Building a Marketing Process in 7 Steps

Patrick McFadden • September 12, 2022

The Indispensable Marketing philosophy is that marketing is a process. It’s not a series of tactics you approach randomly. It’s not an email campaign here, an event sponsorship there, a google pay-per-click ad campaign once in a while. The type of marketing that gives you confidence, clarity, control, and customers is driven by strategy and is constantly updated, monitored, and refined.


I’m going to guide you through the seven steps any business must take to build an effective marketing process. Going through these steps now and revisiting them quarterly or annually is the key to ensuring your business’s long-term success.


1. It Starts with a Diagnosis Before Prescription

Thinking you just need a prescription such as website, video, PPC ads, email marketing or SEO to make your marketing effective is a common mistake. Those are all elements you’ll want to tackle eventually. But first, you’ve got to start with a diagnosis, and a proper diagnosis starts with knowing: Who you need to be marketing to?, What you need to be communicating? and Where you must  place your message?


If you don’t understand WHO your ideal customer is— WHAT their real problems are and WHERE to communicate your value —how can you possibly find a message that resonates and identify the tactics that will work?


The short answer is that you can’t. Every great marketing plan is rooted in identifying your ideal customer and honing in on the ways they want to engage and interact with a business. Only once you’ve established your ideal client can you begin to connect what you offer with how you solve your customer’s problems.


2. Take Control of the Customer You Work With

Today’s small business owners believe that getting loyal clients is about the right clients choosing you. But I have come to realize over time that creating loyal clients is mostly about you choosing the right client.


Far too many of you subject yourself to serving “anyone with money” or worse “anyone you hope will pay.” Understanding, narrowing and choosing clients that value what you bring to the table, respect your staff, pays on time and enjoys a partnership over a transaction is how to build a business that truly can thrive.


But you must understand who you are equipped to serve best and you must do everything in your power to attract, serve and choose them over all else. Smart businesses don’t sit back and let the customer choose them; they take control over the ideal clients they create and attract by how and what they communicate verbally and visually before, during and after the sale.


3. Discover a Differentiation That is Wanted and Valued

Many experts are telling small business owners they need to be different but often ignore this part of the equation.


If your point of difference isn’t valued by your prospective clients, it won’t bring you more business. In the end, what is most important about any point of difference or unique value proposition is that in the eyes of your ideal client it’s viewed as valuable.


This will also play into your criteria for choosing ideal clients and buying process. Any differentiators that aren’t valued by a subset of prospective clients is a wasted effort.


I once had an IT consulting firm that believed their strongest differentiator was their firm’s flexible managed IT engagements. Their competitors certainly could not make the same claim. But, when we interviewed their clients, we discovered they didn’t VALUE flexibility much at all. So much for a strong differentiator.


Having a difference that is wanted and valued by a segment of your market is not only a matter of success, it is a matter of survival.


4. Focus Your Message On What Customers Care About

Matching your message to your ideal client is pretty much everything when it comes to marketing these days.

Think about you – you’ve got about a couple of seconds to get and keep someone’s attention and you can’t waste that precious time with a message that doesn’t focus on what clients want more than anything - their problems understood and solved.


Experience tells me that for some of you this is going to be a challenge, because the cold, hard truth is that nobody cares about you or what you sell. While your business may be incredible, all your customers and prospects care about is what they believe they will get, achieve, relieve, dodge, or acquire based on buying what you sell, and they’ll go with the business that promised them that.⠀


For example, we were working with a tree service that attracted a specific type of homeowner. After interviewing their customers we spotted the following in several summaries – “They never damage my yard and always clean up when they’re done.”⠀

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Turns out that their ideal customer had beautiful front and back yards and didn't want any damage done to the monthly landscaping work they pay for.⠀

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While most of their competitor's messaging focused on how they were award-winning, voted best, and having 60yrs experience at removing trees our client began to focus on – “We never damage your yard and always clean up when we’re done.” – getting prospective homeowners to pay a premium to solve that problem.⠀


5. Be Involved At Every Step Of The Journey

Mapping out the evolving relationship your prospects have with your business in a way that makes sense to service, sales and marketing is a powerful tool.  Most marketers view the customer experience as the traditional funnel, with stages such as Awareness, Consideration and Purchase, but I prefer to execute a much more modern and effective approach in today’s “customer-centered” times: Awareness, Education, Sample, Purchase and Refer.


The customer journey is the sum of all experiences a customer has when interacting with your business and your marketing tactics need to be involved at every step along the way. From their first Google search to their most recent purchase, every touchpoint adds up to a total customer journey. In the end, the sum of all the customer journey's parts is what your audience experiences when interacting with your brand.


These elements of the journey all shape a customer's perception of your brand.


6. Blend Channels To Keep the Leads Flowing

When it comes to lead generation, a steady flow of leads from multiple channels is what will keep you in business for years to come. Not every lead will become a customer, but if you constantly have new opportunities coming your way, you’ll be able to continue to grow your business.


The most effective lead generation occurs through the careful blending of multiple avenues and channels not from single event lead generation promotions. Often a prospect must encounter your brand or message dozens of times before they decide to move forward or make a purchase.


It is the momentum and cumulative impact of presenting your message in each of these arenas that eventually allows you to cut through the clutter and become the provider of choice to a market.


7. Make a Plan to Do

Doing marketing is always the hardest part. Successful marketing essentially boils down to everything you DO or SAY that your ideal customer sees and hears. Marketing isn’t something you can say you're going to do and forget to do. It needs to happen daily, so you should schedule it in to ensure it becomes a habit. If you have a team, stay on top of them to ensure that your priorities are moving along and you’re hitting each of those actionable steps on time.


CEOs, business owners, entrepreneurs, managers and directors all typically have remarkable technical expertise, whatever it may be. And you most likely didn’t take on that responsibility or start that business because you love marketing.


Marketing is doing, and doing leads to having – whether “having” means revenue, profits, leads or awareness.

Marketing strategies don’t fail in creation. They fail in implementation. Ensuring effective marketing implementation is one of the highest payoff activities for success.


A successful marketing plan will never produce results without a successful marketing process to activate it.


Conclusion

Great marketing is a cyclical thing; it never truly ends. Once you’ve gone through these seven steps, go right back to the beginning and refine your approach. Do you need to update the profile of your ideal customer? Is there a new online channel you should be testing? Have your mapping exercises highlighted a new opportunity to increase conversions?


By revisiting each of the seven steps of your marketing strategy each quarter, it keeps your approach fresh and helps you identify new ways to reach customers.


Contact Your Marketing Consultant at Indispensable Marketing

If you’re a small service based business that needs help with building a marketing process for your business or your business’s online presence on Google and other search engines, at Indispensable Marketing we can help. We offer marketing strategy consulting, marketing audits, monthly marketing packages, consultations, exploratory calls or monthly local SEO services. Contact us for more information.

The Missing Layer in AI: Why Judgment, Not Just Data, Will Define the Next Era of Intelligence

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
Everyone is scaling outputs. Almost no one is scaling judgment.

Everyone Talks About AI Judgment. We Built It.

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
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.

We Found the Missing Layer AI Has Been Waiting For

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
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.
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