How a Fractional Marketing Firm Established Itself as an Industry Leader

Client Description

Chief Outsiders is a national consultant firm which offers the services of fractional CMOs—part time marketing executives who bring extensive experience across a variety of fields for a fraction of the full-time cost.

These experts are able to approach the unique obstacles of every business from an outside perspective and provide out-of-the-box solutions from a diverse repertoire of growth strategies. The company has featured on the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest growing privately held companies in the U.S. for the past 10 years, and counting.

The Challenge: Building Credibility Across Industries while Distinguishing from Competitors

Chief Outsiders were and continue to be the pioneers of the fractional CMO industry, with the experience and the record—having served nearly 2,000 clients with tremendous success—to prove it. Demonstrating that leadership to the public, however, posed two significant challenges.

First, every industry needs marketers, so Chief Outsiders required a way to establish credibility and brand-awareness throughout a very broad range of vertical fields.

Second, fractional marketing firms with less value to offer had populated their own field, so that Chief Outsiders also needed to distinguish themselves horizontally as thought leaders across the board.

Our Solution: Prolific Verticalization and Selective Horizontalization

At Razor Sharp Public Relations, we understand that the best advertisement is the product. So when a marketing consultant firm like Chief Outsiders solicited our help, we began to showcase their product: marketing consultation. We received briefings from Chief Outsiders’ fractional CMOs on the topics that matter most to the marketing world, before drafting those discussions into contributable articles and sharing them with the public. We were allowing potential clients to sample Chief Outsiders’ product and experience the quality first-hand.

We were still faced with the initial challenge, however: how do we reach the executives of specific vertical industries while distinguishing Chief Outsiders horizontally? We decided that two unique problems warranted two unique solutions. 

First, we verticalized prolifically. Once we received a briefing from Chief Outsiders, we would look for opportunities to tailor that content to specific industries, and then pitch the bespoke articles toward trade media. In this way we regularly placed up to five articles across various industries—healthcare, hospitality, retail, food, tech, and manufacturing, to name a few—for every briefing. Second, we horizontalized selectively. Every now and again we selected a high-level, generally applicable insight from the Chief Outsiders team for horizontal publication. These we would frame around market-wide concerns and pitch to major business publications like the Wall Street Journal.

Outcome

Before long, Chief Outsiders’ expertise was not only frequenting trade media across dozens of vertical industries—with an average of over 65 media placements per year—but was making statement-appearances on prestigious horizontal outlets like Ad Age and, indeed, the Wall Street Journal. The latter achievements have helped to single out Chief Outsiders as a thought-leader in the fractional marketing field, while the former have succeeded in reaching the many executives who are in need of such a leader. Collectively, these articles have garnered more than 3 million unique viewers—all of whom were able to experience the value offered by Chief Outsiders first-hand.