Senior marketing.
No agency theater.
RARE Marketing is a senior-led marketing practice for companies that need experienced people thinking about the business, doing the work, and being accountable for the results.
We build demand, improve digital performance, fix marketing systems, and connect marketing activity to the thing that ultimately matters: business growth.
No giant team. No junior handoff. No bloated agency structure.
Just experienced marketers doing the work.
Marketing that has to earn its keep.
Marketing has gotten very good at creating activity. More impressions. More clicks. More dashboards. More technology. More meetings to discuss all of the above.
We care about a simpler question: is it helping the business grow?
Everything we do connects marketing to demand, customers, pipeline, revenue, or a better customer experience.
Demand Generation, Paid Media & ABM
We build and manage programs designed to reach the right people, create demand, and turn marketing investment into qualified opportunities.
That includes paid search, paid social, account-based marketing, campaign strategy, audience development, retargeting, and integrated demand generation.
We optimize around business outcomes, not whatever metric happens to look prettiest in the monthly report.
Clicks are useful. Customers are better.
Digital Experience & Conversion
Getting people to your website is only half the job.
We improve landing pages, forms, funnels, messaging, calls to action, and digital experiences to make it easier for the right people to become customers.
Our approach combines performance data, customer behavior, testing, and a healthy distrust of redesigning things simply because somebody is bored with the current website.
More traffic isn't always the answer. Sometimes you just need to stop wasting the traffic you already have.
Analytics, Attribution & Performance
Marketing shouldn't require an archaeological expedition to figure out what generated a lead.
We build tracking, attribution, dashboards, conversion measurement, CRM reporting, and performance frameworks that connect marketing activity to actual business outcomes.
That means understanding where leads came from, what they did, what they became, and whether the money spent acquiring them was worth it.
Leadership gets reporting it can understand. Marketing gets information it can act on.
And everybody gets fewer charts celebrating impressions.
Marketing Operations, Automation & AI
This is the machinery behind everything else.
We help companies improve CRM and marketing automation, lead management, scoring, routing, email programs, campaign infrastructure, integrations, data workflows, and AI-assisted marketing processes.
The goal isn't to add more technology. Most companies already own plenty of technology they aren't using properly.
The goal is to make the pieces work together so marketing can move faster, sales gets better information, and fewer good leads quietly disappear into a database somewhere.
Small on purpose.
RARE isn't a traditional agency. We're also not trying to become one.
We've spent our careers inside companies, working with agencies, managing teams, building campaigns, owning technology stacks, answering to leadership, defending budgets, and figuring out why something that looked brilliant in a presentation produced absolutely nothing in the real world.
We built RARE around what we wanted from a marketing partner ourselves.
You work with the principals.
The people you meet are the people doing the work. There is no account-management layer between you and the people making decisions. No big pitch team followed by an introduction to the junior person who actually inherited your account.
You get us.
We think beyond marketing.
We care about campaigns, creative, traffic, conversion, and technology. But we also care about sales, pipeline, revenue, margins, customers, competition, operations, and where the business is trying to go.
Because marketing doesn't operate in its own little terrarium. At least it shouldn't.
We work inside your business.
Whenever possible, we use the platforms and systems you already own. Your advertising accounts remain yours. Your data remains yours. Your creative remains yours. Your technology remains yours.
We aren't interested in creating artificial dependency so leaving us requires a hostage negotiation.
We measure what matters.
We track the things that help us make better decisions. Leads. Opportunities. Conversion. Acquisition cost. Pipeline. Revenue. Customer behavior. Efficiency.
Not every business has perfect attribution, and anyone promising otherwise has probably never opened a CRM. But we work continuously toward a clearer connection between marketing investment and business performance.
We stay flexible.
RARE works with a limited number of clients at a time. Engagements are designed around what the business actually needs, whether that's ongoing marketing leadership, hands-on execution, a specialized project, or help fixing something that's gone sideways.
We're much more interested in being useful than finding additional ways to bill you. A revolutionary business concept, apparently.
Two partners. That's the whole company.
RARE is owned and operated by James and Lisa O'Brien. Between us, we've spent decades working across digital marketing, customer experience, demand generation, account-based marketing, paid media, analytics, marketing technology, automation, optimization, and growth strategy.
We've worked inside large organizations. We've built marketing programs from scratch. We've managed agencies. We've been the client. And today, we're also business owners ourselves.
That last part changed how we think about marketing.
James O'Brien
James O'Brien is a co-owner of RARE Marketing and a marketing, growth, and business strategist with more than two decades of experience across digital marketing, demand generation, account-based marketing, paid media, analytics, marketing technology, and revenue strategy.
His career includes marketing leadership within healthcare and technology organizations, where he has focused on building demand, improving marketing performance, modernizing technology, and creating stronger connections between marketing and revenue.
