10 Marketing Areas That Demand Your Attention
Patrick McFadden
In today's competitive business landscape, it's crucial to have a clear marketing strategy that resonates with your target audience and drives profitable growth. To achieve this, it's essential to concentrate your efforts on specific areas that will yield the greatest results. In this article, we will explore ten key areas that can transform your marketing efforts and help you build a thriving business.
- Ideal Client: You can't serve everyone, not profitably anyway. By narrowing your focus to your best clients, you get to serve only ideal clients. Understanding your target audience and tailoring your marketing efforts to their needs allows you to establish deeper connections and deliver exceptional value.
- Core Message: A core message allows you to stand out in the minds of those clients who need you and will gladly pay a premium to work with you. It should encapsulate your unique value proposition and communicate the benefits your business offers, differentiating you from your competitors.
- Online Presence: The way people choose to become customers has changed significantly. In today's digital era, it's crucial to have a strong online presence. This means having a user-friendly website, engaging social media profiles, and a presence on relevant online platforms where your target audience spends time.
- Lead Generation: Once you have narrowed your client focus and attracted them with a compelling core message, it's simply a matter of getting your message seen in the right places. Utilize various lead generation strategies such as content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media advertising, and email marketing to reach and engage your target audience.
- Lead Conversion: Creating an amazing customer journey is vital in leading your prospects to the only logical conclusion - they must work with you. Streamline your sales process, provide personalized experiences, and address any concerns or objections to increase your conversion rates.
- Content: Content is no longer just a tactic; it's the voice of strategy and the most effective tool for guiding prospects along the customer journey. Create high-quality and relevant content that educates, inspires, and entertains your audience. This can include blog articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more.
- Retention: It's much easier to do more with customers who already trust you than it is to go out and find new customers. Focus on building strong relationships, delivering exceptional customer service, and providing ongoing value to encourage customer loyalty and retention. Offer exclusive benefits, personalized recommendations, and loyalty programs to keep customers engaged and satisfied.
- Referrals: If you consistently deliver great work, some people will naturally talk about you. However, by intentionally amplifying your referability, you can generate a steady stream of referrals. Encourage satisfied customers to refer their friends and colleagues by offering incentives, creating referral programs, and providing exceptional customer experiences.
- Metrics: The hardest part of marketing is understanding what works and what doesn't. Establish a plan to measure your marketing efforts and track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value. Analyzing these metrics will provide valuable insights and enable you to make data-driven decisions.
- Marketing Plan: When you develop and work from a comprehensive marketing plan, everything smoothes out, and every team member knows what to do next. Your marketing plan should outline your goals, target audience, strategies, tactics, budget, and timelines. Regularly review and adapt your plan to stay aligned with market trends and evolving customer needs.
By focusing on these ten key areas, you can unleash the power of effective marketing and position your business for long-term success. Remember, marketing is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process of refining and optimizing your strategies to ensure maximum impact.
Everyone is scaling outputs. Almost no one is scaling judgment.
Ask anyone in tech where AI is headed, and they’ll tell you: “The next leap is reasoning.” “AI needs judgment.” “We need assistants that think, not just answer.” They’re right. But while everyone’s talking about it, almost no one is actually shipping it. So we did. We built Thinking OS™ —a system that doesn’t just help AI answer questions… It helps AI think like a strategist. It helps AI decide like an operator. It helps teams and platforms scale judgment, n ot just generate output. The Theory Isn’t New. The Implementation Is. The idea of layering strategic thinking and judgment into AI isn’t new in theory. The problem is, no one’s been able to implement it effectively at scale. Let’s look at the current landscape. 1. Big Tech Has the Muscle—But Not the Mind OpenAI / ChatGPT ✅ Strength: Best-in-class language generation ❌ Limitation: No built-in judgment or reasoning. You must provide the structure. Otherwise, it follows instructions, not strategy. Google DeepMind / Gemini ✅ Known for advanced decision-making (e.g., AlphaGo) ❌ But only in structured environments like games—not messy, real-world business scenarios. Anthropic (Claude), Meta (LLaMA), Microsoft Copilot ✅ Great at answering questions and following commands ❌ But they’re assistants, not advisors. They won’t reprioritize. They won’t challenge your assumptions. They don’t ask: “Is this the right move?” These tools are powerful—but they don’t think for outcomes the way a strategist or operator would. 