Strategic FoundationCore Specialty

Marketing Strategy

Portland-area small businesses often know something is missing from their marketing, but not what. That’s where a fractional CMO earns their keep: building the strategic foundation — positioning, go-to-market planning, and budget prioritization — that turns scattered tactics into a coherent plan. PDX CMO works with Portland metro businesses that need executive-level marketing strategy without the six-figure salary and benefits package a full-time Chief Marketing Officer requires.

Joe Downs brings a decade of marketing leadership to this work, including five years as Director of Marketing at B2i Digital, a national leader in investor-awareness digital marketing, where he owned strategy across client management, reporting, and channel planning. That’s paired with an MBA, giving PDX CMO clients a rare combination: boardroom-level business thinking applied directly to the marketing decisions that actually move revenue.

For a local small business, this means a marketing budget that’s spent with intent: every dollar tied to a plan, not a hunch. Whether you need a go-to-market roadmap for a new product, a repositioning strategy against bigger competitors, or simply someone to set priorities and hold the plan accountable, PDX CMO provides that senior-level strategic thinking on a fractional basis.

Paid MediaCore Specialty

Digital Advertising

Digital advertising is where a lot of small business marketing budgets quietly disappear — spread too thin across too many platforms, without the expertise to know which ones actually deserve the spend. PDX CMO specializes in digital advertising strategy and execution for Portland-area businesses, managing awareness, paid search, paid social, display, video, and shopping campaigns as a unified system rather than disconnected line items.

This is Joe Downs’s core specialty, backed by direct platform certifications across the full advertising landscape. At B2i Digital, he placed and managed nearly $8 million in digital ad spend across nine different platforms and oversaw the build-out of more than 75 client landing pages: real, at-scale experience translating strategy into campaigns that convert. This is in addition to a full decade of advertising in verticals as diverse as live events, non-profits and causes, and consumer goods. Digital advertising isn’t just a tool for Joe; it’s a passion.

Here are a few of the dozen-plus ad accounts he’s worked out of, leaving aside the dozens of other non-B2i clients he’s worked with over the years.

For Portland businesses without an internal advertising team, this means access to the kind of cross-platform expertise that’s normally locked inside agencies charging retainer fees far beyond a small business budget. PDX CMO plans the media mix, manages the campaigns, and continually optimizes spend so advertising dollars go toward what’s actually working, not what sounded good in a pitch deck.

MeasurementCore Specialty

Analytics & Reporting

Marketing without measurement is just spending. PDX CMO builds the analytics and reporting infrastructure Portland-area small businesses need to know, with confidence, what’s working: from campaign-level performance dashboards to full attribution modeling that connects marketing activity to actual revenue.

This is the second pillar of Joe Downs’s specialty, grounded in Google’s Analytics Individual Qualification along with a Google Data Studio certification and experience for building client-ready dashboards. That technical fluency is combined with real-world marketing operations experience from managing reporting across HubSpot’s Marketing Hub; Joe attained HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Implementation certification, the platform’s highest-level credential for setting up marketing systems correctly from the ground up. But regardless of the CRM you use, from HubSpot to Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365, he’s fluent.

For a small business owner in the Pacific Northwest, this translates into clear answers instead of vague reassurances: which channels are driving leads, what a customer actually costs to acquire, and where the next marketing dollar should go. PDX CMO sets up the martech stack and reporting cadence so that decision-making is based on data, not guesswork; a level of analytical rigor most small businesses only get from a full-time CMO.

Organic Social

Social Media Marketing

Social media is often the most visible part of a small business’s marketing, as well as the easiest to get wrong without a strategy behind it. PDX CMO builds organic social media programs for Portland businesses that go beyond posting on a schedule, developing content calendars and platform-specific approaches designed to build real audience engagement.

Joe Downs attained Meta’s Blueprint credentials in Creative Strategy and Media Planning alongside LinkedIn Marketing Fundamentals certification, giving PDX CMO clients strategy that’s grounded in how these platforms actually work, not generic best practices copied across every account. That platform fluency is paired with the same strategic discipline applied to paid advertising: knowing which platform deserves the investment for a given Portland business’s audience, and which doesn’t.

But certifications don’t mean as much as a proven track record based on experience, which Joe actually deploys for his own fun social media project highlighting the great stuff happening around his home, Joe Loves Vancouver: