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On 4/3, we hosted our first ever Buildathon focused on building a marketing-strategy skill that serves as a context layer for all marketing work you and your team do in Claude. The event helped people get started on the process described in detail in this newsletter, it may be useful to read it first.

Video recap

Below is the full video from our Buildathon, but first here are some links you’ll need to follow along:

• Claude Desktop App. We’ll be building in Claude Code Desktop.

• MKT1 prompt library for building the skill

• Slides from the event

2 ways to build a marketing-strategy skill

If you’re building along with the recap video it’s important to note we cover 2 ways to build a marketing-strategy skill. Which path is right for you depends on 2 things: whether you're a paid MKT1 newsletter subscriber and whether you're on a paid Claude plan.

1. With the MKT1 MCP Server: The fast-track way to build a marketing-strategy skill and run all the strategy exercises to populate the skill. It requires the MKT1 MCP Server and a paid version of Claude (if you’re on an enterprise plan, you’ll need to ask your admin to enable it).

   Here are instructions to install the MKT1 MCP Server »

2. Without the MKT1 MCP Server, using shared prompts: The more manual path to building a marketing-strategy skill. Instead of the MCP server guiding you through structured exercises, you’ll work through a prompt list we’ve shared to build and populate the skill step by step. Takes more effort, but you end up with the same output. It requires a paid version of Claude (any plan works).

   Here’s our prompt library for this Buildathon »

Either way, you end up with the same output: a marketing-strategy skill file, saved locally or to GitHub, that acts as a context layer for all your marketing work in Claude

Wait what’s an MCP Server?!

An MCP server connects an LLM to external tools, knowledge, and capabilities—in this case to MKT1 processes, content, skills, etc. Think of it like an integration or API that adds the MKT1 brain to Claude.

Upgrade to install the MCP Server

Buildathon FAQ

Getting up to speed on Claude

I’m new to Claude Code and unfamiliar with how Claude works overall. Where do I start? We have some newsletters that can help. We recommend reading What 4 Gen Marketers Are Building with Claude Code and How to build your marketing strategy in Claude. They cover how Claude Code, Chat, and Cowork differ, what skills are and how they work, and how to think about using Claude as a marketing team. That’s a good foundation before diving into the Buildathon video.

Why use Claude Code over Chat or Cowork? You can build skills in any of them and add skills to any of them. Claude Code is better for building and managing files, planning complex tasks, and doing more sophisticated work. It can also do everything Chat can do. It’s partly preference though. More takes on when to use each on LinkedIn here.

Does the MKT1 MCP server work the same in all three? Sort of. You can use it in Claude Code, Chat, or Cowork. The process just looks a little different visually.

Credits

How many credits does this use—and what does it cost? I’m the Claude Max plan ($100/month) and has only hit the limit once, during a week of intensive building where she created 15+ skills. For regular daily use, the Max plan typically covers it.

Does Claude Code use more credits than Chat or Cowork? It depends more on what you're doing than which interface you're in. Conversational tasks use relatively few credits. Agentic tasks (like browsing the web, interacting with other apps, or running multi-step automations) use significantly more.

Making skills as a consultant, agency, or multi-product company

How do I manage strategy skills for multiple companies or clients? Build a separate marketing-strategy skill for each company. Keep them in separate folders (or separate GitHub repos if you want them fully isolated). Be explicit with Claude about which skill you’re working on. Tell it the context upfront and it’ll keep things straight.

I’m a consultant or fractional marketer, should I build a skill for every client? Yes, one [company name]-marketing-strategy skill per client. You can also have a separate skill for your own frameworks and ways of working that you reference across all clients. For instance I have an MKT1-strategy skill and then marketing-strategy-skills for various advisees.

What if I have multiple products under one company with different ICPs and positioning? You can build one skill that covers all products or separate skills per product line. You can also build a strategy skill that spans all products and references individual strategy skills for each product. Basically, build skills that reference the others within the skill text.

Building the marketing-strategy skill

How do I validate what Claude puts in the skill? Always review what it produces before confirming. For things like TAM or market data, Claude may get things wrong—treat those as drafts to verify, not facts. Just ask Claude to show you what it added to the skill exaclty, check it against what you know, and correct it explicitly. Claude will update the skill accordingly. Remember the skill is just a file, so you can read the contents any time.

How do I keep the skill updated over time? Two ways. Set up a monthly reminder (you can do this via Claude Code or Claude Cowork scheduling feature or even connect Claude to Slack or your Calendar) to audit the skill. Just tell Claude what’s changed and have it update the file. Or do what I do: update it on the fly as you’re working and notice things that are wrong or dated. For larger teams, a scheduled check-in is smarter.

Can I connect execution skills (like SEO) into the marketing strategy skill? Yes, this is the whole point. Your CLAUDE.md points to the marketing strategy skill. The marketing-strategy skill can then reference other skills or files (like a target account list, a voice and tone guide, or an SEO skill). You’re building a stacked architecture where the strategy layer informs everything downstream.

Does this work for B2C or only B2B? The MCP server exercises are more B2B-focused, but the core concept of giving Claude a context layer with your strategy, goals, and who you target applies to any team. Adapt the exercises to fit your business model.

Team sharing

How do I share this with my team? GitHub is the best option as it tracks every change, so multiple people can update the skill and you always have a clear history of what changed and when. A Claude project with the skill added can work if your needs are simple, but as the skill grows and more teammates use it, you’ll want a central source of truth that’s built for this. More opinions on how to do this on this LinkedIn post »

Does everyone on my team need a shared Claude account? No. Everyone can have their own Claude account and access the same skills (or plugin, which is a collection of skills) from a shared GitHub repo.

Can I keep my GitHub repo private? Yes. Just tell Claude exactly what you are trying to do it and it will walk you through the full Github set up.

Troubleshooting

I’m having trouble setting up the MKT1 MCP Server, where do I start?

This newsletter covers the details and includes video walkthroughs »

A few common issues and fixes:

→ Can’t find the Connectors option: You need a paid Claude plan (Pro, Team, or Max). Go to Claude → Customize → Connectors → + → Add custom connector.

→ Connected but don’t see MKT1 tools: Set Tool permissions to “Always allow” on the MKT1 connector. If that doesn’t work, disconnect and reconnect to force a fresh load.

→ Showing as free but you’re a paid MKT1 subscriber: This is almost always an email mismatch. Use the exact email you use for MKT1 Newsletter Substack subscription. If you need to disconnect, reconnect, and re-enter the email that matches.

→ Just subscribed but still showing as free: Wait 2-3 minutes, then disconnect and reconnect to trigger a fresh status check. We’ve built a system for authenticating paid newsletter subscribers, but it does take a couple mins to update.

→ Claude isn’t pulling in MKT1 tools automatically: Set Tool permissions to “Always allow,” or start your message with “Using MKT1 MCP Server...” to point Claude in the right direction.

→ Auth issues in Claude Code CLI: Add it with --transport http — SSE transport won’t work with this endpoint.

→ I had the old MKT1 plugin installed: Uninstall it first (Customize → Browse plugins → MKT1 Gen Marketer → Uninstall), then add the MCP connector. Same skills, but they update automatically now with the MCP Server.

Thanks for your interest in our Buildathon. We hope it helps you successfully build a marketing-strategy skill that dramatically improves your work in Claude!

More from MKT1

🙏 Thanks again to Profound for sponsoring this Buildathon.

🗓️ Don’t miss the next event, get on the list for future Buildathons.

🏃‍♀️ Get on the waitlist for a custom MKT1 Claude Sprint, with Kramer, Halley, and your marketing team.

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I’ve long said your website is your most important marketing asset. Lately, I’ve debated if I still believe this is true.

Websites are in a state of flux right now: LLMs are increasingly where people research products, so less traffic is making it to your site. The traffic that does show up is harder to convert, because prospects have already half-formed an opinion in a chat window. It’s fair to wonder if the website is still worth investing in.

But I’ve landed on my answer: Your website is still your most important marketing asset, but for different reasons.

Your website is a major source of what feeds LLMs, so what’s on your site shapes what those models say about you. And your website, at least for now, is still where prospects go to evaluate and buy. In a world where anyone can vibe code a decent-looking site in an afternoon, your website is your chance to stand out in an increasingly crowded landscape. Don’t vibe code it into undifferentiated chaos!
(A recent report by Framer found that 83% of marketing teams manage multiple websites—vibe coded chaos is very real!)

All of this changes what you need to prioritize on your website now:

• It’s easier to build (and update) websites than ever. Vibe coding and AI tools mean you can spin up pages and match what competitors are doing faster. If you’re not regularly updating your site, you’re already behind.

• Less traffic means conversion matters more. When someone does make it to your site, the stakes on that visit are higher. You need to include the details prospects need to convert, and make sure LLMs can parse those details too.
  (In that same Framer report: 71% say conversion is their top KPI, but only 12% run A/B tests to improve it)

• Credibility is a necessity. Product differentiation is harder (because building products is easier now too), so your brand needs to do the heavy lifting. There are more products in every category and savvy prospects can see through flimsy claims and fake social proof.

• You’re building for two audiences now. Humans evaluating your product, and LLMs deciding whether to recommend it. And this is different from just optimizing for search. With search, you controlled what search engines said about you, from the title to the meta description. LLMs generate a different answer every time and you need to do more to guide the LLM correctly.

To see what this looks like in practice, I called Casey Hill, CMO at DoWhatWorks. DoWhatWorks scans millions of websites and tracks tens of thousands of A/B tests, and Casey’s talked to 75+ website teams about what they’re building and why. He posts those findings on LinkedIn and in the DoWhatWorks Substack. I asked him what’s standing out right now, scanned through 100s of his examples myself to pick out my favorites, and put together this newsletter.

Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

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🔓 Offer: Get 15% off a Yearly Pro plan with code MKT15. Annual MKT1 Subscribers get 30% off a Yearly Pro plan in our Perk Stack.

In this newsletter:

I cover the website patterns standing out in the AI era. I’ve categorized 30+ examples into four buckets:

1. Build for humans & machines: We’re now creating content for LLMs, search engines, and humans. These examples cover how to strike the balance.
   Examples include: Wispr Flow, Supabase, Railway, PostHog

2. Go beyond basic social proof to show credibility: AI has lead us all to be more skeptical of what’s real, so the old playbook of basic logos isn’t cutting it. Examples include: Clay, Notion, Linear, Intercom

3. Lower the bar to get started: It’s harder to get people to your site, so when they show up you need them to convert.
   Examples include: Lovable, Replit, Framer, Canva, Zapier

4. Quick wins: Other suggestions to make a high-converting, differentiated site fit for the AI era…and some suggestions of what not to do.

Bonus for paid subscribers: We’ve added all of these website examples and more to our new /website-examples skill in our MCP Server. You can ask Claude for examples of websites that do “X” and it will check the list and report back. I’ll be adding more examples over time.

Subscribe now

Build Claude Code Skills with us this Friday

Come to our first-ever MKT1 Buildathon on 4/3/26. I’ll show how to build a /marketing-strategy skill from scratch in Claude Code.

Free to join thanks to our partner, Profound.

RSVP for the Buildathon

Here’s what to prioritize to build a valuable, high-converting website in the AI era…

1. Build for 2 audiences: Humans & machines

You might think we’ve always been writing for machines (the search crawlers), but it’s a different ballgame with LLMs as the new front door. LLMs generate their own answers with their own copy each time. And many people do not click through on LLM answers like they did with search results. So there are new must-haves to make sure your site is AEO-ready, but still valuable to humans.

➜ Make your site readable by LLMs and search crawlers

I could write many newsletters about AEO, and the noticeable changes to websites, but here are a few ways companies are making their sites LLM-friendly. Some are creating what Casey calls “prompt presets,” pre-built links that send visitors straight to an LLM. Others are adding structured, machine-readable files to their sites. And some are just putting genuinely useful content in places where both humans and LLMs can find it.

Here are some examples:

Wispr Flow: The boldest version of “prompt presets” I’ve seen. At the bottom of their homepage they say “Still not sure that Wispr Flow is right for you? Let ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity do the thinking for you.” Then three buttons: Ask ChatGPT, Ask Claude, Ask Perplexity. It’s a way of saying “we’re so confident in how machines see us that we’ll let them do the talking”—and in their case not just in the footer, but in the flow of the homepage.
Some other examples of prompt presets include Glean & Galileo.

Supabase: They link to humans.txt, lawyers.txt, and security.txt in their footer. These are plain-text files that give agents and crawlers a clean, structured way to parse who built the product, what the security policies are, and where to find legal info. Instead of making machines scrape your About page or navigate your legal docs, you give them a direct endpoint.
More on the point of .txt files in this post from Casey »

Kick: This is really clever! Kick lists tax filing deadlines by entity type (S Corp, C Corp, Sole Proprietorship, Partnership) with add-to-calendar buttons next to each one. This shows they really understand their audience. Plus, they did this in a format that’s useful to humans (with an add to calendar option) and easy for LLMs and search engines to cite.

Plain: They put a link to their changelog right in the hero. It signals shipping speed and shows the product is actively evolving. And a changelog is structured, frequently updated content that keeps your site fresh for crawlers.

➜ Put effort into competitive positioning, for both humans and machines

Comparison pages have always done double duty: They rank in search and they help people who are actively evaluating you against alternatives. Now there’s a third reason to invest in them. LLMs pull from comparison content when someone asks “should I use X or Y,” and if you’ve built that page, you have a shot at shaping the answer. Competition has heated up in every category, which makes these pages more important than they’ve been in years.

Here are some examples:

GC.AI: GC AI knows that ChatGPT and Claude are real competition, so they get right to it. Their homepage has a dedicated section that compares GC AI, ChatGPT, and Claude in a feature table side by side. Framer does the same thing with a dedicated Claude comparison page, and according to Casey this page was ranking in ChatGPT within a month of going live.

Railway: After each feature section on their homepage, they include “Alternative to” followed by competitor logos. It’s subtle and doesn’t seem super aggressive, but is really effective!
Casey details why this works so well here »

ElevenLabs: They add customer logos under each homepage product section. This shows off use cases for the product and social proof at the same time. These simple logos are doing a lot of heavy lifting, teaching you how the product is used and signaling credibility.

PostHog: Their entire site is a 90s throwback, worth studying for how humor and honesty build trust and differentiation. But the competitor comparison pages are the standout. They have a side-by-side format: “A competitor might suit you better (for now) if...” next to “Reasons to choose PostHog.” They admit their own gaps. Also a must-see: “You’ll hate PostHog if...” page.

