Marketing Mapped Out
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The Eight Questions

What business owners ask me before they figure out where to start. By the end of this page you will know your number and which one thing comes first.

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Question one

This is the question I answer before any other one, and it comes from both directions. Some people think they are behind. Others think they are past it and will have to sit through the basics again. Before we go further, you are here.

"a part of me is like hesitant like is it like do I do this now? Do I need to do something else on my side like to be ready for this?" Prospect, coaching business · June 2026

Tick what is already true, then submit. Nobody sees this but you.

Tick at least one to continue.

    Question two

    Which business am I answering for?

    If you wear more than one hat, everything below falls apart until you pick one. This came up on three separate calls with the same person and I have never seen it answered anywhere.

    "wait, who am I being right now answering these questions? ... I almost in a weird way need like three different boxes." Clinic owner and coach · asked three times
    Not the favourite. Not the future one. The others are not cancelled, they are waiting.

    Everything from here is about . When you catch yourself answering for a different one, come back to this line.

    Question three · the one nobody answers

    How many clients do I actually need?

    Most marketing advice starts at "post more" and never starts at the number. Two fields and about a minute.

    "I wanted it to tell me how many more clients I need to meet this financial goal ... Can I just put some numbers in and you do that math for me?" Nonprofit marketing lead · asked on three separate calls
    What you need to sell
    Sales you need this year 0 sales in the next twelve months
    Marketing Mapped Out
    0
    sales in the next twelve months
    go.marketingmappedout.com
    Question four · the expensive one

    What order does this go in?

    This is the question underneath all the others, and getting it wrong is the single most expensive thing that happens to a good business.

    "I paid thousands for branding that doesn't resonate anymore. I wish I could have started here." Prospect, coaching business · June 2026
    "It's easy to spend money the way you're used to spending it, and then find out there was another way to do it." Clinic owner and coach · June 2026

    Nothing went wrong. The pieces got built in the order they were sold to you, which is not the order they work in.

    Tap the piece that feels like your biggest block right now.

    1Clarity
    Who you serve and what changes for them
    2Money
    The number, and whether the offer can carry it
    3Offers
    What you sell, priced and described without apology
    4Messaging
    The words, in your voice, that make it land
    5Brand design
    How it looks, once you know what it is saying
    6Website
    The place it all lives
    7Email
    The relationship you own outright
    8Social
    The part everyone starts with, and the part that goes last
    Questions five to eight

    The other four, quickly

    Shorter answers, because they deserve honest ones rather than long ones.

    You already know what to say. What you're missing is communicating the value of each offering, so try this instead:

    1. Pick one offering that you want to sell in the next month.
    2. On Tuesday, post the problem that it solves.
    3. On Thursday, email or DM the people who reacted to that post.
    4. On Friday, explain the cost of your offering.

    That's enough for your next step, and it's the smallest complete version of the whole system.

    Almost always not yet. A website is a container, and rebuilding it does not change what goes inside.

    Before you spend anything, write one paragraph describing what you do and who it's for, and put it in a public bio. Instagram, LinkedIn, or your site header. If that paragraph is hard to write, the words are the work, and no amount of design will cover for them. If it comes out easily, then your site really might be the next thing.

    Yes, mostly. I use AI every single day.

    What it will not give you is the sequence. Without a framework and an understanding of the order of operations, a chatbot will answer whatever you ask it and none of the answers will know about each other. You'll get a bio that doesn't match the offer, an offer that doesn't match the price, and a plan that doesn't match your calendar.

    You need the scaffolding to follow so the output actually comes out right and actually produces results. The words were never the hard part.

    Because most marketing advice hands you a blank page and no order to fill it in. You sit down, you don't know which thing to do first, and you close the tab. That happens to competent people constantly and it says nothing about you.

    What works is small steps in a fixed sequence, where each one produces something you can see when you're done. That's why this page asks you for a number before it asks you for anything else.

    What you just built

    Your snapshot

    Everything you answered, in one place. Save it and it comes with a plain explanation of what Marketing Mapped Out is and where it sits.

    Everything you told me
    The businessnot yet
    Ready to do thisnot yet
    Revenue goalnot yet
    Price of the main offernot yet
    Sales needed this yearnot yet
    Sales a monthnot yet
    Your biggest blocknot yet
    One last question, this one for me

    Which one of these is yours?

    Tap the one that sounds most like you. I will send you the next step for that specific thing, and nothing else.

    I don't know where to startEverything needs doing and none of it is in order → I don't know what to doYou know the pieces exist. You can't tell which one is next. → I tried this before and it didn't stickYou've bought something like this already →
    Alex Toombs
    Alex Toombs Founder, Marketing Mapped Out Port Townsend, Washington
    Allow me to introduce myself

    I'm Alex Toombs, founder of Marketing Mapped Out.

    I started out marketing live music, running campaigns for more than three hundred events a year. High volume, high pressure, and it taught me fast. You learn what works quickly when you are selling that many shows to that many different rooms.

    Then I spent four weeks driving a camper van around Australia and New Zealand with no fixed plan, and something shifted. I had built a career inside a very specific box, and the box suddenly felt arbitrary. I incorporated Toombs Creative on the flight home. That was 2019.

    What followed was an MBA in Sustainable Innovation in British Columbia, six months driving across North America on my own with my dog Toby and working from the van, and then Port Townsend, Washington, which felt like home the first time I saw it.

    Along the way I have worked with owners in more than thirty industries and led revenue campaigns that raised over seven million dollars. And I kept seeing the same thing. Capable people with real businesses, doing their marketing in whatever order it got sold to them, wondering why none of it added up.

    That is what Marketing Mapped Out is for. It is the process I used to run with clients one at a time, built so it works the same whether it is one owner or a thousand.

    The thread through all of it is the same. Figure out what actually works, build a system around it, do less but do it better.

    Come say hello. I would rather hear from you than not.

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    You own everything on this page. Nothing here was held back, and there is nothing to buy to make it work. Every quote is from a real conversation, used with the speaker's identity removed.

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