James is also an owner and Chief Executive Officer of MJ Nester — Specialty Contractors, where he leads company strategy, growth, business development, technology, organizational development, and expansion into new markets.
Running an operating business has taken his perspective well beyond campaigns and clicks. Marketing decisions eventually collide with sales, pipeline, margins, cash flow, hiring, operations, and enterprise value.
At RARE, James brings those worlds together, connecting marketing, sales, technology, and business strategy around one standard: marketing should help grow the business.
Lisa O'Brien
Lisa O'Brien is a seasoned marketing and customer experience leader with a career spanning digital strategy, campaign performance, account-based marketing, experience optimization, and enterprise healthcare marketing.
As Senior Director of Design, Experience & Optimization at Cencora, Lisa leads initiatives to create better customer experiences and improve how organizations connect with audiences across digital channels.
She brings that enterprise-level expertise to RARE Marketing as a co-owner, while also helping lead marketing for MJ Nester — Specialty Contractors, a growing nationwide industrial specialty contractor in which she and James are owners.
That combination gives Lisa a unique perspective: she understands sophisticated corporate marketing at scale while also experiencing firsthand the realities of building a brand, generating demand, and growing a privately held business.
At RARE, she applies both perspectives to help clients create smarter, more effective marketing that connects customer experience to measurable business growth.
Our advice has to work in the real world.
James and Lisa are also owners of MJ Nester — Specialty Contractors, a nationwide industrial specialty contractor based in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
MJ Nester provides turnkey industrial services including millwright, industrial electrical, PLC and controls, welding and fabrication, industrial labor support, installation, maintenance, and specialty contracting services for industrial customers across the country.
James serves as Chief Executive Officer, while Lisa helps lead the company's marketing.
But MJ Nester is more than another business we're involved with. It's one of the reasons RARE thinks differently.
Because we aren't standing outside a company telling people how businesses supposedly work. We're inside one.
We deal with marketing budgets, leads, sales pipelines, customers, hiring, competition, technology, expansion, profitability, cash flow, and all the other wonderfully inconvenient things that don't fit neatly into a marketing dashboard.
When we invest money in marketing at MJ Nester, it's our money. When the leads aren't good enough, we hear about it. When the pipeline needs to grow, there isn't another department to blame. And when marketing works, we see what it actually does to the business.
That creates a very different standard for the work we do at RARE.
We don't stop at: did marketing perform?
We want to know: did the business grow?
Because experienced shouldn't mean complicated.
There is a point in a company's growth where it needs better marketing but doesn't necessarily need a giant agency, another full-time department, or six specialists sitting in meetings with each other.
That's where RARE fits.
You get senior-level thinking and hands-on execution without paying for layers of overhead you don't need.
We can step into an existing marketing operation, work alongside internal teams, collaborate with other agencies and vendors, or take ownership of specific areas where deeper expertise is needed.
We're comfortable getting strategic. We're equally comfortable opening the account and fixing the problem ourselves.
That's increasingly rare. Hence the name.
Companies that want marketing connected to the business.
RARE works best with organizations that already understand marketing matters but want it to work harder.
- Maybe you've grown beyond the marketing systems that got you here.
- Maybe you've accumulated agencies, platforms, campaigns, dashboards, and technology but still can't confidently explain what is actually working.
- Maybe your internal team needs experienced help in a specific area.
- Maybe you're building a demand-generation engine.
- Maybe you're spending money but aren't convinced you're getting enough back.
Or maybe somebody finally asked the dangerous question: “Why are we doing this?”
Those are usually productive conversations.
Probably just as important.
We're not a full-service creative agency. We're not going to pretend to be experts at everything. We're not building a giant outsourced marketing department beneath us. We're not interested in selling services simply because they're available to sell.
And we aren't going to tell you every marketing problem requires more budget.
Sometimes it requires more budget. Sometimes it requires better strategy. Sometimes the tracking is broken. Sometimes the offer isn't compelling. Sometimes sales isn't following up. Sometimes the form has nine required fields and asks someone for their annual revenue before they'll let them download a PDF.
Humans remain fascinating creatures.
Our job is to figure out what's actually happening and help fix it.
Have a marketing problem worth solving?
We intentionally take on a limited number of engagements. There are only two of us, which is simultaneously part of the appeal and a fairly stubborn capacity constraint.
If you're looking for senior marketing experience without the traditional agency structure, send us a note. Tell us what's working. Tell us what isn't. Tell us what you're trying to accomplish.
We'll have a conversation and figure out whether we're the right people to help.
No elaborate sales process. No discovery call followed by fourteen additional discovery calls. Just a conversation.
jamesob5@mac.com