Other LLM-friendly web suggestions:

• Link critical content from your footer: LLMs (and search engines) seem to overweight content that’s accessible from global navigation.
  Examples: ClickUp links 50+ pages from their footer and Clay links customer case studies directly from their footer nav.
  More on this in DoWhatWorks Substack >>

• Add FAQs to your pages: Structured Q&A is one of the easiest formats for machines to parse and cite.
  Examples: Zapier has FAQs throughout their product pages and DoWhatWorks (where Casey is CMO) has one too.
  More on the importance of FAQs from Nick Lafferty, Head of Growth Marketing at Profound »

• Check for things that LLMs can’t “read”: Hover states and tooltips (invisible to agents), scroll-to-load content (agents can’t trigger the scroll), video transcripts, and content hidden in dropdown menus.

2. Go beyond basic social proof to show credibility

Social proof has always mattered, but when every category has more products and buyers are more skeptical of fake content, who your customers are and how you present them can be a real differentiator. The problem is that most sites are still doing social proof the way they did it five years ago. A logo bar, a quote carousel, maybe a case study page buried in the nav. The companies standing out right now are rethinking what proof looks like, where it lives on the page, and how much of it a visitor can actually verify.

➜ Make your logos verifiable

The logo bar has been a homepage default for as long as I can remember. Slap some recognizable names below the hero, signal credibility, move on. But we all got a little suspicious about which logos were real (or whether a logo churned two years ago or one employee used the product once). Now companies are making logos interactive, clickable, and tied to real stories and stats, which is much harder to fake.

Here are some examples:

Clay: One of the first to do this. Hover over a logo and you see a quote from a real person with their name, role, and photo. Logos are labeled “Case Study” or “Hackathon” to indicate what you’ll see when you click through. Dozens of companies have copied this since, and they should. It’s a great idea.
Casey talks about how basic social proof bars typically perform (not great), and why verifiable proof works better here »

HeyReach: Goes a step further with their social proof bar. Hovering over a logo shows a quote, real performance metrics, and/or what tools the customer uses alongside HeyReach. Click through and you get an actual playbook with campaign workflows and email templates.
Casey’s take on HeyReach’s Homepage on LinkedIn »

Notion: A sticky logo bar is pinned to the bottom of the viewport. This way, social proof stays above the fold and expands with more detail on scroll. We see this with sticky nav bars to the top of the page, but I love the idea of getting creative with what “sticks” on scroll and where it is on the page.

➜ Extend proof beyond the logo bar

Logo bars are now table stakes. So, the best sites are building credibility in other ways too: security certifications, filterable customer lists, video testimonials throughout the page, etc. The common threads are making “proof” specific, verifiable, and easy to find.

Clay & Sierra: both have prominent security certification sections on their homepages (SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.). These aren’t social proof in the traditional sense, but for enterprise buyers they function the same way and are super important for signaling credibility and durability.

Linear & Intercom: Linear’s customer page has logos organized in a filterable table by industry. Each row shows whether a case study exists (”Read Story”). This makes for a more scannable way to view a customer list. Intercom does something similar with filters by use case and industry, and prominent video case studies.
Casey’s take on Intercom’s Customer page on LinkedIn »

CentralHQ: Testimonials have bold headers that read like feature callouts. Each one links to the original source on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, or G2. They make social proof scannable and claims more credible at the same time. Some quotes also mention switching from competitors by name, so the social proof doubles as competitive positioning too.

Profound: Event callouts are another way to show credibility. So, companies are giving upcoming events meaningful real estate on their homepage. Profound has a dedicated section for their Zero Click conference right on the homepage. If you’re hosting a conference and people are showing up, that says something. And right now events can be your best-performing channel, so it’s a great secondary CTA that’s lower-commitment than requesting a meeting.

A note on social proof: DoWhatWorks has tracked 1,347 A/B experiments related to showing logos on websites. Static logo bars score just 18 out of 100 on their algorithmic predictor of success for SaaS companies. But it's not just logos, basic company stats ("trusted by 10,000+ teams") and single-line quote testimonials aren't doing much better. The more vague and high-level the social proof, the worse it performs. So get specific.

3. Lower the bar to get started

It’s harder to get people to your site, so when they do show up you need them to convert. To lower the conversion barrier, companies are adding LLM-style input boxes to their homepage, templates that show you what to do first, and migration help that makes switching feel easy—and sometimes all three.

➜ Use LLM-style text boxes as product onramps

More and more companies are putting an LLM-style input box right in the hero. It’s the interface people are used to now, and it doubles as an onramp into the product. Instead of “sign up for a free trial,” you just start typing.
Casey writes about a bunch of these examples in this LinkedIn post »

Lovable: The hero is an LLM input bar. Describe what you want to build and you’re immediately in a creation flow. I think they kicked off this trend!

Framer: They have dual CTAs in the homepage hero, “Start for free” and “Start with AI.” The AI path takes you to a page with a chat box to get started (and below that is a full template gallery).

Mutiny: They take a slightly different approach. Instead of a typeable input box, their hero rotates through prompt ideas showing what the product can do, then you click get started and jump into the onboarding flow.

➜ Bring your product to life with templates & examples

Template libraries have been around for years, but I’m seeing them move to the homepage more and more. And for AI companies, prompt libraries or suggestions are the new version of a template library. They let users start from something that already works and see the range of what the product can do.

Replit: Below their text-input box, they have preset templates like “B2B project management app” and “Startup pitch explainer.” It helps you understand what the product can do and get going right away. v0 by Vercel has a similar setup.

Canva: They are known for their in-product templates for design, and they display these prominently on their homepage.

Notion: Their use case pages show copy and paste-able prompts with a “Try it!” button and a video walkthrough. This combo gives you proof that it works and lowers the learning curve.

➜ Simplify the path to migration

There’s a lot of change happening right now due to AI, and switching to modern software feels really hard on top of everything else. If you can make migration feel easy, you remove one of the biggest reasons people don’t convert.

Pylon: Their social proof bar is segmented by “Migrated off Zendesk,” “Migrated off Intercom,” and “Others.” Social proof, competitive positioning, and comfort that switching is possible in one element. Well done.

Zapier: Their top banner reads “95% of AI initiatives stall. Be the 5% that break through. Get an AI consultation.” Instead of announcing a fundraise or a webinar, they’re using the banner to position themselves as the guide for AI migration and offering a consultative call to help. Casey’s take on this banner on Linkedin »

Stable: Uses one line in their hero to signal the ease of switching: “Our AI assistant makes switching to Stable easy.” It shows they’ve thought about migration and built for it, and provides that reassurance at a key conversion moment.

Mintlify: They have two clear paths at the bottom of their homepage instead of one generic CTA to sign up or request a meeting. “Pricing details” and “Quickstart” are common next steps for people who have made it to the bottom of the page. It also shows they aren’t afraid of showing pricing, which always makes the buying experience way better for prospects. It’s the same idea as the examples above: think about where your visitors actually want to go and make that path obvious.

Add the MKT1 MCP Server to use our website-examples skill in Claude

We’ve added all of these website examples and more to our new /website-examples skill in our MCP Server. You can ask Claude for examples of websites that do “X” and it will check the list and report back. I’ll be adding more examples over time.

Anyone can install our new MCP Server and get access to newsletter content in Claude, but only paid subscribers unlock the full set of skills. Upgrade now to get full access.

Add our MCP Server

More quick conversion wins

Beyond building for two audiences, rethinking social proof and credibility, and making it easier to get started, there are a few more things you should consider to improve conversion. And a couple things to avoid…

Pricing pages: I’ve been preaching this for years, but I’ll say it again: You absolutely need a pricing page, no excuses. Your pricing page is one of the highest-intent pages on your site. Prospects will find out your pricing one way or another (like by asking an LLM). Make it accessible and scannable and don’t hide the information people are looking for.
Casey points out that Jira has the highest price he’s seen listed on a pricing page in this LinkedIn post »

Meeting scheduling in your demo flow: I’ve also been preaching this for years; you need to make it easy to book a meeting directly from your site. Having someone wait for an email to schedule a meeting is ludicrous in 2026. Tools like Default, RevenueHero, and ChiliPiper make this simple.

Look like a modern (read: AI) company: In addition to the LLM-style input boxes covered above, there are a couple other visual trends signaling “we’re an AI company,” if that’s your goal.

• Big logos in the footer and hero are everywhere right now: Arcade, Granola, Wispr Flow, Gamma, and more.

• AI-generated hero landscape images are becoming a visual shorthand for “we’re modern” (see Mintlify and Railway).

Lastly, here are a few things that the jury’s still out on…

• MongoDB has a persona selector in the hero that changes the page content based on whether you select developer or a business leader. It’s interesting but very clunky. It might be best to leave this customization behind the scenes using personalization tools. Sage has an extremely similar looking hero, including an audience selector.

  

• ClickUp’s homepage says “It’s like adding 15 full-time employees” with specific ROI stats. This may work, but it starts to get awkward when we’re talking about replacing humans so explicitly. I’m watching how audiences respond to this kind of positioning as AI really does replace us…ahhhh!

  

Now go fix your website…

If you take one thing from this newsletter, go look at your own site with fresh eyes. Not as a marketer, but as a prospect who just got a recommendation from Claude and then visited your site. Is your social proof verifiable? Can an LLM actually read your site? Is it easy to get started or book a meeting? Does it look like it was updated in this decade, if not this year, if not this month? If the answer to any of those is no, you know where to start.

If you need additional help checking your website, 2 skills in our MCP server can help.

• The /homepage-positioning-checker skill will evaluate your site against the MKT1 positioning framework.

• The new /website-examples skill lets you ask Claude for examples of sites that do “X” (social proof, migration, LLM readability, etc.) and it’ll pull from the catalog we built for this newsletter.

• Once you add our MCP Server (for paid subscribers) to Claude, just ask it to run these skills, more details here.

Add the MKT1 MCP Server

More from MKT1

🙏 Brought to you by: Profound (AI visibility platform); 42 Agency (paid media, outbound, and Mops agency); and Framer (website builder). All 3 companies have offers for MKT1 subscribers!

🙏 Thanks again to Casey Hill for the conversation and most of these examples. Follow him on LinkedIn and check out the DoWhatWorks Substack. He posts new website breakdowns constantly and they’re always worth reading.
Bonus: DoWhatWorks is giving priority access to MKT1 subscribers to their new agentic product for web feedback and optimizations

👩‍💻 Claude Code Buildathon: Our first-ever Buildathon is on 4/3 at 9am PT / 12pm ET. I’ll show you how to build a marketing-strategy-skill in Claude Code—while you build along! RSVP now to save your spot.

🗓️ Meet me at Profound’s Zero Click SF event: An exclusive gathering for the world’s top AI Search experts on 4/8/26. Register here »

📦 MKT1 Unboxing: Watch our video series to see Kramer (that’s me) unbox Mutiny, Wistia, Luma AI, & Attio.

🥞 MKT1 Perk Stack: Exclusive discounts worth $40K+ on our favorite GTM tools. For annual & superfan paid subscribers only.

🧰 Template & resource library: We have 100+ templates and resources available to paid subscribers in our template & tool library.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community (free to post as a paid subscriber). And our candidate form if you’re looking for a new role (option to remain anonymous included!).

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It’s been just over a month since I went all-in on Claude and started writing about agents and Claude Code. Naturally, I’ve also been helping a lot of marketers get up to speed.

One big observation so far: Most marketers using Claude are skipping ahead. You’re trying to produce outputs with Claude based on faulty (or nonexistent) inputs.

The problem with your agents (and honestly your marketing efforts in general) isn’t that you don’t have enough people, tools, or time. It’s that the strategy behind the work isn’t built out enough, high-impact enough, or connected enough to your company’s context.

This has always been a challenge for marketers: You make strategy docs (hopefully), but you rarely look at them again. You update foundational things like ICPs and positioning, but your team doesn’t actually work from the same foundation when planning campaigns or reviewing outputs. So, you end up doing random acts of marketing, random acts of agenting, and random acts of AI-ing instead of focusing on the things that actually help you win.

Here’s what’s different now: Claude can help you build your marketing strategy and then actually use it—in every brief, campaign review, and prioritization decision. Your strategy can live inside Claude and you and Claude can update it regularly as things evolve.

This newsletter explains exactly how to do this step by step. But there’s a shortcut: paid subscribers can use our new MKT1 MCP Server, it has the whole process built in, ready for you to run. Either way, do the damn thing and get your marketing strategy into Claude so your day-to-day work gets better.

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In this newsletter:

• How to create a central /marketing-strategy skill in Claude that becomes your team’s living strategy doc

  • How to run 7 exercises in Claude to build your strategy skill: company overview, ICP prioritization, Marketing Advantages, Perceptions, positioning, Revenue Levers, and Big Bet Campaign exercises

  • Tips for using your /marketing-strategy skill daily to turn your strategy into actual growth

  • How to share and maintain skills across your team using GitHub

• Shortcut for paid subscribers: Our new MKT1 MCP Server can run you through this whole process step-by-step in Claude.

• Need help? Join our first ever Buildathon on 4/3/26 and we’ll walk you through how to build your /marketing-strategy skill in Claude Code.

Subscribe now

The process: Build a /marketing-strategy skill

To build your strategy in Claude, first create one central file: your /marketing-strategy skill. Then run multiple marketing strategy exercises (detailed in the next section) and save the outputs into this skill file. Over time your /marketing-strategy skill becomes a living, breathing foundation for all of your marketing work—not a strategy doc you made once, but something Claude actually uses every time you work.

The MKT1 MCP Server automatically makes you a /marketing-strategy skill file and guides you through the steps below. Paid subscribers get full access here ➜

Here’s how to set it up:

Step 1: Make your skill

• Ask Claude to create a marketing-strategy.md file (that’s your skill!) to hold all your high-level strategy info.

  Here’s a prompt you can use:

  “Create a Claude skill called /marketing-strategy. It should be a SKILL.md file with a description that tells Claude to reference this skill whenever I’m working on marketing—including briefs, campaigns, content review, positioning, planning, and prioritization decisions. Leave the body empty for now.”

• Then tell Claude to reference your new skill whenever your doing something marketing-related for your company. Set this up to happen automatically:

  • In Claude Code or Cowork: Say, “Add this line to my Claude.MD file: reference marketing-strategy.md for anything marketing related.” Your CLAUDE.md file is the instructions file Claude reads at the start of every conversation.

  • In Claude Chat: Ask Claude to update its memory to reference your /marketing-strategy skill for anything marketing related. You can also add it to the instructions for a specific project. Or you can add the /marketing-strategy skill itself to each project.

If you get stuck on any of this, just ask Claude for help and ask it to reference its own “product-self-knowledge” skill.

Step 2: Run strategy exercises and add results to your /marketing-strategy skill

• Run the strategy exercises detailed below, one at a time. After each one, ask Claude to save the output into your /marketing-strategy skill.

• Tell Claude to reference what’s already in the /marketing-strategy skill as you run each exercise. Each exercise builds on the last: company overview feeds ICP prioritization, which feeds marketing advantages, and so on.

• After completing all the exercises, you’ll have a fully built /marketing-strategy skill. More details on each exercise below.

Step 3: Use your /marketing-strategy skill every day

• Once your skill is built, reference it in everything you do: briefs, campaign reviews, prioritization decisions, etc.

• Keep it updated: Give Claude feedback when something feels off, and re-run exercises when things shift. More on this later in the newsletter.

Once you’ve done all 3 steps, your strategy “docs” now live in Claude as skill. You can reference it anywhere in Claude using /marketing-strategy.

Can I just use my CLAUDE.md file for this? Why build a separate /marketing-strategy skill?

You may have heard advice to add marketing strategy details to your CLAUDE.md file. I don’t recommend using it in this way.

• CLAUDE.md should be short. Anthropic recommends keeping this personal instructions file under 200 lines. The longer it gets, the more Claude ignores parts of it. Your marketing strategy will almost certainly be longer than 200 lines on its own.

• A skill is shareable. Unlike CLAUDE.md, a /marketing-strategy skill can be used across your team, every project, and all three Claudes: Code, Cowork, and Chat.

Run these exercises to add context to your skill

Company overview exercise

Why it matters:

Copying another company’s playbook or stealing random tactics doesn’t work. Your startup is, in fact, a bit of a special snowflake. It has unique attributes that should shape every marketing decision you make. This exercise forces you to document what actually makes your business specific so everything downstream matches the reality. And without it, Claude might make some assumptions about your business model that are out of date or just wrong.

What to document:

• The basics: stage, team size, and funding

• Your business model: ARR, number of customers, GTM motion, how teams adopt your product, and how they expand

• Your high-level audience and TAM, product description, market category, competitive landscape, and ecosystem info (you’ll go deeper on audience and competitors in the ICP and positioning exercises)

How to run the exercise:

1. Ask Claude to help you build a company overview. Give it your URL and let it research your company first, then confirm what it finds and fill in any gaps.

2. Share your stage, company size, pricing model, how customers buy, and anything else unique to how you operate and earn revenue.

3. Ask it to output a clean summary you can save, then tell it to add this to your /marketing-strategy skill (that I detailed how to make in the step above).

Already have the MKT1 MCP Server? Tell Claude to run the mkt1-company-overview exercise. It will research your company, give you a starting point, ask the right questions, and save it all to your /marketing-strategy skill.

ICP prioritization exercise

Why it matters:

Most companies have some version of ICPs, maybe even a persona deck with vanity profiles like “Sales Sally” you never look at. What you actually need are robust ICPs that include both role and company, and you need to prioritize them. Not every segment should get the same effort, budget, or tactics. This exercise forces you to operationalize who you’re spending time on.

What to document:

• Your ICP segments: Both company type and role, and whatever criteria you use to build segments

• Maturity level for each ICP: I recommend using proven/core, scaling, testing, and not a priority.

• Time allocation: Roughly how much overall time your team should allocate to each segment over the next quarter or year.

How to run the exercise:

1. Ask Claude to help you prioritize your ICPs. You can share a list of customers or give Claude access to your CRM to help.

2. Reference your /marketing-strategy skill if you’ve already started building it (so Claude has context on your company)

3. Ask it to output a prioritized table of your segments with maturity levels and time allocation, then add it to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Already have the MKT1 MCP Server? Tell Claude to run the mkt1-icp-prioritization exercise. It will pull in your company overview, walk you through each segment, and save the prioritized list to your strategy file.

Marketing Advantages exercise

Why it matters:

Most companies don’t think deeply about how they can win on GTM before they just start doing. They pick channels, launch campaigns, and copy tactics without thinking about their “accelerants.” Marketing Advantages are the unique catalysts, dynamics, or strengths of your business, product, team, or story that help you grow faster when you focus your marketing efforts here.

What to document:

• The advantages you have—or could have.

• I bucket advantages into 4 categories based on what drives the advantage: product, marketing/ecosystem, fuel, and engine advantages. You can see the broader list I’ve documented here, but you might come up with others that don’t fall neatly into these.

• Strength and maturity of each: How strong is this advantage today, and how strong could it be when fully accelerated? Can it drive step-change growth, or is it just useful? How much energy and focus have you put into this advantage to date?

• Competitive check: Does your closest competitor have the same advantage? If yes, it’s likely a pretty weak advantage.

• Combination check: Are two advantages more impactful together? The best strategies exploit multiple advantages at once.

⠀How to run the exercise:

1. Ask Claude to help you audit your marketing advantages by sharing the descriptions above, this section and diagram from our field guide, and this marketing advantages exercise.

2. Tell it to reference your /marketing-strategy skill and research your top 1-2 competitors. Then confirm what advantages it thinks could catalyze your growth in a meaningful way.

3. Ask it to output a table with each advantage, its strength, and whether it’s competitively differentiated, then add it to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Already have the MKT1 MCP Server? Tell Claude to run the mkt1-marketing-advantages exercise. It will research your company and competitors, help you separate real advantages from aspirational ones, and save it to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Perceptions exercise

Why it matters:
Perceptions are the key narratives you want to drive in your market. They're written from the perspective of your audience and are the foundational tenets of your story. Creating perceptions helps you tell a consistent, repeatable story across all fuel efforts. The majority of your content should ladder up to and support these perceptions.

What to document:

• 3-5 perceptions, covering your company, your market, and your product

• Each written from your audience’s POV, as a belief they’d repeat back to you

• A category for each: company insight, audience insight, market insight, or product insight

• Status: Is this perception already established, emerging, or brand-new?

How to run the exercise:

• Ask Claude to help you define your perceptions by copying and pasting the descriptions above (and by referencing your /marketing-strategy skill.) For more details to feed Claude, reference my newsletter on perceptions and this template for building.

• Ask Claude to output 3-5 perceptions in a table, then add it to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Already have the MKT1 MCP Server? Tell Claude to run the mkt1-perceptions exercise. It will use your company overview, ICPs, and marketing advantages to draft perceptions, then refine them with you.

Positioning exercise

Why it matters: Positioning shapes how you talk about your product to your audience, and without it, you’re probably lacking clarity and maybe even confusing your audience. Most startups overcomplicate this, making long, soon-to-be-forgotten positioning docs that are somehow both exhaustive and unfinished. And even after all that work, they can’t clearly say who the product is for, what it is, and why it’s better than a specific alternative. Once you break positioning down simply, everything else gets easier.

What to document:

• Your answers to the 4 positioning questions: Who is it for? What is it? What are you comparing it to? Why is it better?

• Positioning today vs. positioning in ~1 year: These are often different, especially at fast-growing companies in fast-moving markets. Writing 2 versions solves most positioning misalignment debates.

How to run the exercise:

1. Ask Claude to help you define your positioning. It can check your site and anything already in your /marketing-strategy skill, or you can share any existing positioning work (that 10-page doc from 6 months ago?!) and get help refining. I’ve written about positioning extensively: Here’s my positioning newsletter and positioning statement template for more context.

2. Tell Claude what your product does and who you think it’s for, and let it push back on whether your comparator and “why it’s better” actually resonate with your core audience.

3. Ask it to output a positioning table with two columns (positioning today vs. positioning in 1 year), then add it to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Already have the MKT1 MCP Server? Tell Claude to run the mkt1-positioning exercise. It will research your company, check your ICPs and perceptions, walk you through each positioning question, and save the positioning table to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Revenue Levers exercise

Why it matters:

There are only 4 major ways to drive revenue: new logos, expansion, retention, and pricing. Most marketing teams try to do all four at once and end up doing none of them well. This exercise forces you to stack-rank where marketing can have the biggest impact right now, so you focus your campaigns and goals on the levers that actually move the number.

What to document:

• Stack rank the four revenue levers from 1-4, based on what’s most important to your business right now:

  • Grow top of funnel with core audience

  • Grow top of funnel with new audience

  • Increase customer value

  • Increase efficiency

• For each lever, note the maturity of your current motion: Are you already investing here, just getting started, or not doing anything yet?

• For your top 1-2 levers, describe how marketing will specifically move them with your current team and budget

⠀How to run the exercise:

1. Ask Claude to help you stack-rank your revenue levers by sharing the descriptions above and telling Claude to reference your /marketing-strategy skill. Add more context from this this newsletter and template if needed.

2. Ask it to output a ranked list of these 4 revenue levers with reasoning, then add it to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Already have the MKT1 MCP Server? Tell Claude to run the mkt1-revenue-levers exercise. It will reference your company overview, ICP prioritization, and marketing advantages, walk you through the ranking process, and save it to your /marketing-strategy skill.

Big Bet Campaigns exercise

Why it matters:

Big bets are where strategy becomes action. These are 1–3 campaigns that combine your advantages, perceptions, and ICPs into coordinated efforts. Each one has fuel (content, creative), an engine (channel), and an audience (ICP segment). Without big bets, you end up with a scattered list of tactics. With them, your team knows exactly what you’re investing in and why.

What to document:

• 1-3 campaigns, each with: a name, the ICP it targets, the perception it reinforces, the advantage it leans into, the channel it runs through, and the fuel it requires

• Priority level for each: high, medium, or low

• What success looks like for each campaign

How to run the exercise:

1. Ask Claude to help you design your big bet campaigns by referencing your /marketing-strategy skill. If the above strategy exercises aren’t done and added to the skill, the big bet output ideas won’t be good.

2. Ask Claude to help you brainstorm ideas based on your ICPs, advantages, and perceptions, but the best big bets come from your own creative thinking with all of this context in mind. I’ve written about this more here.

3. Once you have campaign ideas, have Claude output a summary of each, then add them to your /marketing-strategy skill too so you make sure you stay focused on these big things that can move the needle.

Already have the MKT1 MCP Server? Tell Claude to run the mkt1-big-bets exercise. It will pull in the full strategy you’ve already added to your /marketing-strategy skill, paying close attention to your Marketing Advantages, and help you come up with big ideas that will move the needle.

Make skills with me at the MKT1 Buildathon

Come to our first-ever MKT1 Buildathon on 4/3/26 hosted by me, Emily Kramer. We’ll show how we use the MKT1 MCP server and build a /marketing-strategy skill from scratch in Claude Code. It’s the easiest way to go from understanding the concept to actually having this set up and working. Open to all, bring your friends! My dad might even show up (hi dad!)

RSVP for the Buildathon

Other things to add to your marketing-strategy skill

Once you’ve run through all the exercises above, there’s more worth codifying in your /marketing-strategy skill. Here are my recommendations, I can’t cover all of these exercises here, but I’ll be adding skills for each of these things to the MKT1 MCP Server soon!

• KPO Goals: Add your marketing goals and don’t just include KPI or metrics goals. Instead, include goals from these 3 categories: KPI goals (metrics), Project goals (big bets), and Ops goals (foundation work + hiring) Read more in my guide to annual marketing planning and crash course in marketing goal setting.

• KPIs and metrics: Include the specific numbers you track, how you define them, and your targets. Once documented, Claude can reference them when setting goals, evaluating campaigns, or building reports.

• Channel strategy: Document which growth engines you're investing in, the current maturity, and why. Use the exercises above to inform this, not gut feel. Feed Claude my channel-startup fit newsletter (or run the /channel-strategy exercise with the MKT1 MCP Server).

• Lifecycle and account stages: List how contacts and accounts move through your funnel, including lead stages, account stages, product-usage stages, and account tiers. Reference this signal-based campaigns newsletter and the account-driven marketing template.

• Voice, tone, and style guide: Document how your brand writes and speaks. This keeps content consistent across your team, your agencies, and AI writing on your behalf. You can give Claude writing examples or access to Google Drive to get started.

• Brand guide: Add your visual identity: colors, typography, logo usage, diagram style. Share a Figma file or brand PDF directly with Claude to codify.

• Naming conventions, product tiers, and pricing: Adding product details like this prevents Claude from making things up or using the wrong terminology.

• Tech stack and DRIs: Share a list of tools you use and who does what on your team. Makes it much easier for Claude to figure out what’s possible and suggest human and/or tech workflows.

Use your /marketing-strategy skill daily

Run all work through it

Building your /marketing-strategy skill is only useful if you actually reference it. Now that it’s in Claude you can reference it for every marketing thing you do.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• When creating briefs: Before any campaign or project, make a GACCS brief (Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders). This is much faster when you have many of these inputs in your /marketing-strategy skill.

• When prioritizing requests: Sales wants a new deck. A partner is proposing co-marketing. Your founder wants to sponsor an event. Before saying yes to any of it, gut-check it against your /marketing-strategy skill.

• When reviewing content and copy. A generic copy edit in Claude isn’t nearly as effective as checking whether something actually ladders up to your story. Before anything goes out, say: “Review this against my /marketing-strategy” so Claude checks it against your perceptions, positioning, ICP, and brand voice all at once.

The prompt pattern is always the same: Tell Claude what you’re doing and add “reference /marketing-strategy”—that’s it.

Other things you can do when you have this “operating system” built out in Claude:

Once your /marketing-strategy skill exists and Claude is working from it daily, everything else becomes much easier, you can:

• Produce a tangible output from this strategy work. Turn your strategy into a one-page summary for other teams, or a strategy deck—ask Claude to generate it directly from /marketing-strategy.

• Run faster planning cycles. With your ICPs, advantages, perceptions, and revenue levers already in Claude, developing your Big Bets and KPO goals becomes a conversation instead of a process.

• Build a prioritization skill for your whole team. Paste your current to-do list into Claude alongside your /marketing-strategy skill and ask it to stack-rank everything by strategic fit—surfacing the relevant ICP, perception, advantage, and goal for each item. Save that prompt as its own skill, push it to GitHub, and anyone on your team can run it at any time.

• Explain any decision quickly. When a stakeholder asks why you’re doing something, Claude can articulate the strategic rationale instantly—because it’s already in the skill.

• Share your strategy with partners. Need to brief an agency or co-marketing partner? Ask Claude to generate a tailored summary from /marketing-strategy and cut it down for the audience.

The more consistently you reference the skill and keep it updated, the more useful it becomes.

Share it with your team & update it regularly

You should update your /marketing-strategy skill regularly. If you run the skill and anything feels off, ask Claude to help you make updates so it avoids the same mistakes again. And then share it with your team…

• Right now, most teams are sharing skills over Slack, Google Drive, or email. That works once. Once you update a skill, everyone else is on an old version with no way to know what changed.

• Some teams are using Claude Projects or an Enterprise plan instead.

  • On Team, owners can push skills to all members by default.

  • On Enterprise, admins can provision skills org-wide so they appear for everyone automatically. But teammates can’t share directly with each other without going through an admin.

• GitHub was the clear consensus for sharing skills when we asked on LinkedIn. When a skill lives in a shared repo, every update is versioned, every change is tracked, and teammates can always pull the latest version. GitHub gives everyone that flexibility, regardless of their plan.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Create a private GitHub repo: Call it something like team-claude-skills

2. Add your skill files: Put each SKILL.md in a folder (e.g., /skills/marketing-strategy/SKILL.md)

3. Invite teammates: Settings → Collaborators, add team members

4. Each person adds skills to their Claude setup: In Claude Code, skills in .claude/skills/ are picked up automatically when teammates pull the repo; in Claude Chat or Cowork, they download the .md and upload it to their Skills settings

5. When you update, push the change: In Claude Code, teammates run git pull and they’re current; in Chat or Cowork, they download the updated file and re-upload it to their Skills settings.

You can also just ask Claude: “Help me set up a GitHub repo to share Claude skills with my team. I’m not technical — walk me through it step by step.”

Note: There are many ways to do this, including Claude’s newer plugin feature. It’s worth exploring what setup would work best for your team.

Shortcut for paid subscribers: Install the MKT1 MCP Server

More details are in this newsletter announcing the MCP Server.

What is the MKT1 MCP Server?

The MKT1 MCP Server is live in beta now, and paid subscribers get full access, including all the exercises above. It will help you put everything you read about in this newsletter into action—tracking progress along the way and updating your /marketing-strategy skill for you.

An MCP server (Model Context Protocol server) is a service that connects an LLM (like Claude) to external tools, knowledge, and capabilities—in this case to MKT1 processes, content, skills, etc. Think of it like an integration or API that adds the MKT1 brain to Claude.

Why we built this:

I’ve always thought about MKT1 Newsletter as more than a collection of writing. It’s meant to be a system for running marketing. Templates and resources in Sheets, Docs, Figma, and even Lovable apps were a start.

But with MCP servers, it’s now possible to run your marketing team on the MKT1 Method. You can have your own C-Level Gen Marketer operating inside Claude.

How to install:

Install the MCP server in Claude through your desktop or web app and it will work in Claude Chat, Cowork, or Code. The whole thing takes about 2 minutes. Connect it once, and new skills will show up automatically as we build and deploy them.

Find a walkthrough and by step-by-step-instructions for installing the MKT1 MCP Server here:

Learn how to install the MCP Server

Note: Some versions of Claude, such as Free or Claude Enterprise, may limit access to custom connectors.

While we haven’t thoroughly tested this, it’s also possible to add the MKT1 MCP Server to ChatGPT. Find instructions here.

How to start on your strategy exercise and skill using our MCP Server:

• Once you’ve installed the MKT1 MCP Server, you can ask it what skills it has and also tell it to run the “MKT1 Marketing Strategy Setup” to work through the process in this newsletter.

• This will create your marketing-strategy.md file (that’s your skill) and save it locally to your computer

• It will show you a progress dashboard and walk you through each strategy exercise detailed in this newsletter in the right order

• As you complete each exercise, the output gets saved to your /marketing-strategy skill—and Claude reads it automatically in everytime you pick back up on the marketing strategy setup exercise.

• If you want to skip around on exercises, you can. The setup skill will flag what you missed and suggest going back, but it won’t block you.

• That means when you plan Big Bets, Claude already knows your ICPs, advantages, and perceptions, etc. The exercises compound because they’re all writing to the same place.

• We also have many other skills in our MCP Server that all reference your /marketing-strategy skill if you have one saved.

• The one thing the MCP Server doesn’t do is share this skill with your team, you’ll need to decide how you want to do that (we recommend Github).

Upgrade for full access to the MKT1 MCP Server

Anyone can install our new MCP Server and get access to newsletter content in Claude, but only paid subscribers unlock the full set of skills, including the exercises in this newsletter. Upgrade now to get full access.

Subscribe now

Note: It takes a few minutes for us to register your paid subscription, so if you have any issues installing and authenticating the MCP Server, restart Claude and wait a few minutes before reaching out via our support form.

Conclusion

Right now, most teams are using Claude without a real foundation. They’re prompting into the void, getting something between AI slop and a decent-ish result, and calling it progress. Without a clear marketing strategy underneath, you’re mostly just speeding up random acts of marketing.

Building a /marketing-strategy skill forces you to do the foundational strategy work you may have been putting off, and then makes that work actually usable in your day-to-day.

Your strategy starts to compound when you use your /marketing-strategy skill in daily work, and push updates back into the skill in real time. Your /marketing-strategy skill becomes a true living document that evolves with your business and your marketing work becomes sharper.

Most teams aren’t failing because they lack ideas or effort. They’re failing because their strategy isn’t connected to the work. This is one of the first real ways to fix that.

If you do this right, Claude stops being a place you ask for help and starts becoming the operating system your team actually runs on.

More from MKT1

🙏 Brought to you by: Attio, the AI-native CRM; UserEvidence, for capturing customer proof and building advocates; and Omni Lab, an agency partner for paid media & demand gen. All 3 companies have MKT1 discounts!

👩‍💻 Claude Code Buildathon: Our first-ever Buildathon is on 4/3 at 9am PT / 12pm ET. I’ll show you how to build everything described in this newsletter in Claude Code—while you build along! RSVP now to save your spot.

🗓️ Meet me at Profound’s Zero Click SF event: An exclusive gathering for the world’s top AI Search experts on 4/8/26. Register here »

📦 MKT1 Unboxing: Watch our new video series to see Kramer (that’s me) unbox Mutiny, Wistia, Luma AI, & Attio.

🧰 Template & resource library: We have 100+ templates and resources available to paid subscribers in our template & tool library….

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community (free to post as a paid subscriber). And our candidate form if you’re looking for a new role (option to remain anonymous included!).

But with MCP servers, it’s now possible to run your marketing team on the MKT1 Method. You can have your own C-Level Gen Marketer operating inside Claude.

So we built the MKT1 MCP Server and started adding skills to it. The beta is live now, and while anyone can install & search our newsletter archive, paid subscribers get access to our growing library of skills (15 & counting!).

What’s inside the MKT1 MCP Server

What’s an MCP Server?
An MCP server (Model Context Protocol server) is a service that connects an AI model like Claude to external tools, knowledge, and capabilities. It lets Claude pull in specialized context, instructions, and capabilities on demand.
In this case, think of it like an integration or API that adds the MKT1 brain to Claude.

Once you add the MKT1 MCP Server to Claude, it should work across Claude Chat, Claude Code, and Cowork. Connect it once, and new skills will show up automatically as we build and deploy them.

To explore what’s available, connect the MCP Server, then ask Claude: “What can the MKT1 MCP Server help with?” Detailed instructions below ↓

Paid subscribers can access 15 skills through our MCP Server right now

More coming weekly…if not daily.

• mkt1_marketing_strategy_setup: Helps you build a tailored marketing strategy so Claude can operationalize it (using many of the other skills in the MCP Server).

• mkt1_homepage_positioning_review: Reviews your homepage against the MKT1 positioning framework and tells you what’s working, what’s missing, and what to fix.

• mkt1_candidate_eval: Paste in one or more LinkedIn profiles, add a specific role, and evaluate if candidates are a match, based on MKT1 hiring scorecards.

• mkt1_channel_strategy: Determines the best marketing channel strategy for your startup, based on your company stage, audience, GTM motion, and Marketing Advantages.

• mkt1_marketing_advantages: Helps you identify which Marketing Advantages are unique to your business.

• mkt1_icp_prioritization: Helps you identify your ICPs by company type and role, then prioritize them by maturity.

• mkt1_perceptions: Defines your 3–4 strategic Perceptions to guide your “fuel” strategy. These are the narratives and messages you want your audience to repeat back to you.

• mkt1_company_overview: Researches your company and walks you through documenting your stage, business model, audience, and competitive landscape—the foundational strategy drivers everything else builds on.

• mkt1_positioning: Walks you through the 4 positioning questions (who it’s for, what it is, what you’re comparing it to, and why it’s better) and outputs positioning today vs. positioning in ~1 year.

• mkt1_revenue_levers: Helps you stack-rank the 4 revenue levers based on where marketing can have the biggest impact right now, so you stop trying to do everything at once.

• mkt1_big_bets: Designs 1–3 campaigns that combine your Marketing Advantages, Perceptions, and ICPs into coordinated efforts— ach with fuel, an engine, and a target audience.

• mkt1_gaccs: Describe a campaign, launch, or project and it generates a GACCS Brief so your team is aligned before work starts.

• mkt1_newsletter: Ask any B2B marketing question and it searches the full MKT1 archive to find the most relevant posts. This skill is available for free.

• mkt1_templates: Describe what you’re working on and it finds the right spreadsheets, docs, and interactive tools from the MKT1 library.

How to install the MKT1 MCP Server

For Claude

Install the MCP server in Claude through your desktop or web app and it will work in Claude Chat, Cowork, or Code. The whole thing takes about 2 minutes. Here’s a walkthrough, followed by step-by-step-instructions:

Claude desktop app or web browser

1. Open Claude and click Customize in the left sidebar, then click Connectors. Hit the + button at the top and select Add custom connector.

2. You’ll see two fields.

   1. Name: MKT1

   2. MCP server URL: https://mkt1-mcp.data-1c2.workers.dev/mcp

      
      You can also right click on this button, and select “copy link address”:

Copy MCP Server Link

3. Click Add. The MKT1 MCP Server now shows up in your connectors list under “Not connected.”

4. Click on it, then click Connect. This will open a new window where you enter your MKT1 Newsletter subscription email (your Substack login email). Give it a moment to verify; if it seems to stall, just try again.

   1. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll see all available tools & everything we ship in the future. Upgrade to unlock full access ➜

   2. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to search our newsletter archive.

5. [Optional] Once connected, click on the MKT1 MCP Server in your connectors list and find the Tool permissions dropdown that says “Custom.” Switch it to Always allow. That way Claude can use MKT1 skills without asking your permission every time, which gets old fast.

Note: Some versions of Claude, such as free or certain enterprise plans, may limit access to custom connectors. Talk to your administrator if you don’t see the options above.

Claude Code CLI (not desktop app)

If you use Claude Code from the command line, run:

claude mcp add mkt1-mcp --transport http https://mkt1-mcp.data-1c2.workers.dev/mcp

This connects the MCP Server to your Claude Code configuration. You’ll be prompted to authenticate the first time you use a skill. This will open a new window where you enter your MKT1 Newsletter subscription email (your Substack login email). Give it a moment to verify; if it seems to stall, just try again.

• If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll see all available tools & everything we ship in the future. Upgrade to unlock full access ➜

• If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to search our newsletter archive.

For Claude Enterprise

If your organization uses Claude Enterprise, an admin can make the MKT1 MCP Server available to everyone on the team. Individual users then connect with their own MKT1 subscription email.

Admin setup (one-time) - copy these instructions & send to your Enterprise admin

1. Go to your Claude Admin Settings → Connectors page. Click the + button and select Add custom connector.

2. Fill in these two fields:

   • Name: MKT1

   • MCP server URL: https://mkt1-mcp.data-1c2.workers.dev/mcp

3. Click Add. The MKT1 MCP Server will now appear in the connectors list for all users in your organization.

For each user

1. Open Claude and go to Customize → Connectors. You’ll see MKT1 listed as a custom connector.

2. Click on it, then click Connect. This will open a new window where you enter your MKT1 Newsletter subscription email (your Substack login email). Give it a moment to verify; if it seems to stall, just try again.

   1. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll see all available tools & everything we ship in the future. Upgrade to unlock full access ➜

   2. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to search our newsletter archive.

For ChatGPT (now in alpha)

While we haven’t fully tested this, it is possible to connect the MKT1 MCP Server to ChatGPT. These instructions were verified on 3/19/26 using chatgpt.com with a Plus plan.

1. Click your profile icon → Settings → Apps → Advanced settings. Enable Developer mode (the elevated risk warning is expected), then click Create app.

2. Fill in two fields:

   • Name: MKT1

   • MCP Server URL: https://mkt1-mcp.data-1c2.workers.dev/sse

3. Check the acknowledgment box and click Create.

4. Enter your MKT1 Newsletter subscription email (your Substack login) and click Connect.

   • Paid subscribers get full access to all tools. Upgrade to unlock full access ➜

   • Free subscribers can search our newsletter archive.

5. You’re connected. Start any prompt with mkt1 to use it — for example: mkt1 help me write perceptions

How to use the MKT1 MCP Server

There are no slash commands with an MCP server. Instead, you talk to Claude the way you normally would. Something like:

• “What skills does MKT1 MCP Server have?”

• “Run the MKT1 channel strategy skill”

• “Run MKT1 homepage positioning review on [your URL]”

• “Search MKT1 newsletters for anything on content strategy”

• “Find me a MKT1 template for budgeting”

Claude will pull from the MKT1 MCP Server and run the skill. This just augments how you already use Claude. The skills work with whatever context you give Claude, and the more context you provide about your company, the better the output gets. Upload a doc, paste in competitor info, reference a meeting transcript, etc. to make the skill more effective. The point is to run the MKT1 skills on your specific situation.

If something isn’t working

Just ask Claude: “I have a question about the MKT1 MCP Server.” We built support documentation directly into it, so Claude should be able to help with most common issues. You can ask Claude to reference mkt1_mcp_help to see the FAQs.

Most issues—wrong access tier, missing a new skill, a skill failing to load—are fixed by disconnecting & reconnecting the MCP server and/or restarting Claude. It’s a classic “turn it off and turn it on again” situation! Also, make sure the email you connected with matches your Substack subscription email exactly!

A note if you installed the MKT1 plugin a few weeks ago: It still works for now, but we’re not updating it going forward. The MCP server connector above is simpler and updates automatically. You can keep both, they won’t conflict, but we will likely deprecate the plugin sometime soon.

Feedback and support

We would love your feedback on the skills, but please refer to Claude documentation & the built-in help skill (mkt1_mcp_help) as much as possible for troubleshooting. We are a small team at MKT1, it’s Kramer plus Katie and Halley who work part-time. We are not a tech company with built out support and we are experimenting with ways to enhance your newsletter subscription.

That said, if you have feedback and questions, the best way to reach us is through this MCP Server support form.

Fine print:

You will be asked to approve our Terms of Service when you install this MCP Server. These terms of service state:

• MKT1 AI and the MKT1 MCP Server are currently in beta. Access is included for paid subscribers while we test, improve, and determine next steps. A paid subscription—including an annual subscription—does not guarantee ongoing access to these tools.

• Access to MKT1 AI and the MKT1 MCP Server is for individual use and should not be shared.

• You can use outputs generated by MKT1 and the MKT1 MCP Server in your work, but the underlying frameworks, prompts, and tools remain MKT1 intellectual property.

Subscribe now

Things are escalating quickly around here. I’ve barely slept since the last newsletter. It’s not insomnia. It’s not too much advising. It’s not a booming social life. The truth is, I’ve been Clauding and I can’t stop. And I probably won’t stop.

In my previous newsletter, I introduced the idea of hiring your first marketing agent, from choosing the right agent-building tool to the agents I recommend you build first. In this newsletter, we’re going deeper. I’ll walk you through how marketers are actually building in Claude Code and Claude Cowork.

These newsletters follow my own journey; I’ve been learning and building while writing. Just a couple of weeks ago I was on a basic Claude plan. I thought the LinkedIn discourse was a little overhyped. Then, over one weekend, I upgraded my plan and started building everything I could in Claude Code. I’ve basically recreated my (marketing) brain in skills.

I want you to feel the thrill of Claude Code too. No, it’s not always pretty. I have yelled at Claude (in text, not out loud). Claude Code is a bit rough around the edges for a (previously?) non-technical person. But the shift feels as dramatic as when we all got ChatGPT for the first time.

Part of my journey involved calling three people who started building before me: Elaine, Kamil, and Aditya. I’ll share what we all built in detail, covering 5 builds total (2 by me). Paid subscribers can access the skills I made via our new MCP Server and use them directly in Claude.

I hope this inspires you to go deeper.
Warning: This gets addicting fast, you may want to free up some nights and weekends. Your dogs may get shorter walks. Your partner may get annoyed. You might need to purchase a second computer…

Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

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In this newsletter:

This newsletter is part 2 of 2 in a series about building agents, skills, and automations. You can catch up on the previous newsletter here.

• A quick primer on Claude for marketers: When to use Claude Chat, Cowork, or Code. Plus, a glossary of Claude terms in the appendix.

• How we’re building with Claude: 5 real skills built by 3 marketers and me

  • My homepage positioning checker and marketing advantages skills

  • Elaine Zelby’s customer lookalike outbound agent, connecting Claude Cowork to HubSpot + Clay + Slack + email

  • Aditya Vempaty’s humanizer skill for reviewing AI-generated copy, using Claude Code + Google’s Antigravity

  • Kamil Rextin’s LinkedIn ad competitive intel agent, using Claude Code, deployed via GitHub + Railway + Vercel

• What we wish we knew before building in Claude Code & how to get started

• For paid subscribers: 4 5 6 (as of now) Claude skills based on MTK1 frameworks on our new MCP Server you can plug in directly to Claude. We’ll also be running a Claude Code Hackathon (among other tools) very soon—get on the invite list here.

Subscribe now

Claude decoded*

*Pretty unoriginal wordplay, but I tried?

Claude becomes scary-powerful when connected to your work, desktop, browser, other tools, and data. But it’s confusing to know which version to use when and to learn all the lingo. Even when you ask Claude what its own terms mean, the answers can be unclear or conflicting, which doesn’t help the situation.

That said, I’m not covering everything about Claude today (that would be one very long newsletter), but there’s a glossary in the appendix if you need more guidance. The goal in this newsletter is to give you inspiration!

Choosing the right Claude for the job

“Claude Code is the worst branding…maybe in the history of technology.”
–Kamil Rextin, Founder, 42 Agency

If you’re new to Claude (or haven’t ventured beyond chat), it has 3 main tools: Chat, Cowork, and Code.

Despite the name, Claude Code is not just for coding. I built both of the skills covered below without writing a single line of code. Kamil might have been exaggerating in his quote above (maybe?!), but if Anthropic’s trying to attract marketers the name isn’t helping! We see “code” and think “not for us.” Claude Code does so much more than “code.” It’s like regular Claude, Claude Cowork, and “coding” all wrapped together.

I also asked on LinkedIn how you’re all using Claude Cowork vs Claude Code:

Start by understanding skills

The one thing you should walk away understanding after this newsletter is skills. I’ve spent most of my time in Claude building skills, and they’re incredibly powerful—even without deploying “apps” or layering agentic workflows on top.

What are skills?
Skills are reusable sets of instructions stored as Markdown files (a simple text file format) that Claude pulls into context when triggered. Think of them as structured playbooks Claude can reference automatically.

Where do you build skills?
You can create (and use) simple skills in regular Claude Chat. But if you want file access, tool integrations, or multi-step workflows, it’s better to use Claude Code or Cowork. You can also build skills in other tools like Google’s Antigravity or OpenAI’s Codex and save them as Markdown files.

How do you use skills you or someone else built?
You can add skills to Claude Chat, Cowork, or Code. But there’s no automatic sync between the three Claude products—hopefully soon, Anthropic? You can export a skill as a Markdown file and upload or paste it elsewhere, it just won’t stay updated automatically across tools. It’s honestluy a little messy right now.

Can I build an agent in Claude Cowork or Code?
“Agent” doesn’t mean the same thing in Claude as it does in tools like Relay.app (covered in part 1 of this series). When people say “I built an agent in Claude Code,” they usually mean a skill, plugin, app, or some combination.

The closest thing to true “agent” behavior in Claude is the brand-new scheduled tasks feature in Cowork. For now, to get something you built in Claude Code to run on a schedule, you need to ask Code to help you write a script and then use a tool like GitHub Actions, Vercel, or Relay.app to schedule it.

How we’re building with Claude

I’ll share 2 skills built off my MKT1 frameworks Krameworks. Then I’ll cover what Elaine, Aditya, and Kamil built.

/homepage-positioning-checker skill in Claude Code, built by me

📦 Job to be done: Make sure a B2B startup homepage makes sense to visitors.

⚠️ The problem: I’m constantly frustrated when I land on a B2B homepage and can’t quickly tell who it’s for, what the product actually is, and why it’s better than the alternatives—and I know I’m not alone. I figured if I could help people pressure-test their homepage against my positioning frameworks, maybe we could end this whole situation once and for all?!

🧠 What it does: Type the skill name and any web url (eg. /homepage-positioning “website.ai”) into Claude Code to get the review underway. The skill evaluates the homepage against my MKT1 positioning framework. It scores the hero and full page separately with letter grades, checks whether the core positioning questions are answered, and gives a concrete fixes including rewritten headlines.

🥷 Steal this learning: Ask Claude Code to build a skill, share a framework you like, then test it on real-world examples. This is the fastest path to building really useful skills. For me, I connected Claude Code to my templates and resources folder in Google Drive, gave it real URLs to test the skill against, told it what to fix based on the output, and then asked Claude Code to update the skill. Four rounds of iteration took the skill from 60% to 90%.

Details of my build:

• I asked Claude Code to access relevant MKT1 newsletters & templates on positioning. I had already granted Claude access to my Google Drive, so it already had my templates folder. It sorted through all of them to find the relevant ones.

• First working draft took minutes. It had all the needed details but was long and not structured well—probably because I didn’t give it an example output.

• So I tested it on a real homepage and started giving feedback. I ran it on an advisee’s homepage and immediately saw what needed to change: scannable scoring, evaluation of CTAs, and a diagram to summarize findings for each positioning question.

• I told Claude to fix each thing, it updated the skill, and I ran it on a new site. I did four rounds of revisions across four companies I advise. Through these rounds, I made rules for headline copy length, guidelines for CTAs, and added what should change for early-stage vs. late-stage startups.

• On my last run, Tracksuit’s homepage got an A- on both hero and homepage positioning. I agreed with the assessment it was good enough to share with the marketing team there—that’s when I knew it was working. I was so excited I also shared the results with Katie and Halley on team MKT1, my first skill for MKT1 subscribers, check…on to the next.

/marketing-advantages skill in Claude Code, built by me

📦 Job to be done: Help marketers build a strategy based on their product, business model, and market.

⚠️ The problem: I wanted a way for subscribers to identify and pressure-test their Marketing Advantages™. I constantly remind marketers to focus on accelerating real advantages instead of defaulting to random acts of marketing. But that’s easier said than done.

🧠 What it does: I built the /marketing-advantages skill with two phases. The “Identify” phase walks you through four rounds of questions to surface your top 2–4 advantages from my 12 Marketing Advantage categories. The “Review” phase lets you paste in your stated advantages and pressure-tests them for specificity, maturity, and strength. It forces clarity on whether something is actually a catalyst for growth or just a tactic dressed up as strategy.

🥷 Steal this learning: Building skills for review processes is an amazing place to start with Claude Code. So many of us already use ChatGPT or Claude to review copy, strategy, or plans. But turning those review processes into a structured skill is even more effecive. I really wish I had this when I was leading marketing teams and spending two hours every night reviewing everything from copy to strategy to campaign plans. Aditya built a skill like this too, more on that later in the newsletter.

Details of my build:

• It was faster to get started this time, because Claude already had access to my Google Drive and knew how to pull relevant newsletters & templates. (Claude often remembers what you’ve taught it, but sometimes you still need to remind it or reference prior skills.)

• The first draft was too generic and not what I’d actually ask an advisee to help them figure out their advantages, so I just gave Claude Code better questions, the same way I’d talk to regular Claude.

• After a few runs, I noticed the reviews weren’t reliably surfacing two important advantages: network effects or proprietary data. So I added explicit questions to force that analysis.

• The first phase to identify advantages was 90% there. So I built the second phase. Building incrementally like this works well.

• I validated the skill against a real submission from my recent Gen Marketer course and compared it to my original written feedback. It landed on the same core insight I had, a good sign.

• Doing the review work manually first and then comparing it was really effective. So, I fed the skill more reviews of marketing advantages I did for students in my course. I probably should have started by giving these examples; you live you learn.

• I briefly considered turning skill into a web app, which would require other tools, API access, and ongoing costs. Then I decided I should just share the skill file directly with paid subscribers without hosting anything (and then we later decided to build an MCP Server to ship them to you automatically). More on how to upgrade a skill to a full web app in Kamil’s breakdown below.

Get the MKT1 MCP Server:
Run MKT1 frameworks in Claude Code & Cowork

Our new MKT1 MCP Server is live in beta (anyone can install, but paid subscribers get full access). Get the 2 Claude skills I built above, plus make GACCS briefs, find your best growth channels, search MKT1 newsletters & templates, and more.

Get the MKT1 MCP Server

/customer-lookalike-outbound in Claude Cowork, built by Elaine

Elaine Zelby is the co-founder of Tofu and a former marketer. She built this in Claude Cowork, connecting it to HubSpot, Clay, Slack, and email.

“A skill is literally knowledge that Claude now has. I think of a skill as a tool in a tool belt. You have your hammer, your wrench, your screwdriver. Skills are just different tools you use for different situations.” –Elaine Zelby, co-founder of Tofu

📦 Job to be done: Find lookalike accounts from closed-won deals and reach out to them.

⚠️ The problem: Your closed-won deals already contain the pain points, objections, ROI story, and the attributes of the right accounts and contacts. Yet we rarely operationalize that insight. Elaine wanted a system that continuously turns closed-won context into tailored outreach.

🧠 What it does: Every week, Elaine’s /customer-lookalike-outbound “agent” looks at deals that moved to closed-won in HubSpot. It pulls structured call data from the CRM, identifies 10 lookalike companies based on the attributes of those deals and her ICP definition, finds 3–5 contacts per company using Clay, drafts a 4-email sequence plus LinkedIn DMs for each contact, and sends drafts into Slack for the team to review.

🥷 Steal this learning: Before building agents, build foundational skills. Elaine created reusable skills for ICP, personas, messaging, and product information first. Those became the building blocks for this skill. Once you have that base knowledge structured in Claude, assembling agents becomes much easier and more consistent.

Details of Elaine’s build:

• Elaine added HubSpot, Clay, Slack, and email to Cowork. She used the official Claude Connectors, so it has API access (not just browser access). This way, the “agent” is reliable enough to run unattended.

• She went piece by piece, making sure her workflow accesses closed-won deals in HubSpot first. Then, she prompted the skill to find lookalike accounts and contacts in Clay. Next, she scheduled it to share drafts in Slack.

• Since she built in Cowork, she could schedule it to run weekly without an external scheduler (you can’t do this in Code yet). Each run looks at deals that moved to Closed-Won in the last 7 days.

• On each run, Cowork pulls call transcripts from HubSpot (originally recorded in Sybill). Because Sybill already fills in structured CRM fields like situation and pain, Claude has richer context to work with. So, the outbound drafts are very close to sendable each time.

• Elaine evolved the output over time. It started as a manually downloaded CSV; now it’s delivered in Slack so the GTM team sees it in their normal workflow. She hasn’t automated outbound sending yet, as she’s intentionally keeping a human in the loop.

• Her advice: When things break, keep talking to Claude. If something isn’t updating or a file isn’t where it should be, have Claude walk you through fixing it.

  

“The thing I’d recommend people do immediately before they build any kind of agent is create three skills: Number one, ICP. Number two, personas. Number three, messaging.” –Elaine Zelby, co-founder of Tofu

/humanizer skill in Claude Code, built by Aditya

Aditya Vempaty is VP of Marketing at MoEngage, a Series F customer engagement platform. He builds in Antigravity and Claude Code, running Anthropic’s Opus under the hood in both.

“Claude Code does a job. Chat does a job. I honestly don’t understand what Cowork is for. It feels like the odd one out. They’re all in the same UI, but you still have to move files around to keep context, which is frustrating.” –Aditya Vempaty, VP of Marketing at MoEngage

📦 Job to be done: Catch and fix AI-sounding copy before it goes out.

⚠️ The problem: When AI writes copy, it sounds like AI wrote it, no matter how hard you try to get it not to. You can layer in brand guidelines, tone instructions, and examples, but the output can still feel slightly off. Instead of endlessly tweaking prompts, Aditya wanted a way to review near-final drafts, check the “AI-ness” of it, and fix it systematically.

🧠 What it does: The /humanizer skill scores drafts, flags specific patterns making the piece feel AI-generated, and rewrites the draft in Aditya’s voice.

🥷 Steal this learning: Every time you use a skill (which again is just a .md file), ask Claude Code what it learned and to update the skill accordingly. That way, with every use the skill gets sharper.

🎰 Steal these credits! If you’re throttling your AI costs, you can get creative like Aditya. He uses credits in AntiGravity running Anthropic’s Opus then ports the finished .md skill file into Claude Code later.

“When I first started running into credit limits in Claude, I did something kind of funny. Antigravity can also run Opus and gives you a bunch of credits for $20/month, so I started building the skills there and then porting the .md file into Claude. It basically gives me double the Opus credits without having to pay $120.”
–Aditya

Aditya’s happy to share his skill, just follow & DM him ➜

Details of Aditya’s build:

• Aditya started by collecting a few paragraphs of his own writing that actually sounded like him. Those became the baseline for the Humanizer.

• He didn’t want a simple rewrite like regular Claude might give you. So he defined four scoring categories (AI likeness, authenticity, reader value, domain credibility), each on a 1–10 scale.

• The skill scores first, diagnoses what’s driving the scores (things like overly structured formatting, generic transitions, predictable phrasing), then rewrites.

