Joshua Ramsey’s first job was sticking labels the size of a business card onto boxes at his dad’s printing company in the 1980s. He cleaned printing presses. He later ran media placement across newspapers, magazines, mailers, billboards, transit with Lamar and CBS Outdoor, and television with CBS, became senior VP of marketing and sales at a top-100 ad agency, and then started an ad agency and a software company of his own. Today he’s a fractional CMO, and on The Unscripted SEO Interview he made a case that starts with resumes and ends somewhere much stranger — a drawing exercise called the trauma egg.
What a fractional CMO actually is (and what most of them aren’t)
Joshua started doing this in 2018, before the title had a market. His filter for anyone hiring one is blunt: read the resume and check whether they’ve done more than digital.
“A CMO is not just somebody that does just one thing. It’s they need to be holistic of what’s best for the company and then make the strategy decision of what’s best for the company as holistic, not just digital, not just outdoor.” — Joshua Ramsey
If the only experience on the page is digital, what you’re hiring is a very senior digital consultant. That’s a real job. It just isn’t the one that can weigh programmatic against trade shows against direct mail and pick.
The metric that moves the business
Every channel returns differently, so Joshua’s answer to “which metric” is that the KPIs have to be set jointly with the CEO, against the actual goal of the company — not growth in the abstract, but which kind of growth.
His illustration was a roofing company whose agency was hitting every number it had promised: visibility up, backlinks up, traffic up. Average time on site was under twenty seconds and the phone wasn’t ringing any more than before. The owner kept saying the same thing — you’re showing me metrics of growth, my call volume hasn’t gone up.
“If the metrics you’re looking at are growing, but it’s not the metric that moves the business, then you’re wasting a lot of effort.” — Jeremy Rivera
What killed the relationship wasn’t the strategy being wrong — Joshua still calls the original work a good step. It was rigidity. The agency wouldn’t move off what it had sold. Two months after switching focus to conversion and navigation, calls were climbing year-over-year on less spend.
He gives that discipline its own name: CRO, client retention optimization — and, in a related sense, controlling the user’s navigation. SEO is always the foundation, but it’s rarely the goal.
Marketing is the first budget cut, and here’s the room where it happens
One of the sharpest passages in the interview is Joshua’s account of why he targets the CFO, not just the CEO, when he’s selling his own services. The scene he describes will be familiar to anyone who has lost a budget:
“The business owner walks into the office of the CFO, says, where’s my money? Why do I not have more money? And the CFO goes, well, you’re spending on this, this, this. And the CEO goes, we’ll cut something and make me more money. CFO goes, well, we can cut marketing. And everyone goes, yeah, marketing is the first to go — because we gotta have operations and we’ve gotta have sales. I’m like, wait, if you don’t have money coming in, you don’t need those other people.” — Joshua Ramsey
His defense against that conversation is arithmetic set up front. With a restoration company running offices from Baltimore to Miami, he stepped into the sales-management gap himself to define the split: if a rep needs 50 opportunities a month, marketing commits to 25 and the rep owns the other 25, whether by prospecting or referral. Now the marketing budget is tied to a number someone else is depending on.
Boring industries and the knockdown list
Jeremy brought the recurring problem of unglamorous categories — toilet partitions, stair handrails, the stuff nobody searches for casually. Joshua’s answer runs on two tracks.
Track one is demand generation where search volume doesn’t exist yet. For a concierge doctor with weak organic visibility, the plan was to fix the landing pages first, run Meta ads built around a small set of words a consumer will actually remember, and then run Google Ads on those same words to catch the person who saw the ad, forgot about it, and searched later. The Meta ad plants the phrase; the search ad collects it.
