| name | marketing-ideas |
| description | Marketing idea generation for SaaS and software products — a catalogue of 139 proven tactics across 17 categories (content, SEO, free tools, paid, social, email, partnerships, events, PR, launches, product-led, unconventional, marketplaces), filtered against stage, budget, timeline, and goal into a short ranked shortlist. Triggers on "marketing ideas", "growth ideas", "how do I market this", "marketing strategies", "marketing tactics", "ways to promote", "ideas to grow", "what else can I try", "I don't know how to market this", "brainstorm marketing", "what marketing should I do", "we're stuck on growth". |
| allowed-tools | Read, Write, Glob, Grep |
Marketing Ideas
A list of 139 tactics is not a strategy — the value is the filter. This skill picks the three to five ideas that survive this product's stage, budget, timeline, and goal, and says how to start each one.
When this skill activates
Implicit: "we need marketing ideas", "how do I grow this", "what should I try next", "we're out of ideas", "what are other SaaS companies doing", "give me growth tactics", "cheap ways to get users".
Explicit: "Use the marketing-ideas skill to [task]."
Routed from: /mk:research market (paired with [[customer-research]] — market sizing plus the tactic landscape), /mk:growth referral and /mk:growth free-tool, the market-researcher and content-strategist agents, and .claude/workflows/marketing-workflow.md Phase 1 Track B (trends) and Phase 8 (influencer/promotion tactics).
Scope
Covers:
- Generating a ranked shortlist of tactics for a specific product, stage, and constraint set — never a dump of the whole catalogue.
- The 139-idea catalogue itself: 17 categories, stable idea numbers, one line each (
references/idea-catalogue.md).
- Filtering by stage (pre-launch / early / growth / scale), by budget (free / low / medium / high), and by timeline (quick win / medium / long).
- Goal-driven shortlists: leads fast, building authority, low-budget growth, product-led growth, enterprise sales.
- Guerrilla and unconventional plays in depth — the direct-mail 3-rule framework, ROI discipline, and case library (
references/guerrilla-marketing.md).
- Hand-off: naming which ClauKit skill executes each selected idea.
Does NOT cover:
- Executing the chosen tactic. This skill stops at "here are the first three steps" — [[content-strategy]] builds the calendar, [[ads]] runs the paid play, [[emails]] and [[email-sequence]] build the sequences, [[launch]] runs the launch, [[cro]] fixes the conversion path.
- ICP, positioning, brand voice, market sizing → [[customer-research]] and
plans/marketing-context.md.
- Competitor tactic teardowns and what rivals actually run → [[competitor-profiling]].
- A full multi-channel campaign plan with phases and owners →
/mk:campaign and .claude/workflows/marketing-workflow.md.
Selection process
- Load context. Read
plans/marketing-context.md for product, ICP, positioning, stage, and constraints. Ask only for what it does not already answer.
- Fill the four gaps (ask, do not assume):
- Current stage and the single main growth goal.
- Budget and team size.
- What has already been tried — what worked, what did not.
- Which competitor tactics they admire.
- Filter the catalogue through stage, then budget, then timeline. An idea reaches the shortlist only if it passes all three gates.
- Cut to 3-5. More than five is a dump, not a recommendation. Rank by fit, not by how interesting the idea is.
- Write each up in the recommendation format below.
- Name the executing skill for each so the user can move straight to it.
Gate 1 — stage
| Stage | Where the leverage is | Anchor ideas |
|---|
| Pre-launch | Build the list and the launch moment | Waitlist / early-access referrals (#79), early-access pricing (#81), Product Hunt prep (#78) |
| Early | Owned, compounding, founder-powered | Content & SEO (#1-10), community (#35), founder-led email (#47) |
| Growth | Paid and borrowed audiences | Paid acquisition (#23-34), partnerships (#54-64), events (#65-72) |
| Scale | Category ownership | Brand campaigns, international (#131-132), media acquisitions (#73) |
Do not sell a scale tactic to an early-stage product. Conference sponsorship at pre-launch is spend without a funnel behind it.
Gate 2 — budget
| Budget | What is actually available |
|---|
| Free | Content & SEO, community building, social presence, comment marketing (#44) |
| Low | Targeted ads, sponsorships, free tools (#14-22) |
| Medium | Events, partnership programs, PR |
| High | Acquisitions, own conference, brand campaigns |
Budget is a hard gate, not a preference. Team size is part of it — content and community are free in cash and expensive in hours.
Gate 3 — timeline
- Quick wins — ads, email, social posts. Days to weeks. Use when the goal has a deadline.
- Medium-term — content, SEO, community. Weeks to months.
- Long-term — brand, thought leadership, platform effects. Quarters. Only worth starting if the company can wait.
A shortlist should normally mix one quick win with one compounding play, so something moves while the slow thing builds.
Goal shortlists
| Goal | First-look ideas |
|---|
| Leads fast | Google Ads (#31, high intent), LinkedIn Ads (#28, B2B targeting), engineering as marketing (#15, free-tool lead gen) |
| Building authority | Conference speaking (#70), book (#104), podcast (#107) |
| Low-budget growth | Easy keyword ranking (#1), Reddit marketing (#38), comment marketing (#44) |
| Product-led growth | Viral loops (#93), powered-by badges (#87), in-app upsells (#91) |
| Enterprise sales | Investor marketing (#133), expert networks (#57), conference sponsorship (#72) |
These are starting points to filter, not answers. Every one still passes through the three gates.
Recommendation format
For each shortlisted idea, write:
- Idea name (with catalogue number) — one-line description.
- Why it fits — the specific connection to their stage, audience, or constraint. Not "this works well for SaaS".
- How to start — the first two to three concrete steps, doable this week.
- Expected outcome — what success looks like, in their terms. Describe the shape of the result; never quote a conversion rate or multiplier the product has not measured.
- Resources needed — time, budget, skills.
- Executes with — the ClauKit skill that builds it (
references/idea-catalogue.md maps every category).
Guerrilla and unconventional plays
The unconventional block (#110-122) is where small teams outrun budget, and it has its own discipline — two principles govern it: think in stories, not campaigns (people share a story worth retelling, not a funnel) and test small before going big (a guerrilla idea is a hypothesis, proven on a handful of targets first).
Physical mail is the most under-used channel and must pass all three rules — relevance, relationship-building, precision targeting — plus the ROI discipline: a high-cost package only makes sense against a hand-qualified list where one closed deal pays for dozens of packages. Full framework, the ROI math, and the named case library: references/guerrilla-marketing.md.
Key concepts
- The filter is the deliverable — the catalogue is public knowledge; the ranked 3-5 that survive this product's constraints is the work.
- Three gates — stage, budget, timeline. An idea that fails any one is off the list regardless of how well it worked elsewhere.
- Steal the pattern, not the prop — a case study's value is its mechanism, not its execution. Copying the floatie is not the lesson.
- Story over campaign — distribution comes from something worth retelling, not from a channel.
- Test small before scaling — every idea enters as a hypothesis with a cheap version.
- Idea numbers are stable — cite
#31 so a recommendation traces back to the catalogue entry.
Output
plans/marketing/<campaign>/marketing-ideas.md — the ranked shortlist in the recommendation format, plus the gates applied and what was rejected and why.plans/marketing/<campaign>/growth-<tactic>.md — when routed from /mk:growth referral or /mk:growth free-tool, matching that command's declared output path.plans/marketing/<research>/report.md — the tactic-landscape section, when routed from /mk:research market.- Inline shortlist in conversation, for a quick "what should we try" question.
Cross-references
plans/marketing-context.md — required hub (product, ICP, positioning, stage, constraints); hard-fail if absentreferences/idea-catalogue.md — all 139 ideas, 17 categories, with the executing skill per categoryreferences/guerrilla-marketing.md — direct-mail 3-rule framework, ROI discipline, case library- [[customer-research]] — ICP, interviews, and the customer language idea #139 depends on
- [[competitor-profiling]] — what competitors actually run, feeding ideas #11-13
- [[content-strategy]] — turns selected content/format ideas into a calendar
- [[launch]] — executes the launch block (#77-86)
- [[ads]] / [[ad-creative]] — execute the paid block (#23-34)
- [[emails]] / [[email-sequence]] / [[cold-email]] — execute the email and outreach blocks
- [[seo-programmatic]] — executes #4; [[competitors]] and [[competitor-alternatives]] execute #11
- [[cro]] / [[user-onboarding]] / [[signup]] — execute the product-led block (#87-96)
.claude/workflows/marketing-workflow.md — Phase 1 (research) and Phase 8 (promotion) entry points.claude/workflows/marketing-rules.md — quality gates (no invented metrics, brand voice, output conventions).claude/skills/marketing/README.md — full kit overview
Provenance
Imported from coreyhaines31/marketingskills (MIT, (c) 2025 Corey Haines) and adapted for KitForge: the 139-idea catalogue and the guerrilla deep dive are preserved in references/; the upstream .agents/product-marketing.md context convention is replaced by plans/marketing-context.md; the eval harness and the upstream marketing-plan / free-tools / referrals cross-references are dropped (ClauKit does not ship those skills — /mk:plan, [[content-strategy]], and [[cro]] cover that ground); category-to-skill execution mapping added.