• After a new draft runs through /humanizer, he gives Claude feedback. Then he asks Claude Code how the skill itself should be updated. If Claude identifies a new pattern that wasn’t previously codified, it adds it to the skill.

“In Claude, you don’t always know when an agent ran or what it’s actually doing. Antigravity shows me what’s happening from opening tabs to pulling data. That gives me context and confidence. If something’s off, I can rewind and see exactly where it went wrong.” –Aditya Vempaty, VP of Marketing at MoEngage

/LinkedIn-ad-intel in Claude Code, built by Kamil

Kamil Rextin is Founder of 42 Agency. He builds in Claude Code and deploys agents to run on the web using GitHub, Vercel, and Railway.

“For complex projects, I’ve learned not to just jump right in. I use Plan mode in Claude Code to map out the output first. Once that looks right, I switch and let it execute step by step.” –Kamil Rextin, Founder of 42 Agency

📦 Job to be done: Turn publicly available competitor ad data into a structured, ongoing intelligence report.

⚠️ The problem: One of the most common AI use cases is gathering competitive intel, but the output is usually generic. Meanwhile, the LinkedIn Ad Library is hiding in plain sight. It’s free, covers the last 12 months of ads, and in B2B it’s one of the highest-signal places to see how competitors are approaching performance marketing, positioning, and brand. The catch: It’s manual, scroll-based, and impossible to track over time. Kamil wanted to automate it and get updates on what’s changed.

🧠 What it does: Run the /LinkedIn-ad-intel agent with anyURL and it first pulls a list of competitors using his pre-made /competitors skill. Then it scrapes each company’s LinkedIn ads, analyzes messaging themes, and tracks ad volume.

🥷 Steal this learning: Kamil didn't stop at building a skill to run from his desktop. He built a true agent; one that runs on a schedule and delivers results automatically. That required going beyond Claude Code and deploying to infrastructure: GitHub to store and version the code, Vercel or Railway to host and run it. It’s a bit technical, but Claude Code can help you do it.

Download the skill here & a sample report here ➜

Details of Kamil’s build:

• He starts in Plan mode to map out the output before writing any code. Once the plan looks right, he switches to 'Ask Permission' mode and lets Claude execute step by step. This screenshot shows you how:

  

• Kamil previously built a /competitors skill that pulls every competitive company from G2 and TrustRadius. The /LinkedIn-ad-intel agent calls that skill first, stacking skills on top of each other.

• LinkedIn scraping sometimes breaks due to JavaScript restrictions. When that happened, he went back to Plan mode. Claude inspected its own implementation, identified missing retry logic, and proposed fixes.

• Once the agent worked, he pushed the code to GitHub, so it lives in the cloud (not just on his laptop) and he can share it with his team and clients.

• He also set up Railway and Vercel to host his agents. He did this in his browser directly since it’s easier and faster than creating accounts directly in Claude.

• Once the accounts were set up, he connected everything from inside Claude Code by asking it to configure the integrations. By connecting Vercel and Railway to GitHub, he only has to push to GitHub for everything to be updated.

• Railway runs the agent on a schedule via cron jobs (a cron job is just a scheduled task, like “run every Monday at 9am”).

• He later decided to expand what he built to include Meta and Google ad libraries, not just LinkedIn. Starting with just LinkedIn Ads made the build process more manageable.

• The output is a branded PDF report, generated automatically in about 5 mins. Here’s an example for Sierra.ai:

“If your computer isn’t on and your terminal isn’t running, a Claude Code agent can’t run. If you want it hosted on the web, instead of being just on your laptop, you need to deploy it.” –Kamil Rextin, Founder of 42 Agency

Join the first MKT1 Buildathon on 4/3

We’re planning a live buildathon series with the creators and power users of some of our favorite AI tools.

Our first session will be on 4/3/26, hosted by me—we’ll be building a marketing strategy skill in Claude Code.

RSVP now

What we wish we knew before building in Claude Code

The first time…

• Block 2–3 hours for setup. The first time you use Claude Code, plan for it to take a while. Connecting your Google Drive, enabling connectors, granting permissions, figuring out where files live, testing what it can and can’t access, that’s not instant. Block real time for this. Once it’s wired up, it gets dramatically faster.

• Set up a CLAUDE.md file, a standing set of instructions for how you want to interact with Claude, used across all sessions. Type /init to generate one, then add your technical level, preferred approach, and anything you find yourself repeating.

• Build your marketing foundations as skills first. Skills are the compounding layer everything else works off of. So, take time upfront to add skills for your ICP, voice, positioning, GTM motion, etc. (everything in the Marketing Decision Dashboard).

• Claude doesn’t know what Claude can do. It will tell you it can’t browse the web, access a connector, or run something in the desktop app. For how-to-Claude questions, you can ask it to check the “product-self-knowledge” skill that references Anthropic’s docs. In general, if you think Claude is wrong, push back (you won’t hurt its feelings, it’s not human…or is it?!)

Keep going…

• Turn your frameworks and processes into skills. For instance, If you can articulate how you evaluate a draft or share how you created a report step-by-step, that’s a skill. Start with review processes and frameworks you already use. Then run them consistently, share them with your team, and build on top of them.

• Use Plan mode before you “build.” For anything complex, map the output before you let Claude start executing. Confirm the structure, then switch to “ask permission” mode and let it run. This saves credits, reduces chaos, and forces clarity on what you’re actually building.

• Iterate on real examples, not hypotheticals. The first version of everything you build will be solid, but not perfect. Run the skill on actual companies, copy, or deals. Compare the output to what you would have done manually, tell Claude exactly what’s missing, and update the skill.

• The best way to budget time for Claude Code: Build skills in the flow of work. Next time you’re doing a repeat task and have 20-30 extra minutes, like drafting emails or pulling quotes form a transcript, add a little extra time and codify your thinking into a skill.

Appendix: Claude Code terminology

Here’s my best attempt at a glossary to explain all the terms you’ll encounter when connecting and setting things up in Claude Code.

• Integration: Not an official term, just what people say when Claude is connected to something. Could mean any of the below.

• MCP (Model Context Protocol): The “shared language” Anthropic created that lets LLMs, AI applications, external tools, and data connect to each other. Now an industry-wide standard not limited to Anthropic—like a USB-C port, but for AI.

• MCP server: Something a company or developer builds to give AI secure access to their tool’s data and actions. In other words, anything someone builds that speaks MCP. You can add them to “your” Claude (or other LLMs) manually if you have the URL.
  Get access to the MKT1 MCP Server here ➜

• Connector: MCP servers that Anthropic has vetted and packaged for one-click enabling. There are thousands of MCP servers out there, but Connectors are the approved ones you can add instantly.

Used in a sentence: Anthropic built MCP a while back and now they have lots of “integrations” built by developers; for examples, Asana, Slack, Stripe, and Figma have built MCP servers that Anthropic approves and packages into the Settings menu as Connectors, and MKT1 built a custom MCP Server that you can add via URL.

• Skill: We covered this one, but to reiterate…A saved set of instructions and playbooks in a markdown file for Claude (or other AI platforms).
  Example: “Grade my homepage copy against the /MKT1 positioning framework.”

• Plugin: A bundle of skills, connectors, and/or commands packaged up that you can add to Claude. If Claude is your team, it’s like hiring someone new to join the team. You, your company, or third-party developers can all build and share them — Anthropic even has an official directory.
  Examples: Anthropic has pre-built plugins for Marketing

• Command: A /shortcut you type to trigger a saved workflow, skills, or connector. Example: Type /release-notes→ Claude runs this Anthropic-built skill

• Apps & Extensions: Ways to bring Claude into other places you work; not bring other tools into Claude.
  Examples: Claude Desktop for Mac, Claude for Excel
  

  Note: This is a V1 glossary, updated on 3.1.26. Claude is changing regularly and it’s very hard to get a simple definition for these terms, even from Claude. Please let me know in the comments if anything seems off.

Happy Claude Coding! Can’t wait to run some hackathons to help you learn, join the invite list here.

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We’re all hearing the word “agent” more lately. And if you read what’s on LinkedIn, you’d think most m teams have 100 agents doing 90% of our marketing work and spending their whole day in Claude Code. In reality, many marketers I know are still figuring out the difference between workflow automation, chatbots, copilots, and agents. And the vast majority are just dipping their toes in agent building, with varying degrees of success.

No matter where you fall in this spectrum, the time is now to get a handle on how AI can actually automate work for you, Agents represent a real shift in what AI can do, and I think every marketer should be learning to build them right now. Agent-building can be a frustrating and computer draining process, but things are improving quickly. The gap between teams that figure this out and those that don’t is about to get very wide, very fast.

Agents run work on your behalf, in the background, without you initiating every action. An agent monitors your competitors overnight and drops a report in Slack by morning. It watches for job changes at your target accounts and drafts outreach before you’ve had coffee. It takes your webinar recording and turns it into five draft LinkedIn posts without you asking.

If you’ve been following thinking on the new role and skillset I’m calling the “Gen Marketer,” you understand why. Marketers need to use AI to move with increased velocity, learn faster, and run leaner. That way, you can focus on your time on creating work that stands out from the increasingly noisy pack.

I’ve been building and experimenting with agents myself, but I wanted to bring in someone who sees what hundreds of marketers are building. So I phoned a friend: Jacob Bank, Founder & CEO of Relay.app. After watching him wow students in my course with agent knowledge and skills, I knew he’d be able to help MKT1 readers too. So, this newsletter is based on my conversations with Jacob.

In this newsletter:

Part 1 - This newsletter: Learn how to build marketing agent “teammates”

• WTF is an agent? How is different than an automated workflow? Can’t Claude do all of this?

• How to build your an agent you actually ship by thinking in job descriptions, not prompts

• 4 agents every marketing team should create, plus descriptions you can plug into your agent builder of choice

Part 2 - Next week’s newsletter: How 3 marketers built 3 agents step-by-step
This upcoming newsletter will dive a bit deeper on how to build agents in specific tools, step by step.

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Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

Attio just shipped Ask Attio, and it makes other CRMs feel outdated. Search, update, and create with AI in one prompt. Ask Attio anything: update fields and stages, run company research, or prep for meetings with full context. (And yes, Attio is MKT1’s CRM).

🎁 Offer: Try Ask Attio for free.
—
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🎁 Offer: Reach out to Closing Media here & mention MKT1 to get $5,000 of free ad spend for your next campaign.
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Wistia: Wistia is a one-stop video marketing shop. I’ve used them for 10+ years starting with video hosting, and now they cover recording, editing, webinars, and social clips. Wistia’s LLM embeds make videos AEO-ready, helping AI tools understand your transcripts and content.

📦 MKT1 Unboxing: Watch me unbox Wistia with Co-founder Chris Savage: How to make video embeds LLM-friendly, their new remix feature, their webinars product, and more.

A quick break to unbox Mutiny

Mutiny’s brand new AI agent is here. They did the heavy lifting to build the perfect agent for marketing and sales teams to create on-brand, shippable assets using your company’s data and context. Think case studies, business cases, 1:1 landing pages–anything customer facing. I chatted with Jaleh Rezaei, CEO & Co-Founder, who gave me a live demo in our latest MKT1 Unboxing video.

Some highlights from this unboxing and discussion with Jaleh:

• How to build ABM landing pages & business cases that automatically pull in your brand, your sales calls and account history, and link to existing content—in a single prompt.

• How to put an end to the sales request queue by starting from pre-built Mutiny blueprints or saving your own work to create templates for your team.

• How to measure success of assets built in Mutiny, hint: you can see person-level data for every asset, so no more wondering if that enablement asset actually got used and seen.

• Why Jaleh is so focused on bringing sales & marketing closer together and why we think velocity is the most important metric for marketers now.

Join the Mutiny waitlist to get 30 days free with unlimited AI usage »

About MKT1 Unboxing: A series of 30-minute demos + conversations where I (Emily Kramer) unbox marketing and GTM tools—no slides, no scripts, no sales pitch. Just real tools, real workflows, and real talk. The goal: help you find AI tools worth using.

And now, time to build your first marketing agent…

Part 1: WTF is an agent?

“Agents are a totally different way of thinking about work. An agent is not a place that you go to do work. An agent is a doer of work.” – Jacob Bank, founder of Relay.app

An agent is an AI that gets work done for you. It can reason and take action on its own. Think less “assistant I talk to” and more “junior teammate who handles their own to-do list.” You set the parameters, but the agent figures out how to approach the task, uses the tools available to it, and moves toward the outcome.

But everyone defines “agent” a bit differently. It’s admittedly a little confusing—I found myself getting stuck on definitions and what’s what when writing this very newsletter (even with the help of conversations from Jacob). We have tools to help us build AI agents and workflows. We have whole companies dedicated to building a purpose-built AI agent for you. We have the big AI companies building agent builders.

That said, most definitions of an AI agent converge around three characteristics: agents are outcome-focused, reason and plan across steps, and integrate with other tools.

How does an AI agent compare to a chatbot or workflow automation?

“We’re at the beginning of a complete phase shift in how people think about productivity tools. A productivity tool forever has been a place where I go to click buttons and do work…But an increasing amount of the work we get done will be through workflows and agents that are doing that work automatically.” – Jacob Bank, founder of Relay.app

To me, an agent feels like a chatbot and a workflow automation came together… and made a super-kid. “With those tools, you are the operator. But with agents, you are the manager. You set them up, review their output, and train them over time,” explained Jacob.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of what all this nomenclature means:

• An LLM is the underlying model (GPT-4)

• A chatbot is an interface built on top of an LLM. You ask it something, it responds (ChatGPT, Claude)

• A copilot (or embedded AI agent) lives inside a product you already use. It assists you in using the tool and is powered by an LLM. More sophisticated versions can take action inside that system. Think “Ask Attio” inside Attio’s CRM.

• A rule-based workflow automation is triggered by predefined rules and executes actions across tools. It follows explicit if/then logic. These don’t necessarily use an LLM, though they can. Think Zapier in its pre-AI era.

• An AI agent uses an LLM for reasoning, like a chatbot or copilot. It acts across tools and systems, like a workflow automation. Unlike traditional workflow automations, it doesn’t just follow fixed rules—it can interpret context, decide next steps, and work toward an outcome.

And here’s a comparison for understanding what an AI agent actually is (and isn’t):

Part 2: How to build your first agent

I know what you’re thinking: this sounds cool, but I’m not technical enough to build agents. But luckily, you don’t need to know JSON, webhooks, or advanced automation to build an agent. Back to the teammate metaphor: If you can write a job description for a new hire, build a step-by-step workflow in any tool, and use an LLM, you can definitely build an agent.

There are 3 phases here: Pick a task, build your agent, and refine your agent. I’ll walk you through each one.

