Senior marketing support for growing businesses
I bring senior marketing experience to ambitious and growing small and medium-sized businesses.
I’m a marketing consultant with 25 years’ experience across brand strategy, creative, media and digital. I work with businesses that are serious about growth but don’t have a full marketing function in-house, or have marketing activity running without a senior person making sure it all adds up to something meaningful.
Most businesses in that position don’t have a marketing plan that’s genuinely tied to their commercial goals. They have tactics. A campaign here. A social presence there. But no strategy connecting the spend to revenue. My first job is always to build that plan, grounded in your objectives, your audience and where the budget will have the greatest impact.
From there, I bring together everything required to deliver it. Strategy, creative, media, suppliers and reporting. I stay accountable for whether it works. You’re not managing an agency or coordinating multiple freelancers. You’re working with one senior person who has designed the plan, briefed the specialists and remains responsible for the outcome.
The kind of marketing leadership typically found in larger organisations is available to your business without the cost of building an internal marketing department. My fee is for my time and expertise. Any external suppliers are engaged at cost, with no markup.
I’ve worked across retail, QSR, government, resources, property and health. That means I’ve usually seen your challenge before and understand what works, what doesn’t, and where businesses often waste time and money. I’m used to working across different categories, getting up to speed quickly and focusing on what will make the biggest commercial difference.
If you want clearer strategy, stronger creative, smarter media investment and someone accountable for the results, let’s talk.
Areas of expertise
Brand strategy
Brand is how your business represents itself to its audience, and brand strategy is the process of understanding your place in the market, the audiences you are serving and the environment in which you operate. Brand strategy segments your audience into groups and identifies which of those groups are likely to be the most profitable. It clarifies your position in the market so the way you talk and the messages you use are distinct and make sense to your target audiences. It maps your customer's journey so you can direct energy towards the points that will have the greatest effect. Brand strategy is the planning process that ensures everything else you do to win new customers and revenue is pulling in the same direction.
Marketing foundations
Your marketing foundations are the owned assets and processes you have most control over. They're often the parts of your business that do most of the work of converting interested prospects into paying customers. Depending on the type of business you run, that can be anything from customer-facing staff and the showroom experience to your website and social media presence. My focus is the digital side: your website experience, case studies, testimonials, product content and SEO. These foundations are the first thing to get right, because without them any effort you put in further up the funnel can't be as effective.
Media planning
Advertising done well is a cheat code for sales and revenue but it takes careful strategy, thorough understanding and commitment to be effective. Knowing when, where and how to spend to deliver results over time, and to avoid costly growing pains along the way, is where experience earns its keep.
Effectiveness
Effectiveness is the nerdy stuff. It's grounded in marketing theory: the research into what actually makes advertising work. Applied properly, it means achieving more with less. The catch is that most of that theory was developed studying big business with big budgets, and at a smaller scale the rules change. A big brand can afford to invest in advertising that pays off years down the track. A smaller business usually can't, and often shouldn't. It needs revenue now, and it needs wins it can measure, so that marketing earns its place before spending on the slower, brand-building work. Knowing which game you're in is the real skill.
Creative development
The brand strategy tells us the messages we need to communicate and the creative development is the process of working out how we're going to say it and then actually creating the assets — the videos, posters, social posts etc. Creative is far more of a differentiator than it may at first seem. Good, well-thought-out creative ensures your position (that we landed on in the brand strategy) is clear, your brand is distinct and differentiated — you stand out in the crowd and you don't look like your competitors.
Delivery
Once we've agreed on the plan, I own the execution. That means managing suppliers, hitting deadlines, keeping to budget, and keeping you informed — without you having to chase anyone or project-manage something you didn't want to project-manage in the first place. You stay focused on your business. I make sure the work gets done.
My values and ways of working
Accountability
I'm accountable for the results. That means I will be honest with my forecasts. It also means if something isn't working I'll tell you, but I'll also have a plan to manage the shortfall because I'm focused on the commercial results we're trying to drive, not just the activity I'm running at this moment.
Trusted advisor
My role is as a trusted advisor — and "trusted" is doing most of the work in that phrase. I will be honest and open in my conversations because my motivation is to build ongoing partnerships based on trust. I want to be able to look back at the end of the year and be proud of what we've built together and the results we've driven — and that will only happen if I've earned your trust.
That extends to how I charge. My fee is for my time and thinking. Suppliers — designers, developers, media buyers — come through at cost, with no markup. You get the full benefit of my contacts and buying relationships without paying a premium on top of them.
Commercial focus
Everything I do is focused on commercial outcomes. That doesn't always mean short-term sales; sometimes the right investment takes time to pay off, and I'll tell you when that's the case. But it always means your budget is working towards something real; in most cases, sales and revenue. I don't recommend activity for its own sake. Every action is a step on the path we mapped out in our strategy.
Experience
I've been doing this for over 25 years across a wide range of businesses, categories and budgets. That means I've usually seen your problem before and I know what works, what doesn't, and where the traps are. The projects below give you a sense of the range.
Luke took the time to understand our business. The results speak for themselves, our engagement and brand awareness have grown significantly. Luke is professional, easy to work with, and genuinely invested in his clients' success. Highly recommended.
Nikki Lodge
General Manager
Sydney West Sports Medicine
Experience
Blacktown City Council — BEST Precinct
I led the team engaged by Blacktown City Council to develop and deliver the marketing plan and launch campaign for the $100 million Blacktown Exercise, Sport and Technology Hub — a new community health, sport and wellness precinct in Western Sydney.
The first stage of the project was developing the 24-month marketing strategy. The phased campaign plan mapped out the steps from launch through to always-on activity to drive awareness and relevance for the community of the new facility. The launch media strategy spanned digital, social, out-of-home, transit and letterbox. Creative production delivered a set of assets designed to connect a largely non-sports audience with the facility across multiple channels.
