Build comprehensive 12-month marketing plans by AARRR stage

Marketing Plan produces a comprehensive, executable 12-month marketing plan for a specific client, company or product, working at fractional CMO level. The plan is structured by AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue), customized to the client's actual budget, team, stage and capabilities, and cross-referenced with a library of 139 marketing ideas and an embedded 17-section current-state audit rubric. The deliverable is a single Notion-paste-ready Markdown document of roughly 8,000 to 12,000 words, specific to the client, exhaustive across tactical areas and honest about what the team can execute with its current stack and headcount. It is a community skill from the coreyhaines31/marketingskills collection under the MIT license.

It runs in three phases:

1. INIT (research and intake): read all available materials, pull data from wired tools such as Ahrefs, GA4 or Stripe, and run a structured intake covering the company, ideal customer, funnel state, funding, team, marketing budget, active channels, what is done, in flight and stuck, and the tooling stack, saved to research.md. The current state is scored against the 17-section rubric.
2. REVIEW: each of the 13 sections is drafted and shown in chat, where the user can approve, adjust, add observations or ask to go deeper. Confirmed sections are saved to a progress file, so an interrupted run can resume.
3. FINALIZE: compile all sections into final_plan.md, verify cross-references (idea numbers, related skills, integrations), check for machine-specific paths and confirm brand voice, and optionally publish to a shared repository.

The plan has 13 sections: an executive summary (three big bets, 90-day priorities, 12-month outcome), a strategic frame (category claim, distilled ideal customer, business-model logic, brand voice rules), the current state (team, budget, what is done, in flight and stuck, scored against the rubric), Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue, a 90-day roadmap (weeks 1 to 2 unblock, 3 to 4 foundation, 5 to 8 velocity, 9 to 12 compound, with owners), a 12-month outlook tied to funding-stage unlocks, a marketing operations stack, a tactical idea bank with each idea marked Now, Q2, Q3+, Q4+ or Skip, and measurement with a RACI table and open decisions.

Key frameworks inside the plan: Acquisition means strangers become aware, Activation is the first valued experience, Retention is repeat use, Referral is retained users bringing others, and Revenue is monetization, with brand and content treated as cross-cutting. The rubric scores 17 areas from 0 to 5, out of 85: positioning, customer research, homepage, sales and product pages, conversion pages, competitor comparison, resources and content, onboarding, email lifecycle, sales material, messaging, pricing, CRO, GTM launches, paid ads, SEO and internationalization. The score's shape matters more than the total, for example strong messaging with weak distribution points the plan toward Acquisition. Funding tiers anchor spend: pre-seed or bootstrapped at $0 to $2K a month of total marketing spend and organic only; seed close at $5K to $15K of paid testing and a first marketing hire; seed deployment at $20K to $50K paid; Series A at $50K to $150K paid; and Series B and later at $150K or more with brand campaigns and PR.

Budgets are set with one of two methods. The revenue-based method uses 5 to 40 percent of annual recurring revenue (5 percent conservative, 15 to 25 percent standard growth, up to 40 percent aggressive), and the goal-based method works backward from a revenue target with the formula new ARR divided by (ARPC times 12), times CAC, divided by the annual retention rate. Add 10 to 20 percent for experiments. CAC must be blended, including salaries, ads, tools, content costs, retainers and outbound staff, and for VC-backed Series A clients the 12-month outlook is anchored to the 3-3-2-2-2 growth rule. Growth is described as S-curves and phases (grueling to $10K ARR, treacherous middle to $100K, acceleration to $1M), not a hockey stick.

Client type changes what the plan leans on while its structure stays the same. B2B SaaS acquisition leans on SEO, content, outbound and LinkedIn, with signup plus product trial as activation, product engagement and a customer-success motion for retention, customer advocacy for referral and expansion for revenue. A D2C consumer app leans on the App Store, paid social, influencers and PR, with onboarding, first session and paywall as activation, lifecycle email and push for retention, sharing mechanics for referral, and subscription plus upsell for revenue. Hardware-led products lean on PR, retail, Amazon and Shopify SEO, with unboxing and setup as activation and blended lifetime value across hardware, accessories and subscription. Marketplaces treat activation as two-sided, retention as repeat transaction frequency and revenue as take rate times gross merchandise volume, and developer tools lean on technical content, developer relations and documentation SEO, with a first build or integration as activation.

A good plan tags every move with its AARRR stage, anchors each recommendation in the client's real budget, team and channels, gives the 90-day roadmap owners, explains what changes when the next round closes, shows skipped ideas with reasons in the idea bank, can be lifted into an investor update from its executive summary, and states open decisions plainly. Signup intent counts as acquisition, while signup completion and everything after it is activation. The operations stack thesis is that a small team, a fractional CMO, the marketing-skills library and MCP integrations can output the work of a 15 to 20 person marketing organization, and the plan names the skill and tool behind each move. The plan is written for sharp, busy, skeptical founders, so tone is direct, with named tradeoffs and explicit assumptions.

Use it when starting a client engagement as a fractional CMO or consultant, when a founder needs a year-long roadmap for a team or investors, when scattered marketing work should be consolidated into one plan, when the user asks for a marketing, growth, GTM, fCMO or AARRR plan, or when an existing scored audit needs sequencing into actions.

Do not use it for a tactical document for one channel (use the channel-specific skills such as emails, ads, seo-audit or onboarding) or when the user only wants marketing ideas without a plan (use marketing-ideas). Every plan must be customized on current budget, unit economics, team, current channels, past work to acknowledge, growth phase, funding milestones, and the skills and tools behind each move; unknowns go into open decisions, with unknown CAC the highest-impact one. Avoid listing tactics without sequencing, recommending what the team cannot execute, pretending paid budget exists before a round closes, and generic advice.

Invocation takes a client name or domain:

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

The skill reads ~/marketing-plans/{client-slug}/progress.md and resumes from its state (fresh, initialization, review, finalize or finalized); finalized plans are never silently overwritten, and the user chooses to revise as a new version, start fresh or re-open a section. Each plan folder holds materials/, research.md, progress.md, numbered files in sections/ and final_plan.md. The team model advises a first hire who is a strategist and a pi-shaped marketer with two deep skills, conservative titles such as manager or lead, and contractors or small niche agencies for execution before Series A. Tone should be direct and written for skeptical founders.

It works with the marketing-ideas, product-marketing, customer-research, onboarding, emails, referrals, pricing, SEO, ads and launch skills, and with tools such as Ahrefs, GA4, Stripe, Customer.io and Notion.

It suits fractional CMOs, marketing consultants, founders and startup marketing leads who need a specific, sequenced, investor-ready plan rather than a generic checklist.