Phase 1: Pick a task, hire an agent

1. Identify the task

While agents can do multi-function workflows, it’s best to start with something simple. Think of a task that takes manual or repetitive effort. I start by thinking about the things I’m already doing in a few categories:

1. What am I already asking LLMs to do regularly? This usually means generating or editing content. For me, it’s editing a LinkedIn post or writing YouTube descriptions. Can I turn this into an agent with better inputs and less manual cleanup?

2. What processes am I doing in other tools that feel manual? We all log into tools and do the same things over and over again. For me, that’s finding the right people to invite to events or cleaning up screenshots before sharing them. Could an agent run this workflow end-to-end?

3. What research could I do more frequently or in more depth? We all say we want to do more research on our audience, competitors, partners, market, trends, top prospects, etc., but it’s hard to keep up. For me, this could be tracking what advisees’ competitors are doing, monitoring what B2B startup marketers are discussing across communities, or analyzing call recordings for content ideas. Could an agent handle the scanning and summarizing so I can act on it more regularly?

2. Write an agent spec (like it’s a job description)

Once you have an idea, make sure your agent’s first task has a measurable deliverable, something like: “Pull out three potential clips from this webinar transcript.”

Think of this like writing a simple job description: Start with a descriptive agent name and write a short list of responsibilities. You’ll then feed this into your agent building process.

Jacob described this as “A good responsibility tells the agent what-when-how,”, specifically:

• What work should the agent do

• When they should do it

• How they should do it, including how they should deliver the final output

Phase 2: Build the agent

3. Pick a tool to build your agent

There are a lot of options for building agents right now. Some are more autonomous, others are more structured. Some are triggered automatically when something happens behind the scenes (e.g. a new contact enters your CRM). Others are activated by you each time (e.g. by prompting them directly, even via text message, like in the very trendy OpenClaw). Some are pre-built and productized, and you buy them off the shelf. Most teams will end up using all three: autonomous tools for discovery and one-off work, structured systems for the workflows that matter most, and productized agents for the most time-saving, repeatable work.

But you don’t need to overthink this if just getting started, the goal is to try to build something! I find lots of marketers overthink what’s the best tool, and it prevents them from building.

Here’s how I think about the landscape right now:

Autonomous agents like the newish Claude Cowork, let you describe a goal and they figure out the path.

• You point them at a folder or tool, tell them what you need, and they determine the steps in real time.

• But, despite the label “autonomous,” you typically need to activate these agents each time; they don’t just run continuously in the background by default.

• These are powerful for exploratory work or tasks where the process isn’t predictable. (I’m also running this stuff on a second computer, because they are slow!)

Structured agent builders like Relay.app, Zapier, or n8n work differently.

• You define the available tools, triggers, and logic upfront.

• You determine if you want them to run automatically based on a trigger or at your command.

• The agent operates within those boundaries, often with human-in-the-loop controls and explicit error handling.

• These are better when you need repeatability, visibility, approval workflows, or something that runs reliably at scale.

Productized agents (like Mutiny) are pre-built and robust.

• You’re not designing the logic; the company has already defined the job and built the workflows.

• These can be more refined and “sturdy” than something you build yourself, especially for well-defined, common use cases.

And no matter which you choose, use ChatGPT or Claude (the non-Cowork version) to help you research what to build, where to build it, and how to build it. This path is (usually) cheaper than going straight into tools and saves you some major headaches.

4. Build the agent

Now take the “job description” you wrote in step 2 and actually build the agent.

In most tools, there’s a prompt box or setup screen where you can paste in your agent spec. Start there. The platform will usually guide you through the next steps—connecting tools, defining triggers, choosing models, or setting output formats.

Most modern builders have a built-in co-pilot that asks follow-up questions and helps you fill in gaps. You don’t need to architect everything upfront. You respond, refine, and move forward.

The process is often more guided than you expect.

Here’s an example of what this might look like…

Phase 3: Refine your agent

5. Ship it and improve it

Once you’ve got a minimum viable version working, publish your agent and let it run on real tasks. You’ll learn far more from seeing it operate in the wild than from endlessly tweaking it in setup mode.

Most tools provide logs, error messages, and step-by-step visibility to help you understand what went wrong. Use that feedback to tighten the instructions, clarify the output format, or adjust the logic.

If things are breaking, explain the problem to an LLM and have it help you debug, start again with a prebuilt template, or go simpler. E.g. Instead of building a social media monitoring agent across multiple channels (like in my example above), have it monitor just one.

6. Build more

Keep going! Once you build one, you’ll start getting ideas for more on the regular. Go try to build those too. Maybe someday you’ll end up like a person on LinkedIn saying they’ve automated 40% of their job, but know that’s not the reality for most…yet.

I have a lot of 75% done agents that I don’t go back and finish. I don’t have any great advice here, I usually go back to them when I am doing the thing manually again and fix them. I think this is the reality for most people here. You only actually ship and use a small percentage.

“If you were hiring a new competitive analyst, you would not write them a thousand-word document about what you want them to do. You’d say, ‘Hey, look at our competitor YouTube videos and send me a report, tell me if there’s anything interesting.’ And then they’d give you the report and you’d say, ‘Focus more on this, focus less on this.’ And that’s exactly how you should work with your AI agent.” – Jacob Bank, founder of Relay.app

But what about “Agent Swarms” and “Parallel Agents”?

You may see a lot of people talking about multi-agent systems, meaning agents coordinating with each other, running in parallel, forming little AI “teams.” Tools like Antigravity and CrewAI are built for exactly that.

I think in most cases we may be getting our head out over our skis (have I been watching too much Winter Olympics with this phrase)?

Short answer: Yes, some marketers are building those, but that’s not where most teams should start.

When you’re getting started, focus on outputs. Pick one clearly defined task with a tangible deliverable (a competitor brief, a repurposed content draft, a weekly report). Build an agent that owns that job end-to-end. Let it produce something visible in a shared system: a Google Doc in Drive, a Slack message, a CRM update.

If and when you add another agent, don’t over-engineer coordination. Have it work off the output of the first one (that Google Doc, for instance). One agent creates a doc; another reviews or enriches it. One pulls data into a sheet; another analyzes it. They don’t need to “talk” directly. They can collaborate through shared artifacts, just like humans working in the same tools.

Start with one job, and let agents collaborate through shared systems. You’re still ahead of the game if you do this, I promise.

“If you’re wondering how multiple agents work together, it’s just like people! They send each other emails and Slack message, collaborate on the same Google Docs, etc, so you don’t need to think about a totally new concept of an “agent swarm.” – Jacob Bank, founder of Relay.app

4 marketing agents you can build right now

“In general, the rule that I found is for a purely hands on keyboard knowledge work task…an AI agent can do 50 to 90% of what a great human employee can do.” –Jacob Bank, founder of Relay.app

Here are 4 “popular” ideas for agents that most B2B marketing teams could use. You can find more in this LinkedIn post I did this week, template libraries from various agent-building tools, or by asking an LLM.

You can copy and paste these “job descriptions” directly into a tool (like Relay.app) to start building your own version. Or make these your own. The beauty of any AI workflow is it can be fully customized to your needs. So use these templates as a starting point or a first experiment to understand what’s possible, and iterate from there.

1. Competitive intelligence agent

Most marketers deprioritize or shortcut competitive intel because it takes so much time (and because we’re burned out from “battle card” requests from sales). Build an agent instead! A competitive agent is an easy one to start with because it runs entirely on public data, and doesn’t need internal permissions.

• What: Scan competitor websites, LinkedIn, YouTube, press releases, job boards, and G2 reviews for new features, pricing updates, positioning shifts, key hires, and funding announcements.

• When: Weekly on Monday morning (or daily if your industry is super-competitive or fast-moving).

• How: Deliver a structured report to Slack or email. Highlight what changed since the last run and flag anything that could impact positioning, campaigns, or sales conversations.

• Add context: Add a step that pulls in your positioning from Google Docs, Notion, etc. and prompt the agent to assess competitor changes against those claims.

• Related agents: Competitor pricing tracker or a product feature comparison agent that maintains a live feature matrix

Analyze complements, not just competitors. Leveraging the trust and credibility of 3rd-party partners, aka ecosystem marketing, is a very effective way to grow right now. So don’t stop at competitive research. Create an agent to analyze the latest from potential partners, influencers, analysts, etc with the same intentionality you would competitors.

2. Content repurposing agent

Most teams create strong fuel and then don’t extract enough mileage from it. Not because they don’t want to, but because repurposing takes time and mental energy. Since the source material is your own content, the quality floor is significantly higher than generating content from scratch. This is one of the easiest, highest-ROI agents to build.

• What: Take new long-form content (webinars or podcast transcripts, newsletters, a successful longer-form LinkedIn post), and repurpose it into social posts.

• When: Triggered automatically when new content is published or uploaded.

• How: Deliver a set of draft posts to a Doc or directly to your social platform channel for review.

• Add context: Feed the agent your brand voice guide, target persona definitions, past social posts with data, and current social goals, so it aligns with what you’re actually trying to drive.

• Related agents: Full recording to clip transcript extractor, customer quote library builder, evergreen content resurfacing agent

3. Social listening agent

You can’t manually monitor every place your brand or category gets mentioned. Agents are great at monitoring conversations happen in LinkedIn comments, Slack groups, Reddit threads, and X replies, especially when given a few keywords to monitor. This agent helps you know what people are saying, and can chime in when needed.

• What: Monitor specific mentions of your company across LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack communities, X, and relevant forums. (I think it’s best to start by choosing one platform at a time).

• When: Real-time alerts for high-priority mentions (so you can engage in a timely way) plus weekly reports.

• How: Deliver a concise digest to Slack that prioritizes mentions based on: Posts from high-reach or high-authority accounts, posts gaining engagement quickly, mentions tied to priority topics. Show the highest-impact opportunities first.

• Add context: Pull in focus keywords or topic, brand name variations, and top influencers or creators in your space.

• Related agents: Executive name mention tracker, partner mention alert agent, target account mention agent.

4. Growth analyst agent

Automate the jobs a strong growth marketer does every day: check HubSpot, look at email performance, scan ad accounts, and figure out what actually needs attention. The problem is that analytics live in different systems, and most teams don’t have the time to synthesize dashboards daily. You can also have the agent share updates with the whole team so everyone has visibility into what’s changing.

• What: Pull data from HubSpot, your email platform, ad accounts, and anywhere your marketing analytics exist. Share daily KPIs and flag meaningful shifts.

• When: Send a daily KPI snapshot, with a more detailed weekly trend summary.

• How: Deliver a short update to Slack or email that includes: Core KPIs vs target and last week notable changes or anomalies, 1–2 areas that likely need investigation

• Add context: Pull in your KPI targets and quarterly goals from your planning spreadsheet so the agent evaluates performance against your actual goals.

• Related agents: Pipeline quality monitor that tracks conversion rates, paid campaign monitor, Forecast vs. actuals agent

More examples of things people have actually built from this LinkedIn post’s comments:

Account research & outreach agents

• Cold outreach agent with ICP mapping, research, and email composition

• Customer lookalike agent pulling HubSpot data, finding similar companies via Clay, personalizing email sequences and LinkedIn DMs

• Weekly database scanners for high-intent signals with ICP lead enrichment

• Case study opportunity detector (or just use Mutiny!)

Content creator agents

• Executive POV miner (pulls themes from sales calls, customer interviews)

• A blog post generator that pulls in the latest news each week

• Landing page creation agent trained on brand guidelines

• Resource hub built and updated by agents

• Podcast guest research agent

Social media manager agents

• LinkedIn page management

• Content insights from top voices

• LinkedIn post topic finder

Research agents

• Trademark clearance agent for agency that does naming

• Research agent synthesizing audience signals, competitor posts, and content pillars into prioritized ideas

• Conference opportunity analyzer

Productivity agents:

• Job board scraper and poster

• Draft intro emails directly in Gmail by sharing LinkedIn profiles

More tips from my workshop with Jacob

Here are some things to keep in mind as you build:

Use LLMs to help you build agents.
Describe the job to ChatGPT or Claude and have it help you break the work into steps, anticipate edge cases, and refine instructions. I rarely build in any AI tool without an LLM helping me plan & write prompts as I go.

Design for reliability before scale.
A lot of the questions during my session with Jacob came down to trust. How do you know which model to use? What about subtle logic errors?

The answer isn’t finding the perfect prompt, it’s constraining the system. Start by defining the exact structure of the output. Don’t just ask for “three clips” or “a competitor summary.” Specify the fields you expect. Most modern platforms support structured outputs, which force the model to return content in a predefined format. That constraint dramatically reduces formatting drift and vague answers.

Check your work with another agent.
People are always concerned about hallucinations, and rightfully so. For higher-stakes work, use a simple writer + checker pattern: one pass generates, a second pass audits against a short checklist or your definition of done before it ships.

Security, cost, and access, concerns are valid
Treat permissions like you would with a new hire, begin with read-only access, limit what the agent can change, and expand write access only after you’ve seen it behave well on real inputs.

The same discipline applies to cost. Keep scopes bounded and steps explicit so the agent doesn’t wander. Open-ended tool use and retries are what make usage unpredictable.

For this reason, I’m less likely to use a brand new unestablished tool that might be hot that day. And if your company doesn’t give access to all tools, you may be able to start with basic productivity tasks that require less tool access.

Don’t create another place to go. Treat agents like teammates, not tools to visit.
If your agent lives in its own interface, you’ll forget it exists. The best agents deliver work into systems you already use (Slack, Drive, your CRM, your project tracker) just like a teammate would. And remember, you can use one agent’s output (a Google Doc, a Slack message, a spreadsheet) as another agent’s input.

Relatedly, I find that setting every agents output to daily seems like a good idea when setting it up, but is overly ambitious. I’m not actually going to look at if a competitor changed their customer’s page daily, so don’t add the extra noise!

How agents fit into modern marketing teams

“Whenever you’re in doubt about how you should work with an agent, just think about how you’d work with a person. Write a job description like you would for a teammate. Assign tasks like you would to a teammate. Review and edit the work like you would with a teammate. Give feedback like you would to a teammate.” –Jacob Bank, founder of Relay.app

Truth be told, when I start to think about agents too much, I get a little freaked out about what happens to human marketers. I can’t 100% predict where this goes in the long term.

But for now—and likely for a while—the teams that learn when to use humans versus agents are going to operate more effectively. I’m bullish on marketing teams shifting away from specialist-heavy silos and toward flatter structures built around Gen Marketers: AI era generalists who own campaigns end-to-end and pull in specialists, contractors, and agents as needed. A Gen Marketer with a team of well-tuned agents can execute faster, learn more quickly, automate the mundane, giving them more time to spend on campaigns that actually stand out.

