How to Build an Strong Marketing Strategy in 24 Hours

Patrick McFadden • May 23, 2016

“I’m active on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.”

“I’m blogging and networking regularly.”

“I’m using PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.”

“I feel like I’m doing everything right, but I’m not seeing results.”

Do any of these statements sound familiar? A lot of small business owners and CEOs I talk to feel like they are doing all the right things.  But, they aren’t achieving their business goals.

A recent survey from Infusionsoft confirms this is common. “Sales and marketing activities are among the most challenging tasks for small business owners. Generating leads, getting new customers and gaining marketing expertise are some of the biggest challenges small businesses face today.”

So why is everyone struggling? I’m not quite sure as to WHY, but in this article, I’ll show you HOW you can overcome this obstacle…and overcome it in the next 24 hours.  Let’s roll!

What is Strategy?

First, let’s identify what strategy actually is. It really doesn’t have to be that complicated. Strategy is simply a plan of action designed to achieve an expected goal.  So, we need a goal to get started. For the purpose of this article, let’s say that our business goal is $5 million in revenue and to meet that goal we need to increase visibility, and generate 50 qualified leads per month.

A worthy goal.

Now, we need a plan of action that will get us there.

Note: You may have a different marketing goal, so just apply this same framework in order to backtrack from your business goal, to an activity plan.

Identify an Ideal Market and Customer

If we’re going to generate 50 qualified leads per month, we need to define a “quality lead”. Let’s pretend we’re a website company that provides website development services for contractors like roofers, electricians, plumbers, etc.  The sales team says that if they can get a Demo Request, they consider that a quality lead.

Okay, so now we’ve got an ideal market and we know what a quality lead is.  We’re getting closer to being able to build our plan of action.

Action Steps for Identifying Your Ideal Customer:

  1. Nail down your best customer. Ideal Customer Example: Contractors located in the United States that are doing between $500,000 and $20M in revenue annually, already haves a website, participates in local community events, and believes in providing the highest level of service possible.
  2. Talk with your best customer. Your best customers have the following two behaviors:  they are profitable and also refer business to you.   Not to   mention   it’s not practical to engage all of your customers in a conversation. Discover who your 5-10 best customers are, then email or phone them asking for feedback on their marketing, sales and service experiences.

Time Estimate: 2 hours

  1. Honestly, this should be something you already know (your ideal customer).  But give yourself an hour to talk to a few customers, look through your referrals and profitability, and establish who you’re really after.
  2. Give yourself another hour to talk to a few customer facing employees or manager at your company. Make sure you find out exactly what they notice and identify when it comes to ideal customers.

Identify The Best Place to Reach These Ideal Customers

Once we know who our ideal customer is and what our goal is, we need to locate our ideal customer.  What industry are they in?, where do they network?, where are they located?, what do they read?, what do they listen to?, what challenges do they face?, how do they buy? You’ll want to look at social media, blogs, websites, and forums.  Make a big list!  Here’s what I might do if I were looking for contractors.

First, I’d dive into contractor online networking groups. I know LinkedIn is better for B2B, so I head there first. There are tons of various groups, so I started looking for groups full of my audience.

I will continue my search for “HVAC”, “plumbers”, and “electricians”.  After spending some time gathering a list, hopefully I’ve identified at least 25 solid groups that have my target audience.

Next, I’ll explore other social media options to see if there is anything industry specific. After spending some time on Google, I run across Houzz , a social network for contractors, builders and remodelers.

Still further, I’ll spend some time on Google again looking for events, conferences, forums and other websites where I might find my ideal customer.

At the end of this research process, you should easily have 20-50 channels (in-person events, forums, blogs and other websites), groups (on LinkedIn or Facebook) and communities (on Google+) on your list. Now, we’re getting somewhere! We’re narrowing down the Web and locating the corners in which we want to spend our time and effort.

Action Steps for Finding Your Ideal Customer:

  1. Spend time looking at in-person events, social media, websites, blogs and forums for your ideal customer.
  2. Create a master list with links to these places.

Time Estimate: 4 hours

  1. Don’t shortchange yourself here.  Put in the time to locate your ideal customer.  This step will serve you well for many marketing campaigns into the future, so spend about four hours doing your research.
  2. Create the list as you go along.

Identify Their Greatest Challenge, Problem, or Question

Ok, just to re-cap.  We now know:

  • Our goal
  • Who we’re targeting
  • Where they live offline and online

Now, it’s time to dig for the greatest challenge. As you’re doing your research and visiting groups, websites and blogs with your audience, start listening. What does that mean, really? How do you listen? What are you listening for?

