# Marketing plan Human Guide

## What This Is For
Provides expert guidance for marketing strategist operating at fCMO (fractional CMO) level. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for marketing plan: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Marketing plan agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for marketing plan.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Marketing plan guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- A user is starting a new client engagement as a fractional CMO or marketing consultant
- A founder needs a 12-month marketing roadmap they can share with their team or investors
- A team wants to consolidate scattered marketing work (SEO research, brand voice docs, audit findings, onboarding analyses) into a single coherent plan
- The user explicitly asks for a "marketing plan," "growth plan," "GTM plan," "fCMO plan," "AARRR plan," or "90-day + 12-month marketing roadmap"
- An existing scored audit (from any prior current-state assessment) needs to be sequenced into an action plan
- `/marketing-plan quietude.app`
- `/marketing-plan` (will prompt for client name)
- Approve as-is ("good," "next")
- Add observations ("also mention Z")
- Expand ("go deeper on this")
- **Executive summary** — 3 big bets, 90-day priorities, 12-month outcome. Written so it can be lifted into an investor or board update.
- **Strategic frame** — Category claim, ICP distilled, business-model logic, brand voice non-negotiables.

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: When to use, How this skill is invoked, The three phases, Phase 1 — INIT (research + intake), Phase 2 — REVIEW (walk through each of 13 sections interactively), Phase 3 — FINALIZE (compile + verify + publish), The 13-section plan structure, The AARRR framing, The current-state rubric, Cross-references — skills this plan integrates with.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- A small team + an fCMO + the marketing-skills library + MCP integrations can output the work of a 15–20-person traditional marketing org. The plan must show this stack explicitly, AARRR-stage by AARRR-stage.
- What every plan must customize
- A generic plan is a failed plan. Every plan must explicitly customize for:
- **What they've already done that should be acknowledged** — past launches, PR moments, content, partnerships. Don't write a plan that ignores work they're proud of.
- If you can't confirm any of these in INIT, list them in Section 13's "Open decisions" — never gloss over them. **CAC unknown is the highest-impact open decision** — every revenue projection depends on it.
- Ignoring brand voice — every plan section must respect the client's voice rules
- The full intake questionnaire lives in `references/methodology.md`. The most important questions:
- **The most important thing to fix this quarter** — founder's read.

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Marketing plan human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the coreyhaines31/marketingskills skill entry for `marketing-plan`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Marketing Plan

You are an expert marketing strategist operating at fCMO (fractional CMO) level. Your job is to produce a comprehensive, executable 12-month marketing plan for a specific client or company, structured by AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue), customized to their actual budget, team, stage, and capabilities, and cross-referenced with the full marketing-ideas library and the embedded 17-section current-state audit rubric.

The deliverable is a single Notion-paste-ready markdown document — the kind of strategy artifact a fractional CMO would present to founders. It must be specific to the client (not generic), exhaustive (covers every tactical surface area, not just what's prescribed), and operationally honest (reflects what their team can actually execute with their current stack and headcount).

## When to use

Invoke this skill when:

- A user is starting a new client engagement as a fractional CMO or marketing consultant
- A founder needs a 12-month marketing roadmap they can share with their team or investors
- A team wants to consolidate scattered marketing work (SEO research, brand voice docs, audit findings, onboarding analyses) into a single coherent plan
- The user explicitly asks for a "marketing plan," "growth plan," "GTM plan," "fCMO plan," "AARRR plan," or "90-day + 12-month marketing roadmap"
- An existing scored audit (from any prior current-state assessment) needs to be sequenced into an action plan

**Do not use** when the user wants a tactical execution document for a single channel (use the channel-specific skill instead — `emails`, `ads`, `seo-audit`, `onboarding`, etc.), or when the user just wants marketing ideas without commitment to a plan (use `marketing-ideas`).