2. Who’s Actually Building the Thinking Layer™? This is where it gets interesting—and thin. Startups and Indie Builders Some small teams are quietly: Creating custom GPTs that mimic how experts reason Layering in business context, priorities, and tradeoffs Embedding decision logic so AI can guide, not just execute But these efforts are: Highly manual Difficult to scale Fragmented and experimental Enterprise Experiments A few companies (Salesforce, HubSpot, and others) are exploring more “judgment-aware” AI copilots. These systems can: Flag inconsistencies Recommend next actions Occasionally surface priorities based on internal logic But most of it is still: In early R&D Custom-coded Unproven beyond narrow use cases That’s Why Thinking OS™ Is Different Instead of waiting for a lab to crack it, we built a modular thinking system that installs like infrastructure. Thinking OS™: Captures how real experts reason Embeds judgment into layers AI can use Deploys into tools like ChatGPT or enterprise systems Helps teams think together, consistently, at scale It’s not another assistant. It’s the missing layer that turns outputs into outcomes. So… Is This a New Innovation? Yes—in practice. Everyone says AI needs judgment. But judgment isn’t an idea. It’s a system. It requires: Persistent memory Contextual awareness Tradeoff evaluation Value-based decisions Strategy that evolves with goals Thinking OS™ delivers that. And unlike the R&D experiments in Big Tech, it’s built for: Operators Consultants Platform founders Growth-stage teams that need to scale decision quality, not just content creation If Someone Told You They’ve Built a Thinking + Judgment Layer™… They’ve built something only a handful of people in the world are even attempting. Because this isn’t just AI that speaks fluently. It’s AI that reasons, reflects , and chooses. And in a world that’s drowning in tools, judgment becomes the differentiator. That’s the OS We Built Thinking OS™ is not a prompt pack. It’s not a dashboard. It’s not a glorified chatbot. It’s a decision architecture you can license, embed, or deploy— To help your team, your platform, or your clients think better at scale. We’ve moved past content. We’re building cognition. Let’s talk.
In every era of innovation, there’s a silent bottleneck—something obvious in hindsight, but elusive until the moment it clicks. In today’s AI-driven world, that bottleneck is clear: AI has speed. It has scale. But it doesn’t have judgment . It doesn’t really think . What’s Actually Missing From AI? When experts talk about the “thinking and judgment layer” as the next leap for AI, they’re calling out a hard truth: Modern AI systems are powerful pattern machines. But they’re missing the human layer—the one that reasons, weighs tradeoffs, and makes strategic decisions in context. Let’s break that down: 1. The Thinking Layer = Reasoning with Purpose This layer doesn’t just process inputs— it structures logic. It’s the ability to: Ask the right questions before acting Break down complexity into solvable parts Adjust direction mid-course when reality changes Think beyond “what was asked” to uncover “what really matters” Today’s AI responds. But it rarely reflects. Unless told exactly what to do, it won’t work through problems the way a strategist or operator would. 2. The Judgment Layer = Decision-Making in the Gray Judgment is the ability to: Prioritize what matters most Choose between imperfect options Make decisions when there’s no clear answer Apply values, experience, and vision—not just data It’s why a founder might not pursue a lucrative deal. Why a marketer might ignore the click-through rate. Why a strategist knows when the timing isn’t right. AI doesn’t do this well. Not yet. Because judgment requires more than data—it requires discernment . Why This Is the Bottleneck Holding Back AI AI can write. It can summarize. It can automate. But it still can’t: Diagnose the real problem behind the question Evaluate tradeoffs like a founder or operator would Recommend a path based on context, constraints, and conviction AI today is still reactive. It follows instructions. But it doesn’t lead. It doesn’t guide. It doesn’t own the outcome. And for those building serious systems—whether you’re running a company, launching a platform, or leading a team—this is the wall you eventually hit. That’s Why We Built Thinking OS™ We stopped waiting for AI to learn judgment on its own. Instead, we created a system that embeds it—by design. Thinking OS™ is an installable decision layer that captures how top founders, strategists, and operators think… …and makes that thinking repeatable , scalable , and usable inside teams, tools, and platforms. It’s not a framework. It’s not a chatbot. It’s not another playbook. It’s the layer that knows how to: Think through complex decisions Apply judgment when rules don’t help Guide others —human or AI—toward strategic outcomes This Is the Missing Infrastructure Thinking OS™ isn’t just about better answers. It’s about better thinking—made operational. And that’s what’s been missing in AI, consulting, leadership development, and platform design. If you’re trying to scale expertise, install judgment, or move from tactical to strategic… You don’t need a faster AI. You need a thinking layer that knows what to do—and why. We built it. Let’s talk.
