO, AI search, website strategy, conversion performance, analytics and wider digital marketing strategy, but the starting point is usually the same: what is the business trying to achieve, and what is most likely to make a meaningful difference?
Dave co-founded Big Bear with Emma Sheppard, helping grow the agency from a small family business into an established Cambridge-based marketing agency working with clients across the UK.
Dave’s specialist areas include digital marketing strategy, Google Ads, PPC, SEO, AI search, Answer Engine Optimisation, Generative Engine Optimisation, website strategy, conversion optimisation, hospitality marketing and commercial growth.
He is particularly experienced in helping businesses understand how these areas work together rather than treating paid media, search, websites and content as separate marketing activities.
Dave has more than two decades of experience working across digital, technology and commercial strategy.
His career has included work with complex organisations, consumer platforms and public-sector teams, giving him a broad view of how digital systems influence customer behaviour, business decisions and commercial performance.
Over the last decade, much of his work has focused on hospitality and the challenges facing independent hotels and hospitality brands as customer behaviour, distribution and digital search have evolved.
As a Founder of Big Bear, Dave has also worked closely with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough business community. Big Bear has supported projects connected with the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority and has grown alongside the region since launching in 2016.
Dave believes digital marketing works best when it starts with commercial clarity.
A campaign can generate more clicks, a website can attract more traffic and an SEO report can show improved rankings, but none of those things matter much if they do not contribute to the outcome the business actually cares about.
His approach is to look at the whole picture.
That means asking whether the right people are being reached, whether the website gives them enough reason to act, whether tracking can be trusted, whether marketing spend is being used efficiently and whether the business is building assets it owns rather than becoming increasingly dependent on third-party platforms.
The aim is not more marketing activity. It is better marketing decisions.
Hospitality is one of Dave’s strongest areas of expertise.
He works with independent hotels and hospitality brands that want to increase direct bookings, improve their digital performance and reduce their dependence on Online Travel Agencies.
His approach goes beyond simply running advertising campaigns. He looks at how paid search, organic visibility, AI discovery, website experience, storytelling, pricing, booking journeys and first-party data work together.
This is particularly important as Google, AI search and major travel platforms continue to change the way guests discover and compare hotels.
Dave has extensive experience in paid search and digital advertising, with a particular focus on making campaign decisions around commercial outcomes rather than platform metrics.
His work covers campaign strategy, account structure, audience intent, landing pages, conversion tracking and budget allocation.
He also writes about changes to Google’s advertising ecosystem and what they mean for independent businesses, including the changing role of Hotel Ads and competition from larger Online Travel Agencies.
The question is rarely just whether a campaign can generate traffic. It is whether that traffic turns into worthwhile business.
Dave also works extensively across SEO, AEO and AI-led discovery.
His view is that AI does not replace the fundamentals of good marketing. Clear positioning, useful content, strong storytelling, credible authority and solid SEO remain important.
AI search adds another layer.
Businesses now need to think about whether tools such as ChatGPT and AI-powered search engines can clearly understand who they are, what they offer and why they are relevant to a particular question.
Dave’s approach is practical rather than driven by hype. He focuses on making businesses clearer, more authoritative and easier to discover rather than promising guaranteed inclusion in AI-generated answers.
Good digital marketing should make a business less confused, not more.
New platforms, algorithms and technologies will continue to change, but the underlying questions are usually straightforward.
Who are you trying to reach? What do they need? Why should they choose you? Where are you losing them? What is genuinely working? And what should you stop spending money on?
The job is to understand the complexity and turn it into a clearer set of decisions.
Dave co-founded Big Bear with Emma Sheppard and has helped build the agency around the idea that work should support life rather than consume it.
Big Bear remains a family-run business, combining experienced strategic thinking with a small team that works closely with clients rather than operating through layers of account management.
That approach has shaped the way the agency works today: practical advice, open conversations and a willingness to challenge work that does not make commercial sense.
Dave is active on LinkedIn, where he writes about hospitality marketing, Google Ads, SEO, AI search, digital strategy and running an independent agency.
LinkedIn: Dave Sheppard
Big Bear Creative
Allia Future Business Centre
King’s Hedges Road
Cambridge
CB4 2HY
Call: 01223 776090
Email: hello@bigbearcreative.co.uk
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