Use marketing-plan when a team or consultant needs a complete roadmap organized around acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. It is heavier than an ideas session and saves research, progress, and approved sections for work that requires multiple reviews.
Install and invoke
Run this in your project terminal to install only this skill for Claude Code:
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill marketing-plan -a claude-code
Node.js and npx must be available. For Codex, replace -a claude-code with -a codex. In the agent conversation, explicitly ask it to use marketing-plan and supply your material. The installation command belongs in the terminal, not in your content brief.
Prepare the actual operating context
Collect product information, prior campaigns, active channels, funnel evidence, and team responsibilities. A revenue target alone does not justify invented economics. Unknown acquisition cost, retention, or conversion should become explicit research gaps.
Example brief:
Use marketing-plan for studio-app.
Read materials/ and .agents/product-marketing.md. We have one part-time owner; the monthly budget is in budget.csv.
Complete INIT and identify missing data first, then review sections interactively.
Emphasize executable ninety-day work. Treat annual milestones as conditional and do not assume unreceived funding.
The official slash invocation is /marketing-plan client-name in clients that support it. Natural-language requests should identify the same client consistently. The default folder is ~/marketing-plans/client-slug/: research.md holds evidence, progress.md records state, and sections/ contains confirmed sections. Reusing the client identifier lets an interrupted task inspect its progress.
Review resource allocation, not just prose
The five growth stages help expose plans that pursue new visits while neglecting first value or continued use. For each section, check the current bottleneck, responsible person, required tools and data, and conditions that must be met before deferred work begins.
The default covers thirteen sections and cross-references a broader ideas library. An early team can retain the structure while shortening irrelevant parts. Explaining why a channel is excluded is more useful than scheduling everything. Show budget assumptions and treat funding or growth targets as uncertain. Unconnected APIs and MCP services belong in the dependency list.
The compiled artifact is final_plan.md. Before sharing, verify section links, owners, dates, and client-specific paths so machine details do not leak into the document. Preserve versions when revising a confirmed plan rather than silently replacing it. Finally, test the first phase against a real week’s available effort before beginning execution.
Review the plan in phases rather than accepting thirteen sections at once
During INIT, separate known facts, assumptions, and gaps. If revenue goals, monthly budget, funnel conversion, team ownership, or runway are unknown, leave them as questions in the research record and identify who can answer them. In REVIEW, approve one section at a time: Does the strategic frame match the target customer? Is the current state backed by data? Can the acquisition plan be supported by activation and retention? Save each approved section before moving on so later drafting does not silently rewrite an earlier decision.
For a small team, place the first quarter into an actual calendar. If one part-time owner is assigned four weekly articles, paid campaigns, events, sales follow-up, and reporting, the plan has not made a resource choice. Request owner, weekly hours, dependencies, cost range, and a stop condition for every priority. Queue work that cannot be done concurrently rather than marking every idea “high priority.”
At FINALIZE, reconcile numbers across sections. Is one budget spent twice? Do conversion assumptions and revenue goals fit together? Do references point to real tasks? The final file should include assumptions that need checking and specific first-month actions. A complete template is not an executable plan until someone can own the first week.
Example: re-plan after the budget is cut in half
Suppose a plan has been approved through section six when the team confirms next quarter’s budget is half the earlier estimate. Do not have the agent restart a completely different report. Provide approved sections, the new budget, and contracts that cannot be canceled. Ask: “Continue this client’s marketing-plan REVIEW. Identify sections and assumptions affected by the budget change. Reopen only those sections. Offer two tradeoff options that fit current team hours and explain what each sacrifices. Do not compile a final plan before approval.”
Check that total spend fits the new cap, people are not assigned twice, and objectives still agree across sections. Proportionally shrinking every line item while keeping all channels and the same outcome promise is not a real prioritization. Once an option is chosen, update progress and section files before FINALIZE so a later resumed session does not use the old budget.
Name the one growth problem for this stage
Before expanding into thirteen sections, state the most important change for this stage: making a defined buyer group aware of you, helping signups reach a first value moment, or reducing a known churn cause. Intercom’s early marketing strategy began with getting target people to learn and talk about the product, then chose channels where those people actually spent time. Make the annual plan answer that priority and spell out budget, owners, and what cannot happen in the first ninety days; length alone does not make a plan executable.