For years, B2B content has followed a familiar formula: brief, draft, design, polish, publish. Everything is brand-safe, stylised, and approved. And yet, too often, it lands with a dull thud. No comments. No real engagement. No movement in pipeline.
Then, over on LinkedIn, a company’s founder casually posts a 90-second video shot in poor lighting, sharing a candid take on a recent product misstep, and it sparks thousands of views, reactions, and messages from prospects and peers alike.
This contrast isn’t accidental. The content that performs best in B2B today increasingly isn’t the most polished – it’s the most authentic. And in a growing number of high-performing marketing organisations, authenticity is coming from a new source: internal experts.
Whether it’s founders, consultants, sales leaders or product owners, the voices buyers are listening to, and trusting, are those of real people with subject matter credibility. This shift marks the rise of expert-led content.
Why expert-led content resonates
B2B buyers today are sophisticated, sceptical, and self-directed. They’ve seen enough generic whitepapers, keyword-stuffed blogs, and polished videos to know when they’re being marketed to. What they respond to now is candour. Depth. A distinct point of view.
Expert-led content delivers that. It’s rooted in experience, not positioning. It feels less like a pitch and more like advice. And because it comes from individuals who have done the work – built the product, led the team, solved the problem – it carries a level of credibility that brand content often lacks.
That credibility has commercial value. Expert-led content drives awareness by expanding individual reach. It supports the sales cycle by answering nuanced questions. And it builds long-term brand equity by fostering trust – one post, podcast, or comment at a time.
Redefining who creates content
This doesn’t mean marketing teams no longer matter. In fact, expert-led content requires skilled marketers to function: not as sole creators, but as enablers.
Some of the most effective B2B brands today act more like editorial teams than traditional marketing departments. They identify strong voices within the business – product managers, sales engineers, customer success leads – and help them shape their thinking into audience-ready formats.
That might mean ghostwriting a LinkedIn post based on a voice note. It could involve co-hosting a podcast where an engineer explains a new feature in plain language. It might mean drafting an internal playbook on objection handling and repurposing it as a blog for external audiences.
The point is, marketers no longer need to be the voice. They can – and should – be the amplifier.
Why polish is no longer enough
The old belief in content marketing was that professionalism and polish equalled authority. The neater the visuals, the more credible the brand. And while production quality still matters, it’s no longer the differentiator.
Buyers want depth, not gloss. They want to hear from someone who has sat across the table from a client, wrestled with a product roadmap, or hired and fired within their function. They want specificity, not generalisations. Detail, not decoration.
In this world, a rough-cut video explaining why a go-to-market plan failed can be more impactful than a glossy explainer video outlining how the product works. A founder reflecting openly on team culture will get more shares than a branded post on “five trends to watch”.
What used to look “unprofessional” now looks relatable. And what used to feel “off-message” now feels human.
The risk of over-control
Of course, letting go of brand control can feel risky. Marketing leaders rightly worry about tone, messaging, and consistency. But the alternative – total control – often results in lifeless content that pleases nobody.
Today’s best-performing content doesn’t sound like it’s been through five rounds of stakeholder edits. It sounds like a person speaking plainly and with conviction. And audiences can tell the difference.
Rather than forcing all content through a single tone of voice, it’s more effective to offer guidance and guardrails. Help internal experts be clear, not corporate. Give them confidence to share what they know, and provide support to turn raw insight into public value.
How B2B brands are doing it
Some of the strongest examples of expert-led content come from brands that have built their growth around it.
Take Lavender, whose co-founder Will Allred became known for bite-sized, tactical videos about cold email structure – shot informally, often in a hoodie, and entirely unfiltered. These posts weren’t just branding exercises. They drove demos. They shaped perception. They built a community of buyers who trusted the product because they trusted the people behind it.
Or look at Gong, where sales leaders regularly share insights drawn from anonymised call data. Their content feels alive with real-world relevance, because it is. It’s the kind of insight that comes from working the problem, not writing around it.
Then there’s Chris Walker (Refine Labs/Science of Scaling), who built his own authority – and a multi-million-pound business – by posting sharp, data-backed takes on B2B demand generation. His posts were opinionated, not polished. And they worked.
These brands didn’t hide their experts behind slick brand templates. They put them front and centre, and reaped the rewards.
Making it work internally
To build a successful expert-led content strategy, B2B marketers need to shift their mindset – from content creators to content collaborators.
Start by identifying the voices inside your business who already have credibility with customers. These might be founders, yes, but also product owners, account directors, or technical leads. If they have a strong point of view and a willingness to share, you’ve got raw material worth investing in.
Next, make it easy for them. Create a simple process: short interviews, voice notes, Slack prompts. Turn these into articles, posts, scripts or slides. Keep them involved, but don’t ask them to do the heavy lifting.
Then, share the results. Show how their post led to a sales conversation. Show the views, comments, replies. Show the marketing impact—not to prove ROI, but to build confidence.
And finally, give them room to be themselves. That might mean going off-message. That’s fine. The trust and engagement it generates will often outweigh the risk of inconsistency.
The future is credible, not corporate
In 2025, buyers are looking for B2B brands they can believe in – not just because of the product, but because of the people behind it. They want clarity over choreography. Originality over optimisation.
Expert-led content works because it speaks from experience. And when done well, it scales that experience in ways traditional brand marketing never could.
So look beyond the content calendar. Talk to your experts. Capture what they know. And let them speak – not for the brand, but for the buyer.
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