✍️ how to market to people who hate marketing

Marketing to experts is like trying to teach Gordon Ramsay how to boil water. He already knows, and he's definitely not impressed by your intro-level technique.

You can’t out-smart an audience of experts. But you can curate something useful for them to sink their teeth into—and you can definitely entertain them along the way.

Experts Exchange (EE) learned this the hard way when the first run of their newsletter died in a single edition.

EE’s subscription-based tech community serves 6 million IT professionals who need expert solutions to complex technical problems. So when their community of techies read the first issue… let’s just say they did NOT mince words:

"That's not true.”
“Who's writing this?”
“This writer clearly doesn't know software."

(And as a bonus, five separate members reached out to fact-check the issue into oblivion.)

So when Thomas Bernal, Chief Revenue Officer at Experts Exchange, decided it was time to re-launch their newsletter, he took a different approach. Today, he calls EE’s ByteSize newsletter "the easiest revenue stream we've ever created."

His anti-marketing marketing approach turned a newsletter disaster into a 47% open rate powerhouse flush with sponsorship opportunities—and with a format that actually makes skeptics subscribe.

You’re doing stand-up comedy at a convention for professional hecklers. Everyone in the audience knows your material better than you do, and they’re actively rooting for you to fail. 

Welcome to marketing for expert audiences.

"You can't tell our audience your half-baked opinion on Microsoft when they're in the weeds dealing with Oracle applications stacked with AWS," Thomas explains. "These tech people do not like to be pitched or sold to. They want real peer review stuff."

Most marketers would retreat to safer, less intimidating audiences.

Thomas did the opposite.

Instead of trying to out-geek the geeks, he positioned ByteSize as the informed curator their audience actually wanted. 

"The biggest thing for us was making sure that we're presenting something in a way that our audience doesn't leap to fact-checks,” he explains. "We're saying, 'Hey, we aren't the experts. We're giving you a stream of content that you guys can dig into on your own.'"

This humble-but-helpful positioning landed EE in the marketing sweet spot: between mind-numbing technical documentation and insulting marketing fluff.

In our latest playbook on newsletters, we dig into the 4 steps for turning skeptics into subscribers:

1. Choose a distinct voice (for example, EE went with “Tony Stark”—witty, smart, confident, but never condescending)

2. Use data to focus on what your audience is most interested in

3. Engaged subscribers > more subscribers (when EE slashed their 400K subscriber list in half, their open rate jumped to nearly 50%)

4. Monetize the trust through premium sponsorship opportunities

With this process Thomas achieved something most marketers can only dream about: getting tech pros to voluntarily open marketing emails.

Learn more about how he did it here.

Campaigns that got us talking: Looks like someone figured out how to monetize their morning jog! A SF-based venture capitalist is offering his shirt as startup advertising space for his 5-7 mile daily walks. Why buy a billboard when you can rent someone’s shirt? It's like ad space on taxi cabs, but for torsos…

How people are actually using ChatGPT: OpenAI dropped the receipts on their 800 million weekly users, and the results are wonderfully human. The top three uses: Practical guidance (28.3%), writing help (28.1%), and information seeking (21.3%). Personal non-work conversations now dominate 70% of usage, up from 53%. We wanted artificial intelligence, we got artificial friendship.

Stuff that made us scroll back up: Ever wondered what it would sound like if Sisyphus worked in marketing? Madeleine Work just answered that question with three sentences that hurt more than stepping on a LEGO barefoot.

Have you met our VP of Content, Stewart Hillhouse, yet? 

Most content leaders talk strategy. He builds revenue engines.

Stew previously led content at Mutiny, where his systems drove over 40% of new pipeline—not engagement metrics, actual revenue. Now he oversees the strategists and copywriters turning our clients' big ideas into content that competes and wins. Stewart thinks in systems: editorial newsletters that get forwarded, executive thought leadership that starts conversations, website content that converts browsers into buyers.

Right now, he's fascinated by how AI is forcing marketing teams to completely rethink their playbook—not just tools, but the fundamental structure of how they build trust and drive growth.

(Seriously, fascinated. He won’t stop Slacking us about it.) 

Want to brainstorm or pressure test an idea? Book time here. Fair warning: There’s already limited availability, so we recommend getting this one on the calendar.

Choose your fighter: Your dream brand tone would sound most like…
Vote here. 

• Sherlock Holmes (brilliant insights, no nonsense) 

• Wednesday Adams (dry wit, cuts through the fluff) 

• Olivia Pope (equal parts style and authority) 

• The Dude (laid back, and surprisingly profound)

Previously we asked you to weigh in on the Great Marketing Duality: Should you put your money toward brand or demand? You cowards split the difference and said both. 

(jk, we agree.) 

But it’s easier said than done—so here’s a breakdown of HubSpot’s strategy for striking the brand/demand balance.

There's something beautifully ironic about needing to be humble to succeed in an industry built on ego. But turns out the best way to win over skeptics isn't to prove you're smarter than them. It's to prove you respect how much smarter they are than you.

It’s been a minute since we asked, so tell us: Are there marketing disasters you want us to dissect? Experts you think we should interview? Hit reply—we read everything, fact-check nothing. (Kidding, we definitely fact-check.)

See y'all next time.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… The Guinness Book of World Records (one of the best-selling copyrighted books ever) was created in 1955 as a marketing stunt to settle pub arguments. Sometimes the most successful content marketing happens when you're not trying to sell anything.