Define
Establish the entity, category, ICPs and needs, message architecture, journeys, markets, target prompts and key relationships.
The MAPS Method
Define. Prove. Distribute. Enable.
The MAPS Framework tells you what needs to be true. The MAPS Method turns those conditions into four workstreams. They overlap on purpose, because brand, product marketing, media, PR, SEO and AI-visibility work rarely fit into a single box. The same four verbs run a launch, a rebrand, a new market or an AI-visibility program.
Prove
Support claims with expertise, outcomes, research, trial, customer satisfaction and independent corroboration.
Distribute
Place the proof across every channel the audience uses: search, AI answers, paid, earned, shared, owned, reviews, partners, shelves and screens.
Enable
Make the proof accessible, structured, extractable, verifiable and actionable by machines on every surface, and findable by every person on the team.
Keep it reliable: apply Consistency, Utility, and Measurement & Validation across every workstream.
Open the full process diagram ↗
01
Define
Start with the entity and the demand around it. Define category, ICPs, buyer, user, offering, need, markets, journey, target prompt universe and the relationships you need the world to express.
- Canonical entity definition
- ICP sheets and need-to-offer map
- Message architecture and vocabulary
- Audience and journey map
- Prompt library
- Entity and relationship map
- Competitive and market scope
02
Prove
Turn positioning into evidence. Support priority claims and relationships with expert knowledge, proprietary data, outcomes, customer proof, a way to try it and independent corroboration.
- Claim-to-proof map
- Original research and data
- Trial or pilot design
- Outcome library: one documented result per ICP and claim
- Case studies and outcomes
- Expert authorship
- Satisfaction and advocacy program
- Reviews, coverage and partner proof
03
Distribute
Put the proof into the audience's world. Do not chase every channel or every citation source. Prioritize the places that matter to the ICP, the prompt and the business.
- Channel-by-ICP coverage map
- Media plan tied to proof messages
- Core search coverage
- Fan-out query coverage
- Publisher, creator and community presence
- Review, partner, directory and marketplace coverage
- Physical and in-market presence
- Market and platform-specific distribution
04
Enable
Make the proof easy for machines and people to access and use. Fix technical blockers, clarify structure, declare entities and relationships, sync the source of truth to every surface, and expose current actionable data where needed.
- Crawlability and rendering
- Information architecture
- Structured data and identifiers
- Extraction and verification readiness
- Transactional data readiness
- Surface inventory and source-of-truth sync
- Agent-readiness checklist
- Brand kit, fact register and asset library
The control loop
Consistency, utility and validation are the operating rules.
Consistency
The same facts, words and proof wherever the brand appears: a sales deck, an ad, a review reply, a feed. Reconcile stale facts, changed products, renamed entities and conflicting third-party profiles. The fact register is the mechanism.
Utility
Ask whether the asset, message or placement is still useful once the buyer has an AI answer, a competitor's ad and a friend's opinion. Proprietary evidence, current data, decision support and task completion are difficult to commoditize.
Measurement & Validation
Baseline each pillar for people, market and machine. Change one thing. Retest under comparable conditions. Connect visibility to pipeline and revenue.
Running it
How a marketing leader runs a quarter on MAPS.
Find the constraint
Run the audit. Find the weakest pillar for the ICP that matters most this quarter, and the weakest reader.
Fund it first
Put the quarter's budget and headcount against that constraint before anything else.
One deliverable per verb
Pick one Define, one Prove, one Distribute and one Enable deliverable that moves the constraint.
Baseline, ship, retest
Report by pillar and by reader. Expand only when the change is meaningful relative to its cost.
Four waypoints. Four owners.
No single team owns all four. That is why consistency is a leadership challenge.
Meaning
Brand and product marketing
Own the sentence, the ICPs and the message architecture.
Authority
PR, comms and customer community
Own the proof, the trial and the advocacy loop.
Presence
Social, media, content, partnerships
Own coverage and frequency on every channel the buyer uses.
Signals
Brand, web and SEO
Own the source of truth and every surface that reads from it.
Report these, not reach
Impressions and rank are a photo of a moving car.
These three tell you whether you are getting real mileage. Report them by pillar and by reader.
How often we make the list
Citation and inclusion rate across the prompts, channels and shortlists that matter to each ICP.
How accurately we are described
Mention accuracy: entity, category, audience and claims match the canonical sentence.
How often we are the one picked
Recommendation rate, trial starts and the share of new business that arrives already decided.
Start with the constraint, not the tactic.
Before adding schema, buying media, pitching journalists or publishing another article, work out whether the problem is Meaning, Authority, Presence or Signals. Do not boil the internet. Find the constraint first. The audit is designed to make that obvious.