What you want to do is listen to the problems that your ideal customer is expressing. You want to write down the questions they are asking.  Write down the things they are complaining about. You want to be able to speak their language.

You’ll start to see different discussion questions, comments on blogs, or frustrations. Here are a few sample discussion topics I pulled from a LinkedIn Group full of roofers.

Obviously, you want to identify challenges and pains around the product or service you offer, but sometimes you can get some really powerful insight just by writing down any common questions or problems. You’ll start to see some trends.

As you’ll see in the next section, we want to use these questions, pains and problems in our content and messaging.

Action Steps for Identifying Pains, Problems and Questions:

  1. Go to 10-20 places on your master list and start copying and pasting your audience’s discussions and questions.

Time Estimate: 2 hours

  1. This should take you about 2 hours, but don’t be afraid to spend 3 or 4 if you feel you’re not seeing any trends.

Create a Content Calendar

Alright, now we’re ready to create a content calendar. Most people want to rush into this step because it feels like you’re accomplishing something. However, this step won’t be worth much if you haven’t dedicated the time to your research.

Note:This will be a high level overview.

Basically, now that we’ve got a sense for what our ideal customer is dealing with, we can brainstorm some effective monthly themes, maybe some blog, webinar topics and definitely some e-book ideas.

On a strategic level, content marketing must mean more than a blog post, status update or tweet. You must think about your content as an asset to serve your business over time.

By strategically creating content, your organization puts itself in the pathway that current prospects are learning, asking, and shopping for products and services.

Action Steps for Content Calendar:

  1. Brainstorm monthly themes
  2. Map out how many blog articles you’ll need to create each week.
  3. Plan your e-book creation.
  4. Plan your call to action back to Requesting a Demo.

Time Estimate: 2 hours

  1. Spend 1 hour brainstorming monthly topics.
  2. 15 minutes for mapping out your blog calendar.
  3. 20 minutes for planning out your e-books.
  4. 20 minutes mapping out your call to actions.

Create a Distribution Plan

Your distribution plan is just as important, if not more important that your content plan and calendar.  Most small business owners feel like once they hit “publish”, it’s time to start working on the next piece.  Not true!  Once you hit publish, it’s time to go to work promoting that piece.

You spent time writing or recording it, editing it, finding an amazing photo and placing a relevant call to action.  Now, it’s time to zero in on our ideal customer and share that content with them. This is how we’ll drive people back to our content, they’ll click on our e-books, receive our emails and ultimately sign up for that demo!

Creating your distribution plan will be much easier now that you’ve got a master list of where your ideal customer lives. You’ll be able to share your blog articles as discussions in exactly the right LinkedIn Groups.

You’ll be able to comment on other websites and blogs and reference your content in a super relevant fashion because you know exactly what your ideal customer challenges and pains are. You’ll be able to craft blog titles that are irresistible to your ideal customer because you studied their problems and pains.

Your distribution plan should basically be the time you spend promoting your article to all the places on your master list. It might look something like this:

Blog Title: 5 Website Struggles Roofers Face…and How to Solve Them

Distribution:

  • Create a discussion in all 20 LinkedIn Groups and frame it with the question “What is your biggest website challenge right now?”
  • Share article on Twitter using the hashtags #webdesign #roofers #contractors #HVAC #plumbers. Rotate hashtags. Schedule 10-20 Tweets over the next 30 days.
  • Jump into a couple of forums and find the discussions around websites.  Add value to the discussion and add a link to the blog post as a reference point.
  • Find individual contractors on Houzz or other websites and send a personal email with a link to the article.
  • Send out an email to all current leads in the database and share the article.

So, your distribution plan will have some activity that you’ll do every time you create a blog post.  Then, for specific topics, you may have additional activities you’ll want to add that make sense based on the topic.

Action Steps for Content Calendar:

  1. Write out all the possible distribution activities you might have for a specific blog post.   Each time you publish, go to that list and execute as many as possible!

Time Estimate: 1 hour

  1. Spend an hour brainstorming all the ways you could distribute a blog post, e-book or piece of content.

Your Strategy

Phew!  There’s a lot of work there, but you can do it… and you can do it in less than 24 hours!  The total time spent in this process totals 11 hours.  Obviously, it would be a long work day to push through these activities, but you’ll be setting yourself up for success over the next several months, if not years. If you can’t block off an entire day to do this, spend a couple hours each day for a week and you’ll be all set.

Your goals and strategy will change over time, but I wanted to break down a very simplistic way to create a strategy quickly and start moving forward.

Just to re-cap what you need to do:

  1. What is your goal?
  2. Who are you targeting?
  3. Where do they live offline and online?
  4. Develop your content calendar.
  5. Create a distribution list.

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.
More Posts