Marketing Ideas

Access a curated library of 140 proven marketing approaches — filtered by growth stage, channel, and team size.

What This Skill Does

The Challenge: Marketing ideation often circles the same familiar tactics: blog posts, paid ads, cold outreach. Teams miss high-leverage opportunities in channels they haven’t considered or approaches that work specifically for their stage.

The Solution: Marketing Ideas skill provides a structured library of 140 proven approaches for SaaS and software products, organized by growth stage, channel, audience type, and execution complexity. Filters to the most relevant ideas for your specific situation.

Activation

Implicit: Activates when user asks for marketing ideas, growth ideas, or channel suggestions.

Explicit: Activate via prompt:

Activate marketing-ideas skill to generate ideas for [product/stage/goal]

Capabilities

1. Idea Library by Channel

140 approaches organized by primary channel.

Channel breakdown:

Full idea catalog: references/marketing-ideas-140.md

2. Stage Filter

Match ideas to your current growth stage.

Stages and priorities:

• Pre-launch (0 customers): Waitlist building, beta recruitment, community seeding
• Early traction (1-100 customers): Founder-led sales, community, content
• Growth (100-1000 customers): Paid channels, partnerships, SEO at scale
• Scale (1000+ customers): Brand, PR, enterprise motions, international

3. Idea Scoring Framework

Rate ideas against your situation.

Scoring dimensions (1-5 each):

• Reach: Audience size you can access
• Relevance: Fit to your ICP
• Effort: Time/resources required (lower = better)
• Uniqueness: Differentiation from competitors
• Compounding: Does this get better over time?

Top score = (Reach × Relevance) / Effort

4. Quick Start for Each Idea

Every idea includes a 3-step quick start.

Example — Subreddit Marketing:

1. Find 3 subreddits where ICP hangs out (tool: gummy-search.com)
2. Spend 2 weeks providing value (no promotion)
3. Post case study or tool after credibility built

Prerequisites

• Clear definition of ICP and product value proposition
• Known growth stage
• Team size and bandwidth estimate

Best Practices

1. Test before scaling Run a 2-week experiment for any new channel before committing budget.

2. Focus beats breadth Pick 3 channels maximum and do them well. Most success comes from mastery, not coverage.

3. Steal from adjacent markets If you’re SaaS, look what works in consumer apps. Adapt, don’t copy.

Common Use Cases

Use Case 1: Idea Sprint for Q2 Planning

Scenario: Marketing team needs 10 ideas to evaluate for Q2 roadmap.

Workflow:

1. Filter library by stage (Growth) and budget (mid-range)
2. Score top 20 ideas on 5-dimension framework
3. Select top 10 by score
4. Assign each to team member for 1-week feasibility research
5. Choose 3 to pilot in Q2

Use Case 2: “We’ve Tried Everything” Reset

Scenario: Team in plateau, need novel ideas outside current playbook.

Workflow:

1. List all tactics currently running
2. Filter idea library to exclude running tactics
3. Sort by “Uniqueness” score descending
4. Pick top 5 most novel ideas with reasonable Effort score

Troubleshooting

Issue: Ideas feel generic, not tailored to product Solution: Apply ICP filter before browsing. Ask: “Does this idea naturally reach [specific persona]?”

Issue: Team keeps returning to same 5 tactics Solution: Block out 1 hour to explore ideas outside top-3 channels. Set a rule: one experiment from an untested channel per quarter.

Related Skills

• Marketing Planning - Strategize around chosen ideas
• Free Tool Strategy - One of the 140 ideas, expanded
• Content Marketing - Content-focused ideas in depth
• Competitor Alternatives - SEO idea from the library

Related Commands

• /ckm:brainstorm - Brainstorm custom ideas
• /ckm:plan - Plan idea experiments