The campaign reached over 300,000 people in the Blacktown area — approximately 65% of the LGA population. Alongside the park launch, I also managed awareness and lead generation campaigns for four commercial tenants within the precinct, spanning both digital and traditional channels.
When the agency I was working with closed in mid-2025, I took over the account directly and have continued to run media and creative for the Council since.
Luke brought a wealth of experience to the development of a strategic marketing plan for new businesses within an established international sporting precinct. His approach to both client and stakeholder management resulted in a campaign with demonstrable impact on the businesses in both revenue and visitation
Luke was professional in his approach and was a pleasure to work with, demonstrating a willingness to understand the challenges and formulate bespoke responses in a timely manner.
Dr Neil Gibson
Precinct Director for Blacktown International Sports Park
ATP Science
ATP Science is a high-growth Australian sports nutrition brand with an extensive range of protein powders, supplements and bars. Getting listed in Woolworths was a significant commercial milestone — but it created a marketing challenge. They had a good reputation amongst the specialist health and fitness audience but to be successful in Woolies they needed to increase their awareness and provide relevance to the mass market shopper buying ATP protein bars for the first time.
The campaign strategy and creative were developed to bridge that gap. Creative direction delivered a set of tongue-in-cheek assets for a multichannel launch campaign across two regions, designed to allow testing against non-advertising regions. The campaign ran across digital out-of-home, TV, social and display. Over the three-month campaign period, sales in the campaign regions were 30% higher than non-campaign regions demonstrating the effectiveness of the work.
After the launch, to maximise return on investment I worked with our media partners to identify the most effective channels, then monitored and invested in them tactically whenever they were available at significant discounts as distressed media. This allowed ATP to maintain an effective media presence in the right channels at a fraction of the usual investment.
Rio Tinto — Amrun Mine Transition
As Account Director I led the Weipa Pride project end to end. The campaign won the Mumbrella Change Management Award in 2019 with 93% of jobs filled by the time the campaign wound up.
Weipa is a remote mining town in far north Queensland, that is home to the miners at Rio Tinto's local bauxite operations. When the existing mine began winding down and a new operation 50km away across the river at Amrun came online, Rio Tinto faced a significant challenge. They wanted to retain their experienced and trusted staff but the new site presented significant lifestyle changes for employees. Working at the new site meant asking people to change from 5-day week shifts, living at home to 9-day fortnights with 12 hour shifts living on site at Amrun. This would be a massive upheaval for the Weipa community impacting family life, the community and people with pets. The campaign task was to motivate staff to make the move.
The research phase involved extensive interviews with employees and families to understand what Weipa meant to them and what the transition would actually cost them. What came back consistently was that people loved the place. They had boats, they fished, they camped, they knew their neighbours. The strategic insight was simple — they were living somewhere most Australians only dream of visiting. So we positioned Weipa as exactly that: the place other people put on their bucket list, that Rio Tinto employees got to call home.
That positioning ran through a campaign that included a book, video content on social media, local outdoor advertising and placements at Cairns Airport — the only gateway in and out of Weipa — reaching both existing staff and prospective recruits.
Robert Timms
Robert Timms is one of Australia's most recognised coffee brands, known particularly for its coffee bags. To support the launch of a new flavoured coffee bag range into Coles, Woolworths and IGA, the business invested $750,000 in an integrated campaign across capital cities.
As Account Director I managed the project end to end — overseeing creative development and production including a TVC shoot, planning and managing the media strategy with our media partners, and handling reporting throughout the campaign. The range launched into strong retail distribution across all three major grocery channels.
Zambrero
Zambrero is a national Mexican QSR franchise with over 200 restaurants and annual revenue of around $200 million. I ran the account for two years, managing an annual advertising budget of $1.5 million across brand and promotional activity.
The work covered the full mix: media strategy and buying, creative strategy and development, promotional planning across a packed calendar of limited time offers, and data management to produce meaningful and actionable reporting. The brand vs sales balance was a constant consideration — building Zambrero's long-term brand equity while driving short-term sales through promotions and LTOs.
One of those two years was through COVID, which was a genuinely challenging period for any food business. Zambrero navigated it well — takeaway demand held up and the campaigns adapted quickly to the changed environment.
The results reflected the work: brand awareness research showed a 9% rise in awareness in the first year. The rise in brand awareness makes every subsequent sale slightly easier delivering sustained revenue increases.
Property and Placemaking
Property marketing is one of the most commercially focused creative disciplines there is. Every asset — the renders, the brochures, the video, the digital campaign — exists for one purpose: to sell something that doesn't yet physically exist. The creative has to create enough desire and trust that buyers commit significant money to a promise. Get the strategy or the execution wrong and the development stalls.
I worked across several significant property projects as Account Director, owning the creative process end to end — from strategy and positioning through to production, which in property includes technically complex work: coordinating 3D studios, integrating drone footage with rendered visuals, and managing the full suite of sales assets a development requires.
For ALAND, a Western Sydney developer, I worked across three major projects including Paramount on Parkes and The Hoxton — large-scale residential developments requiring research, brand strategy, creative development and full production of the sales asset suite. For City Developments in Wollongong I delivered the same scope for The Civic. For FDC, one of Australia's largest construction companies, I produced a project video for the Royal Botanic Garden Herbarium.
The Singleton project sits in the same placemaking territory but with a different commercial goal — shifting the perception of Singleton from a mining region to a business-focused destination. The work covered brand strategy, creative direction, brand guidelines and the creative assets to bring the positioning to life.
Ready To Improve Your Marketing?
If you want clearer strategy, stronger performance and better return on your marketing spend, let’s talk.