The AI Marketing
Intelligence Briefing
Your firm’s authority is real. The reason it isn’t converting online is simpler — and more fixable — than you think.
17%
According to Gartner, that is how much of the entire buying journey a B2B client spends meeting with potential suppliers. When they’re comparing several firms, the time with any one of them falls to as little as 5–6%. The rest is self-directed — and the single largest share of it is spent researching independently, online.
“If a client spends most of the decision without you in the room, then your website, your profiles and your listings are not your marketing. They are most of your sale.”
— Larysa Hale, Expert Circle
Why your authority leaks before a client ever calls
You have experience, expertise, client results and years of earned credibility. The substance is real. The problem is structural: that authority does not travel cleanly into the places where clients now form their view of you.
A client may see your website, a senior person’s LinkedIn profile, your Google Business Profile, a directory listing or a partner page long before they meet you. If each describes the firm differently, speaks to a slightly different audience, or fails to make your value clear, your authority leaks away. Fragmented expertise is harder to find, harder to understand, and far easier to overlook — by clients, by search engines, and by the AI summaries that increasingly answer the question before anyone clicks.
This is what E-E-A-T — experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust — really measures. Not a search trick, but whether a client can quickly tell that you understand their problem, have solved it before, and can be trusted with it.
And here is the harder truth underneath the leak. You could line up every profile, make them perfectly consistent, and still blend in — because most firms describe themselves in the very same words: experienced, trusted, results-driven, client-focused. Consistency makes you findable. It does not make you the choice. What makes you the choice is being specific: one clear promise, for one kind of client, about one problem you solve, in their words.
YOUR MOVE
Three actions for this week
Audit five places
Your homepage, your LinkedIn company page, one senior person’s profile, your Google Business Profile, and one directory or membership listing. Do they describe the firm the same way? Is it clear who you help, what you solve, and why you over a similar firm? Could a client grasp your value in under thirty seconds? Where the answer is no, you’ve found a leak.
Pick one service — the one that already makes you money
Don’t try to fix the whole firm. Sharpen the value proposition for a single service first, in your clients’ own words, and you have a model you can repeat.
Line up the story before you publish another word
The fix is not more content. It is one clear, specific description, made consistent everywhere it appears.
The Gartner finding
Gartner finds the biggest single slice of buying time — around 27% — goes on independent online research, more than any other activity in the process. The decision is overwhelmingly made in the places you’re not present to defend. Which is precisely why the firms that are clear and consistent there get recognised — and the firms that are scattered get passed over, however good they are.
What’s on this month
The work runs across the programme this month, in three depths.
The masterclass — The authority problem: build your E-E-A-T foundation
Where you find the leaks and learn to describe your firm clearly and consistently across every place it appears. Members only.
The free on-demand webinar — Working on your value proposition
Where you build the specific promise underneath that authority, for one service, and leave with the start of a campaign plan to take it to market. Free, and yours to watch anytime.
The live work group, Thursday 23 July
Where you finish it for real — a small group of senior peers pressure-testing your value proposition until it holds, and you leaving with tasks for your team and a plan for what’s next.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Most firms believe their problem is visibility — that if they could just be seen more, the work would come. So they publish more, post more, show up more.
But visibility was never the hard part. The hard part is being unmistakable once you’re seen — and being clear in the handful of places a client looks when you’re nowhere near the room. This month, the whole programme is working on exactly that.
Larysa Hale
Founder, Expert Circle
Members do all of it, and carry their plan into the accountability session at the month’s end — where you report back on what actually happened and commit to the next step, with the group holding you to it. That follow-through is what turns a good month into a changed firm.
If you’ve been meaning to get this right, it’s the natural way in.