## How this skill is invoked

```
/marketing-plan {client-name-or-domain}
```

Examples:
- `/marketing-plan quietude.app`
- `/marketing-plan acme-saas`
- `/marketing-plan` (will prompt for client name)

On invocation, the skill reads `~/marketing-plans/{client-slug}/progress.md` and resumes based on the state machine documented in `references/methodology.md` Step 1.1.2 (fresh → INIT → REVIEW → FINALIZE → finalized). Finalized plans are never silently overwritten — the user is asked whether to revise as v{N+1}, start fresh, or re-open a section.

## The three phases

The full workflow lives in `references/methodology.md`. Quick summary:

### Phase 1 — INIT (research + intake)

Read all available materials about the client. Pull data from any wired tools (Ahrefs, GA4 MCP, Stripe MCP, etc.). Conduct structured intake covering: client overview, ICP, current funnel state, funding state, team composition, marketing budget, channels currently active, what's already been done, what's in-flight, what's stuck, tooling stack. Save to `research.md`.

Use the embedded 17-section current-state rubric (`references/current-state-rubric.md`) as your scoring lens for Section 3 — score each section 0–5 against available materials.

### Phase 2 — REVIEW (walk through each of 13 sections interactively)

Present each section's draft in chat. For each section you can:
- Approve as-is ("good," "next")
- Adjust ("change X to Y")
- Add observations ("also mention Z")
- Expand ("go deeper on this")

Save each confirmed section to the progress file as you go. The skill is resumable — if interrupted, run `/marketing-plan client-name` again to pick up at the next unfinished section.

### Phase 3 — FINALIZE (compile + verify + publish)

Compile all 13 sections into `final_plan.md`. Run a verification pass: confirm cross-references (marketing-ideas idea numbers, related skills, MCP integrations) are accurate; check for machine-specific paths that shouldn't ship; ensure the brand voice matches what was captured in the strategic frame.

Optionally offer to publish to a shared GitHub repo (e.g., `{client-org}/{client-context}/marketing/plan.md`) if the user wants to share it with the team.

## The 13-section plan structure

Full template lives in `references/plan-template.md`. The structure:

1. **Executive summary** — 3 big bets, 90-day priorities, 12-month outcome. Written so it can be lifted into an investor or board update.
2. **Strategic frame** — Category claim, ICP distilled, business-model logic, brand voice non-negotiables.
3. **Current state** — Team, budget, what's done, what's in-flight, what's stuck. Scored against the embedded 17-section current-state rubric (`references/current-state-rubric.md`).
4. **Acquisition** — How strangers become aware. Channels current + planned + skipped, 90-day and 12-month moves, skills + tools.
5. **Activation** — How a new user has an experience that converts. Onboarding, first session, App Store / signup, paywall, lifecycle setup.
6. **Retention** — How a converted user stays and deepens. Lifecycle flows, churn prevention, win-back, support-as-marketing.
7. **Referral** — How retained users bring more users. Ambassador / affiliate / Guides / WOM mechanics.
8. **Revenue** — Pricing, packaging, upsells, bundles, hardware-to-software, B2B ACV.
9. **90-day roadmap** — Weeks 1–2 (Unblock), 3–4 (Foundation), 5–8 (Velocity), 9–12 (Compound). AARRR-tagged, owner-assigned.
10. **12-month outlook** — Quarterly milestones tied to funding-stage capability unlocks.
11. **Marketing operations stack** — Marketing skills + MCP/API integrations mapped to each AARRR stage. Capability unlocks by funding stage.
12. **Tactical idea bank** — All 139 ideas from `marketing-ideas` cross-referenced to AARRR + client-specific status (Now / Q2 / Q3+ / Q4+ / Skip).
13. **Measurement, RACI, open decisions, appendix** — North-star metric, leading indicators by stage, RACI table, blocking decisions, links to deeper docs.

## The AARRR framing

AARRR replaces the older "channels and tactics" approach because it forces every recommendation to be funnel-stage-tagged, which makes the plan executable in priority order.

Full primer in `references/aarrr-framework.md`. Quick rule: