marketing-plan

---
name: marketing-plan
description: Use when a comprehensive 12-month marketing or GTM plan is needed for a client or product, structured by AARRR and customized to budget, team, and stage.
category: Marketing
version: 1.0.0
tools: []
---

# Marketing Plan (fCMO-Level)

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 against a 139-idea tactical library and a 17-section current-state audit rubric.

The deliverable is a single, shareable strategy document — the kind of artifact a fractional CMO presents 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 the team can actually execute with its current stack and headcount).

## When to Use

Use for: starting a new client engagement as a fractional CMO or marketing consultant; a founder needing a 12-month roadmap to share with their team or investors; consolidating scattered marketing work (SEO research, brand-voice docs, audit findings, onboarding analyses) into one coherent plan; any explicit request for a "marketing plan," "growth plan," "GTM plan," "fCMO plan," "AARRR plan," or "90-day + 12-month roadmap"; sequencing an existing scored audit into an action plan.

**Don't use** for a tactical execution document on a single channel (go straight to the channel specialist — emails, ads, SEO, onboarding) or when the user just wants tactical ideas without committing to a plan.

## Three Phases

**Phase 1 — Intake.** Gather everything available about the client via the Knowledge Base and web research. Conduct structured intake covering: client overview, ICP, current funnel state, funding state, team composition, marketing budget, active channels, what's already been done, what's in-flight, what's stuck, and tooling stack. Score the client against the 17-section current-state rubric (0–5 per section) as the lens for Section 3.

**Phase 2 — Review.** Present each of the 13 sections in chat for approval, adjustment, added observations, or expansion. Work is resumable — if interrupted, pick up at the next unconfirmed section rather than restarting.

**Phase 3 — Finalize.** Compile all 13 sections into the final document. Run a verification pass: confirm cross-references (tactical-idea numbers, related specialists, tool integrations) are accurate, strip anything client-specific that shouldn't ship broadly, and confirm brand voice matches what was captured in the strategic frame.

## The 13-Section 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/in-flight/stuck, scored against the 17-section rubric.
4. **Acquisition** — how strangers become aware: channels current/planned/skipped, 90-day and 12-month moves, skills + tools.
5. **Activation** — how a new user gets a converting experience: onboarding, first session, 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/word-of-mouth mechanics.
8. **Revenue** — pricing, packaging, upsells, bundles, ACV expansion.
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** — which skills and tool integrations execute each AARRR stage, and what unlocks at each funding tier.
12. **Tactical idea bank** — all 139 ideas cross-referenced to AARRR stage and 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.

## The AARRR Frame

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

- **Acquisition** = strangers → aware (top of funnel)
- **Activation** = aware → first valued experience (signup, onboarding, first session)
- **Retention** = repeat users (lifecycle, churn prevention, deepening engagement)
- **Referral** = retained users → bring more users
- **Revenue** = monetization (pricing, upsells, bundles, ACV expansion)

Brand and content are cross-cutting, not their own stage — they serve all five.

## The Current-State Rubric

Section 3 scores the client against a 17-section rubric. If a separately scored audit already exists, ingest those scores directly; otherwise score from available materials and mark the section "scored from materials" so the team can push back with better data.

## What the Plan Integrates

- **Tactical idea library** — 139 proven tactics; Section 12 cross-references every one to AARRR stage and client status.
- **Product-marketing foundation** — positioning, ICP, and voice context, read first since Section 2 builds on it.
- **Stage-specific specialists** — onboarding, signup, email, referrals, pricing, etc.; the operations stack (Section 11) maps these to AARRR stages explicitly. Be opinionated about which specialist serves which stage.

## The Marketing Operations Stack

This is the differentiator of an fCMO-style plan versus a generic one: it doesn't just say what to do, it says what capability and tooling executes it. A small team plus an fCMO plus a well-mapped skill/tool stack can output the work of a 15–20-person traditional marketing org — show this explicitly, AARRR-stage by AARRR-stage.

## Funding-Stage Capability Unlocks

Every plan states explicitly what changes when funding closes or budget unlocks — investor-friendly (founders mid-raise see what they're buying) and operationally honest (not pretending a team can spend $50K/mo on paid before the round closes).

- **Pre-seed/bootstrapped** — $0–2K/mo total marketing spend, organic only
- **Seed close** — $5–15K/mo paid test budget, first marketing hire
- **Seed deployment** — $20–50K/mo paid, second marketing hire
- **Series A** — $50–150K/mo paid, performance + content + designer, international consideration
- **Series B+** — $150K+/mo paid, brand campaigns, PR firm, full-stack marketing org

Adjust for category — consumer apps and ecommerce can spend more, deep-tech B2B typically less.

## Setting the Budget Scientifically

Two defensible methods:

1. **Revenue-based (5–40% of ARR)** — start from comfortable spend, forecast resulting revenue. Best with historical CAC data.
2. **Goal-based** — reverse-engineer budget from the revenue target: `[(New ARR / (ARPC × 12)) × CAC] / annual retention rate`. Best for fundraising or a fixed goal.

Always add 10–20% experimental budget on top — the experimental layer funds the next channel before the current one plateaus. For VC-backed Series A+ clients, anchor the 12-month outlook against the 3-3-2-2-2 rule (3× growth in years 1–2, 2× in years 3–7, from $1M ARR).

## Growth Patterns

Pitch decks show hockey sticks; real growth is a series of S-curves with plateaus between them.

- **Phase identification** — $0–10K ARR (grueling), $10K–100K (treacherous middle), $100K–1M (acceleration); Section 3 names the current phase, Section 10 sequences the next.
- **Linear vs. step-function** — healthy SaaS growth is mostly linear, punctuated by step-functions (enterprise tier launch, new segment, channel breakthrough); describe both honestly rather than promising exponential growth.
- **S-curve layering** — Channel × Product × Market; start the next S-curve while the current one is still growing, since riding any single curve to its ceiling before investing in the next produces multi-month plateaus.

## Team and Agency Model

Strategy lives in-house; execution can and often should be outsourced.

1. **First hire is a strategist, not a tactician** — look for a π-shaped marketer (two deep skill sets); common high-leverage combos are Product Marketing + Growth, Product Marketing + Content, or Growth + Content.
2. **Title conservatively** — the first marketing hire is almost always Manager or Lead, not VP or CMO; inflated titles paint the org into a corner later.
3. **Use contractors and small niche agencies for execution** — most pre-Series-A companies should rely on individual contractors for nearly all outsourced work, deepening agency relationships only at Growth and Scale stage.

## What Every Plan Must Customize

A generic plan is a failed plan. Confirm and customize for: current marketing budget (exact $/mo by line, plus blended CAC including salaries/content/tools/retainers, not just ad spend); unit economics (ARPC, annual retention rate, LTV feeding the budget math); team composition and whether the strategic owner is π-shaped, T-shaped, or tactical-only; what the client is doing today by channel with status; what they've already done that deserves acknowledgment; current SaaS growth phase; future funding milestones and what capability they unlock; which specialist executes each move; and which tool/integration makes each move doable without hiring.

Anything unconfirmed goes into Section 13's open decisions — never gloss over it. CAC unknown is the highest-impact open decision, since every revenue projection depends on it.

## Client-Type Variations

Structure stays constant; emphasis shifts:
- **B2B SaaS** — Acquisition: SEO + content + outbound + LinkedIn. Activation: signup + trial. Retention: product engagement + CSM motion. Referral: customer advocacy. Revenue: expansion/NRR.
- **D2C consumer app** — Acquisition: App Store + paid social + influencer + PR. Activation: onboarding + first session + paywall. Retention: lifecycle email + push. Referral: sharing mechanics. Revenue: subscription + upsell.
- **Hardware-led** — Acquisition: PR + retail + Amazon + Shopify SEO. Activation: unboxing + setup + first use. Retention and revenue continue through the companion software and support relationship.

## Coordinate With
@mention specialists per AARRR stage as the plan is built out — onboarding, signup, email, referrals, and pricing specialists for Sections 5–8; a positioning specialist for Section 2; an analytics specialist for Section 13's measurement plan.