Turn approved evidence into a marketing plan with ak:marketing-planning

Use ak:marketing-planning to transform a marketing goal and reviewed evidence into an organized plan. The Skill can design positioning, channels, campaign phases, deliverables, measures, and contingencies; it must not execute the campaign.

Choose planning for a decision artifact

Use ak:marketing-planning when

• You need a campaign, launch, content strategy, editorial calendar, funnel, or multi-channel initiative broken into reviewable phases.
• You need to compare strategy options through RACE, SOSTAC, STP, SMART goals, or another relevant decision frame.
• You need owners, dependencies, deliverables, approval requirements, measures, risks, and unresolved questions documented together.

Choose another workflow when

• Market, competitor, or audience evidence is missing. Start with ak:marketing-research; the planning Skill also invokes that research phase unless reviewed reports are supplied.
• You need ideas before choosing a strategy. Use ak:marketing-ideas.
• You need campaign execution, publication, ads, outreach, asset production, or account changes. Approve and run the relevant execution workflow separately.

Prepare evidence, constraints, and decisions

Supply the business goal, target audience, market and competitor research, brand authority, prior campaign evidence, current assets, resources, timeline, channels under consideration, measurement capability, compliance constraints, and decision owners. If reviewed research or brand documents already exist, identify them so the corresponding discovery phase can be skipped.

State budget, KPI, target, and deadline values as approved inputs or explicitly ask for proposals. The Skill's plan format can populate these fields, but an inferred value is not a financial commitment, forecast, or performance fact.

Invoke a bounded planning goal

/ak:marketing-planning "Create a 6-week launch plan from the approved audience and competitor reports. Propose two channel mixes, label unapproved budget and KPI values as drafts, include owners and approval gates, and do not publish, spend, or contact anyone"

/ak:marketing-planning "Create a 6-week launch plan from the approved audience and competitor reports. Propose two channel mixes, label unapproved budget and KPI values as drafts, include owners and approval gates, and do not publish, spend, or contact anyone"

$ak:marketing-planning "Create a 6-week launch plan from the approved audience and competitor reports. Propose two channel mixes, label unapproved budget and KPI values as drafts, include owners and approval gates, and do not publish, spend, or contact anyone"

Understand the six stages

1. Analyze current context. Discover the project's brand, marketing, business, product, campaign, asset, sales, measurement, and compliance authorities instead of assuming filenames beyond documented defaults.
2. Research missing evidence. Run the research phase for market, competitors, audience, trends, and benchmarks, or skip it when reviewed reports are supplied.
3. Synthesize opportunities. Identify supported positioning options, audience needs, trade-offs, conflicts, and assumptions.
4. Design strategy. Define positioning, messages, journey, channel options, campaign architecture, resources, proposed budget, measures, tests, risks, and contingencies.
5. Document the plan. Create plan.md, research and report artifacts, and phase-XX-phase-name.md files in the selected plan directory.
6. Review and refine. Check feasibility, brand alignment, evidence, dependencies, approval gates, measurability, and unresolved questions, then return the plan path and summary without execution.

Reuse an active plan when it matches the requested work, after inspecting its acceptance criteria and completed evidence. A suggested plan is only a hint, not automatic authority to write into that directory; ask when competing plans make the target ambiguous.

After creating a new plan, the workflow attempts session activation through set-active-plan.cjs where the runtime provides it. Activation requires a bound CK_SESSION_ID and an existing plan directory. Exit 0 confirms the pointer was persisted and read back; a nonzero exit means activation is not confirmed, not necessarily that no write occurred. If activation fails or the helper is unavailable, continue planning and pass the explicit plan path to subagents. Relative paths resolve from the immutable session launch root, not the current directory after a directory change; use an absolute path when needed.

Passing --clear to set-active-plan.cjs clears the session pointer. This is distinct from the worktree-scoped current-plan pointer managed by ak plan use.

Keep planning separate from authority

The workflow writes local planning artifacts and may update active-plan session state where supported. It must not buy media, create provider accounts, change CRM or analytics state, upload audiences, contact people, contract a vendor, publish assets, deploy code, or spend money. Each such action needs separate scope, credentials, review, and approval.

Verify the plan and evidence

A decision-ready plan should include:

• Source-linked research, brand authority, assumptions, and evidence gaps.
• Objective, audience, positioning options, rationale, and rejected alternatives.
• Phases, deliverables, owners, dependencies, dates, and approval requirements.
• Proposed channels, resources, budget, KPIs, benchmarks, attribution limits, tests, risks, contingencies, and stop conditions.
• Required YAML frontmatter in plan.md, with new plans starting at status: pending and every unapproved numeric value visibly marked as draft.
• Exact artifact paths, review status, and unresolved stakeholder decisions.

Troubleshoot and know the limits

The Skill does not validate provider availability, quote live media prices, forecast revenue, guarantee attribution, or prove a plan is feasible. Its sample frontmatter values and allocations are illustrative, not defaults. Continue with Projects, artifacts, and checkpoints and the Marketing Kit lifecycle for ownership and recovery.