Marketing for expert-led businesses
Your firm is already the expert. Let’s make the market see it.
I help expert-led B2B businesses turn the expertise they already have into demand. I find what your market wants to know, draw the answer out of your people, and get them in front of the right audience, as real, named humans, not another faceless brand shouting into the feed.
Why now
AI has made competent content free and infinite. Which means content itself no longer sets you apart; it’s a commodity your competitors generate as fast as you do.
The one thing that can’t be generated is a credible, named human who was the origin of an insight, not a repackager of one. Search knows it: E-E-A-T rewards first-hand experience and demonstrable expertise. The AI answer engines are learning it too: the crawlers behind LLM assistants weigh authority and provenance much as search does, surfacing and citing whoever is recognised as the source. People feel it: nobody wants an internet of chatbots talking to chatbots; they want to feel connected to a source. A firm with no human face is, functionally, indistinguishable from one. And your buyers can tell.
Here’s the good news: you’re already the expert. That was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck is knowing what the market wants to hear, and getting your people visibly in front of it before your competitors get theirs.
Five moves.
Sense the demand
Separate signal from noise: what your market actually wants to know, and when. This is the data and insight work I think out loud about in The Data Pit.
Draw out the expertise
The answer already lives inside your business, in your people. I get it out of their heads and into a usable form.
Give it a face
A named, credible human in front of it. Not a logo, a person.
Distribute it
The right message, the right channel, the right cultural moment, built as a system, not a one-off. This is where I execute directly: SEO, paid, CRM, PR, content.
Reach the market, repeatably
So authority compounds instead of resetting with every campaign.
The same method, different sectors.
Over my career I’ve been fortunate to work with companies around the world, across a wide range of sectors: from shaping the narrative around carbon credits in Peru with Bosques Amazónicos, to reframing the case for international study in Hong Kong with University of Wollongong Hong Kong (香港伍倫貢學院), to easing the transition from fossil fuels to EVs in the UK with Pod Point. Below are just a few of them: industry expertise, turned into marketing results.
Read the cultural moment, then put the experts’ faces on it.
Turn the founder’s expertise into the engine.
Borrow the expertise the brand didn’t have yet.
Give institutional expertise a human face for nervous beginners.
Put world-renowned marketing leaders in front of learners, every week.
Turn six decades of engineering know-how into content.
Make the firm’s own experts the thought leaders, proactively and reactively.
It started by handing someone else the mic.
I cut my teeth in the DIY punk scene, where if you want something to happen, you bootstrap it. So when I turned to marketing, and wanted to hear from the grassroots founders and technologists the rest of us couldn’t get near, I did the thing that, at the time, wasn’t obvious at all: I started a podcast.
It began as a segment on a radio show, syndicated to iTunes, then found its audience once we started interviewing the developers behind Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects. Novel at the time, that expert-interview format took it to the top of the iTunes technology chart, because everyone won: the audience got access they didn’t have, the founders got reach, and the show grew on the back of both. We repurposed every episode across Patreon, YouTube, and Reddit, riding the crowdfunding platforms’ own followings and nativising the content as we went.
It also, almost by accident, made me one of the UK’s, and arguably the world’s, first professional podcasters.
That’s the whole idea behind everything here. The expertise already exists, in other people. My job is to surface it, give it a face, and get it in front of the audience that actually wants it.
“You ever meet someone and think… he gets it.”
via LinkedIn
“Having worked in marketing for decades, Luke reminded me that I still have much to learn.”
via LinkedIn
The same instinct, off the clock.
The habit of building the thing, rather than talking about building the thing, doesn’t switch off at six. Here’s some of what that looks like away from client work.
The Data Pit
My writing on the messy truths behind the data: separating signal from noise, how people actually decide, and the use and misuse of data in marketing. Where I show the demand-sensing, rather than just claim it.
Machine Cartel
A properly DIY band, which means exactly that: we do all of it ourselves. The logistics, the marketing, the distribution, shooting the music videos, and, somewhere in there, writing and performing the songs.
If it doesn’t exist, I build it
- There wasn’t a local nursery, so we made one. Founding patron of Blossom Tree Early Education, helping shape the business and its logistics.
- There wasn’t a good way to stop AI crawlers, so I built one: ContentShield.
- No university place, so I made my own route. Taught myself to Master’s level, certified by the University of Salford, and joined the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
- Endurance for its own sake: a 20-mile swim, and a marathon through the Sahara.
- Avid allotmenter, and bike polo played around the country.
Marketing that’s considered, commercially grounded, and built on your biggest asset: your expertise.
If that’s what you’re after, let’s make something worth talking about.
Prefer LinkedIn? Connect with me there.