Track two is the knockdown list, and it’s the most transferable idea in the episode:
“The knockdown list is to identify the specific targets that we know will buy what we sell some point in the next six months, 12 months, or two years. But we know that we wanna be top of mind to them. So when we do that, we take specific steps and measurements of touch points, and we try to get people to opt out.” — Joshua Ramsey
Deliberately farming opt-outs is counterintuitive and correct: every person who removes themselves concentrates the attention you have left on the ones who said yes. The ask for everyone else is modest — you don’t have a project right now, can you save my number, I’ll bother you twice a year. And Joshua is clear that this only works if the rest holds up: when they finally do search you, the site had better answer the due-diligence question.
Which is why he pushes back on the blog-post reflex. People arriving with a live need are not there to read your blog; the blog may bring them in, but almost nobody travels from your homepage to it.
The USP argument: everyone has one, and it isn’t your brand
Jeremy framed the brand question the way SEOs have started framing it post-helpful-content — that Google appears to bias toward established brands, and the industry’s reflex has been to get the name mentioned in as many places as possible. Joshua enjoys arguing the other side:
“I believe a brand is built based on the USP, but a USP is not the brand. My concept is building a brand means that they’re familiar with who you are… But the USP is what makes me love the brand.” — Joshua Ramsey
He demonstrates it with his own SERP. Search his name and you get a Canadian punk-rock singer backed by Universal and a professional soccer player; he’ll never beat either. Search his name plus marketing and he dominates, ahead of four other Joshua Ramseys working in the field. Brand recognition, in his model, is social proof — the podcasts, the mentions, the notoriety that accumulates around a name. The USP is the reason anyone cares once they’ve found it.
And a USP isn’t a claim. “I’m the best general contractor” is a platitude. What makes it a USP is supporting evidence — which is why, asked at the top of this interview why we should trust him, Joshua answered with how he was raised and then immediately offered the receipts: his own marketing, his own PR, his own rankings for fractional CMO across roughly 32 US cities.
Nike, Jordan, and the operations story as marketing
His two case studies for building a brand out of a narrative are both Nike. The origin: wanting a shoe with better traction, pouring rubber into a waffle iron, gluing the result to a sole. That’s operations becoming marketing.
The second is Air Jordan — not just signing a young player they weren’t sure about, but shipping a shoe the NBA fined them for every single game, and making sure the fine got publicized. Nike paid, on the record, to say how much it believed in one person.
“Most business owners did not start their company because they were good at marketing. They started their company because they had a great idea and they felt like they could do it better than anyone else. That’s a narrative, that’s a USP that creates the brand.” — Joshua Ramsey
He’s applying the same move for a pond company right now: they win about half their bids, and roughly 80% of the half they lose come back later to have the other contractor’s work fixed. That statistic is the positioning. The next step is finding out why.
The homework: draw the trauma egg
Asked for one action item, Joshua gave an exercise rather than a tactic. Go somewhere quiet without your phone or laptop and spend at least two hours writing your own story. Then research the trauma egg: draw a large egg on a big sheet of paper, narrow end at the bottom, and fill it in with pictures — colored pencils, crayons, whatever — starting from your earliest memory at the bottom and moving up through every age to the most impactful moment at the top. Drawn, not written. The point is impact, not chronology.
What you’re looking for is the thread. He was candid about his own:
“My narrative that I found was abandonment. I wasn’t abandoned to some of the degree that others have been, but we all have our journey… The abandonment has made me better today and that is part of why I say I treat people the way I want to be treated. The way I want to be treated is valued, cherished, loved, appreciated. So I’m going to do that to everyone that I work with.” — Joshua Ramsey
That’s the chain he wants marketers to see: narrative produces USP, USP produces brand, brand produces the trust Google and buyers are both trying to measure. “It all starts to connect.”
Connect with Joshua
Joshua Ramsey is a fractional CMO and the founder of JRCMO, and he still owns the ad agency and software company he built along the way. He offers a two-hour free consultation for anyone who wants help working through their narrative and USP — and he’s an active referrer to specialist agencies, so he’s worth knowing even if you’re on the supply side.
Listen to the full episode on Castos. For more conversations like this one, explore the Unscripted SEO archive, or try the keyword research tools at SEO Arcade.