Here’s how I see the division of labor today…agents handle repeatable knowledge work: monitoring, drafting, enriching, reporting. Humans handle strategy, creative judgment, and anything where the cost of being wrong is high.

For now, just start building. And if you want to go deeper, get on the waitlist for our upcoming hackathons—we’ll be working on everything from agent building to vibe coding to AEO workflows.

More from MKT1

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🔓 Gen Marketer Hackathons: Be the first to know when we kick off our Hackathon series, get on the list here.

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🥞 MKT1 Perk Stack: Exclusive discounts worth $40K+ on our favorite GTM tools. For annual & superfan paid subscribers only.

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🍽️ MKT1 Supper Club: Get on the list for monthly IRL dinners with Kramer, a small group of smart marketers, good food, and conversations on topics that actually matter in your role—made possible by some of my favorite GTM tools.

• How to build ABM landing pages & business cases that automatically pull in your brand, your sales calls and account history, and link to existing content—in single prompt.

• How to put an end to the sales request queue by starting from pre-built Mutiny blueprints or saving your own work to create templates for your team.

• How to measure success of assets built in Mutiny, hint: you can see person-level data for every asset, so no more wondering if that enablement asset actually got used and seen.

• Why Jaleh is so focused on bringing sales & marketing closer together and why we think velocity is the most important metric for marketers now.

Join the Mutiny waitlist to get 30 days free with unlimited AI usage »

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The hottest B2B marketing trend right now isn’t AI, it’s dinner. Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration. But it’s true that founders and marketing leaders are getting multiple invites every month to some kind of “dinner”: small group dinners, executive roundtables, salons–or even flower arranging classes. We’re right on top of this trend at MKT1, we hosted our own MKT1 Supper Club dinner last week in NYC with Profound.

Whatever you want to call these events, it’s clear that somewhere in the last 5 years, the company-hosted “dinner” replaced the trade show as the B2B event du jour…and I support this “trend.”

I’ve podcasted and written about in-person events before and cautioned against the old strategy of throwing your whole budget at conference booths. But a dinner done right is increasingly a high-leverage way to stand out in a sea of AI slop, and it’s an elegant way to put your ecosystem to work. Especially for high-ACV businesses, getting the formula for a successful dinner right can be transformative.

So I called Sheena Badani, who works with companies to host standout events through her company RevAura, to get an expert take on running dinners that work in 2026. At RevAura she’s running dinners, cooking classes, and even nail salons, all aimed at getting the right people in the room. Sheena was previously a marketing leader at Gong, but decided to double down on executive events after seeing their impact firsthand.

In this newsletter, I’m sharing her best tips along with my own to help you get the most value out of this strategy.

Recommended products & agencies

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In this newsletter:

• Why dinners have replaced trade shows as the reigning champ of B2B events

• How to make sure your dinner is worth the investment

• Why a good dinner nails the 3 Ps: people, place, and programming

• Operational tips for making dinners repeatable

• For paid subscribers: A map of SF & NYC dinner venues hand-picked by the MKT1 community

MKT1 Unboxing: A quick break to unbox Wistia

Learn how to leverage video in the AI era from video marketing GOAT, Chris Savage, Co-Founder + CEO at Wistia. Wistia has evolved from “video hosting” into a one-stop video marketing shop. They handle hosting, embeds, analytics, recording, editing, social clips, podcast distribution, and multi-language dubbing—so if you’re looking for tools to help you manage video marketing, watch this:

Some stand out moments in this episode of MKT1 Unboxing:

• LLMs don’t watch videos, so you need to add context for AI search.

  AI tools read text, not video. Wistia makes video embeds LLM-friendly so your videos can actually be indexed and show up in AI search. Watch this clip »

• Most social clipping tools only grab what’s obvious.

  Clipping a single moment is easy. Finding the best moments across an entire recording is harder. Wistia’s new (beta) Remix feature does this for you, watch at 12:04 »

• Webinars work better when they’re part of your video stack

  Running webinars in the same place you host, edit, analyze, and repurpose video makes them easier to re-purpose and measure over time. Here’s how Wistia approaches it, watch at 19:49 »

Get started with a free trial of Wistia here »

MKT1 Unboxing is our new video series, each video is a 30-minute demo + conversation where I (Emily Kramer) unbox marketing and GTM tools — no slides, no scripts, no sales pitch. Just real tools, real workflows, and real talk. The goal: help you find AI tools worth using.

Now back to in-person events…

Why the “dinner” replaced the trade show

“Events used to be more trade show-oriented, taking advantage of other people’s events to leverage for lead generation. Now attendance at those just looks different. People are less inclined to travel to those large trade shows. So the new event model is using your own hosted events for deal acceleration.” –Sheena

Trade shows were the primary event model for decades. You’d sponsor someone else’s event, set up a booth, and hope decision-makers wandered by. But post-Covid, which forced everyone to figure out deal cycles without conference infrastructure, companies started questioning the ROI.

Companies were investing so much money sponsoring, not to mention their own employees’ travel costs and time, then crossing their fingers that the right people would come find them. As I said in one of my most successful LinkedIn posts to date, when I look at most conference booths, I just see dollars in trashcans.

But what many of these booth exhibitors noticed was that the most valuable moments were the side conversations: the dinner the night before, the coffee meeting in the lobby, the drinks after a long day on the floor. At some point, people started asking: Why not just do those things directly?

You control the budget, the venue, and the guest list. You can get the right mix of existing champions, active prospects, and warm accounts. You’re not trying to collect 500 badge scans from people who will never respond to follow-up emails. You’re connecting directly with ~12 people who are actually in your pipeline, actually evaluating you, and giving them a reason to move forward. Seems like a better use of money.

In some ways, the prospect and/or customer dinner is the oldest trick in the GTM book. Wine and dine your potential customers, close the deal. In my recent rewatch of Mad Men, which is the true historical record for how marketing once was, I saw Don Draper do this on repeat (though usually inappropriately).

But I’ve definitely seen this surge recently. The other reason these dinners are a go-to strategy is not just the reaction to the trade show reboot post-Covid, it’s of course, AI-related too. In the age of AI-generated everything, this kind of authentic human connection is a strong differentiator. A dinner forces real conversation. You can’t automate your way through it. That’s why it works.

And the last reason I think these dinners are surging right now: It’s never been easier to access and fully enrich account and contact data. What used to be a massive, manual process now takes minutes. You can do this quickly with tools like Clay, then feed it into your CRM—or even manage the entire event invite flow in Attio (like we do at MKT1).

Watch my 1 min walkthrough of how I manage exec dinners in Attio ➜

Watch our in-depth Attio Unboxing with Head of Success, Zev Leibowitz ➜

“People who go to these dinners tell me they want to either meet their peers, somebody interesting, or they want to learn something new that they can take back to their business. That’s ultimately what they care about. And ideally, it’s both. You’re helping facilitate those connections, and you’re helping facilitate the exchange of ideas.” –Sheena

What makes a dinner worth the investment

“Where and when you should do dinners needs some thought, too. What cities are your open pipeline in? Where do your champions live? You could even host around a trade show or another place you know your audience is going to be.” –Sheena

Dinners require real investment: budget, time, and coordination. So you shouldn’t host these with reckless abandon, even if it seems like everyone else is. You need to make sure you can get your money’s worth. This means you shouldn’t book a restaurant until you’ve done the strategic work upfront. Otherwise, you’re just doing Random Acts of Marketing™ (RAM 🐑) at a fancy venue. You’re turning the RAM emoji into a lambchop? Note: I’m a vegetarian, it makes this graphic metaphor acceptable, I think?

Account-driven strategy + dinners go together like wine + cheese

Dinners work best as part of a broader account-driven strategy. You need to know which accounts are top priority right now to determine which cities make sense and who to invite. A simple example: If your open pipeline is concentrated in New York and Austin, hosting a dinner in SF because that’s where your office is doesn’t make strategic sense.

Once you have your target accounts identified, treat each dinner as a campaign, not a one-off event. This is the same approach you need for any marketing initiative: you need fuel (the content and experience) and engine (how you get people there and follow up). An event campaign needs touchpoints before, during, and after.

Upsides you might not have thought of

“Dinners are a great way to get to know your persona. Especially if you’re moving into a new market or into a new persona, this is an opportunity to do some light research that way.” –Sheena

Dinners have upside beyond just hitting a pipeline goal, which is what makes them such an interesting tactic for B2B teams.

I like to think about setting an internal sub-goal for each dinner. Here’s what I mean:

• Research & market intelligence: There’s no substitute for talking to your ICP in person, and people get really unfiltered at dinner. You hear what’s working for them right now, what keeps them up at night, what tools they’re evaluating, what their bosses care about. That intelligence is worth thousands of dollars if you’re paying attention…I sometimes wish I could have Granola transcribe the dinner, but I don’t think that’s appropriate?!

• Positioning & content ideas: The informal nature of a dinner makes it a great testing ground. You can see whether your new messaging resonates, whether a product launch idea makes sense, and whether the problem you’re solving is actually top of mind. Dinners are a great source of fuel, too, beyond the standard post-event social post with the poorly lit photo of people eating and awkward selfies. You can easily pull 10 content ideas just from what people bring up at dinner.

• Community-building: Dinners are primarily about building relationships. Even if these specific people don’t buy, they might give you intros to other accounts. I’m not even opposed to inviting people multiple times. Three dinners later, you could have a core group of advocates who know each other and are invested in your success.

• Brand-building: You’re putting your executives in front of prospects in a setting where they can actually have a conversation, not just pitch. You’re demonstrating that you understand the space well enough to convene the right people and ask the right questions. You’re showing up as a peer, not a vendor. That perception shift is worth more than most companies realize, especially in crowded markets where everyone’s product looks the same, and everyone’s content is straight outta Claude.

“Audiences that aren’t as tapped are looking for ways to build community. We did a Women in AI event for Glean, and all these women were like, we just want to stay in touch with each other. So we set up a WhatsApp group for them to stay in touch afterwards.” –Sheena

For paid subscribers: Steal my event planning rubric

Before you start planning any event, make sure it’s worth the investment!
I built an interactive version of my own event planning rubric that helps you decide (and defend) what’s worth the ROI. We have a Docs version too.

Get my event planning rubric ➜

The formula for a dinner that stands out

“When a dinner is randomly thrown together, it’s just missing something…that special factor. These dinners really need to have a lot of thought and intentionality behind them to make them successful, and to make them stand out. You can’t depend on one single thing to make your dinner successful, they all tie together.” –Sheena

Most companies throw dinners as a box they must check (often because sales is asking for them). They pick a restaurant, invite some prospects, and hope for the best. And that’s the problem.

Everyone’s running the same play now, so if you’re not thoughtful about differentiation, your dinner blends into the noise. Think about what makes your dinner different. What’s your “it” factor?

Sheena shared a really helpful formula for creating a differentiated event. You have to nail the 3 Ps: people, place, and programming.

People: The most important ingredient

“Rather than going out with an empty invite list, seed a few people to build interest in the dinner. Are there friendlies you can bring in—like an existing customer, investor, or influencer—to get a couple of logos? Now you can use that in the promotion of the event itself, and that helps to drive RSVPs faster than if you had no one.” –Sheena

Of the three elements, people matter most, by a lot. You could show up at McDonald’s with the right people or co-hosts, get people to show up, and still have a good time. The inverse is also true: If you have the wrong people, even the best restaurant and most compelling topic won’t save the dinner.

Social proof matters more than people think. Most of us want to know who else is coming before we give up an evening. A few confirmed logos or names can completely change how the invite lands. Suddenly, it’s not a vendor dinner; it’s a peer networking dinner that happens to be hosted by you.

Think about the obvious factors: Are they at companies you’re actively trying to close? Are they in your ICP? Are they senior enough to make decisions, but not so senior that they won’t actually show up?

But also: Are they going to be good dinner guests? Do they add a new perspective to the dinner? I like to seed the list not only with “big names,” but also with a few natural connectors I know personally who can carry a conversation and make others comfortable.

“I often suggest inviting two people from one account that you’re trying to close. People really hesitate to take advantage of this, because they want to spread the resources across accounts. But they’re both more likely to come, and now you have the chance to create two champions within that company.” –Sheena

If you are an avid reader of MKT1, you know I’m obsessed with ecosystem marketing right now. And this is one of my favorite ways to seed the list: Co-host with a complementary startup, an agency that serves the same audience, or bring in an “influencer” as a guest or co-host. (I do both—I’ll either show up as a guest or do end-to-end hosting like with MKT1 Supper Club.) Piggybacking on the trust and reach of partners is one of the only reliable ways to grow right now when other channels are wavering.

Bonus idea: Some professions, like accountants and lawyers, require continuing education credits. If you can structure your event to count toward those requirements (easier with lunch-and-learns than dinners), that’s a huge incentive.

Programming: Give people something worth talking about

“A dinner is a way for you to extend your brand or a point of view that you have as a company. Just like you would write a blog post or do a webinar, the dinner is another avenue for you to get that perspective out to your audience.” –Sheena

I think it’s obvious that a dinner is an “engine” to reach your audience, but you need to think a lot about the “fuel” component too. A dinner shouldn’t be just “let’s get people together and see what happens.” You should be using the dinner to advance a specific POV your company has, or in MKT1 terms, a Perception™ you’re trying to drive.

Think about the research you’ve published, the frameworks you talk about in sales calls, and the positioning that differentiates you from competitors. Those are all potential dinner topics. The dinner is where you bring that thinking to life in a conversational format, with the right people in the room to discuss it.

But don’t over-program. And definitely don’t show slides, especially if it’s a pitch. If you’re filling every minute with structured conversation prompts or presentations, you’re not leaving room for people to actually talk to each other. The best dinners have just enough structure to give people something to talk about. You might open with a 10-minute framing of the topic, seed a few discussion questions, and then let the conversation flow naturally.

“Specificity is one way to differentiate. Say you’ve done research on how to code 10x faster—tie your dinner into this point of view and this research that you’ve done. Now you have a compelling theme and title for your dinner. So it’s not just, hey, here’s an engineering leadership dinner. How do you take that and make it much more specific?” –Sheena

A note on micro-conferences: Between the trade show and the dinner sits the micro-conference: intimate, curated events with 50-200 attendees. These are rising for similar reasons. But I recommend nailing dinners before you jump to an expensive 2-3 day microconference. Master the basics of getting the right people together and facilitating meaningful discussions first.

How this works at MKT1 Supper Club

At MKT1 Supper Clubs, we put blank question cards at every seat for guests to fill in. They don’t all need to be strictly on topic—adding a few fun questions helps set everyone at ease—but guests almost always end up talking about the dinner theme anyway. If the topic is strong, people are already bought into discussing it by the time they sit down.

Guests write down a question, we shuffle the cards, and use them to spark group discussion. As a bonus, I’ve noticed people take notes on the cards too. It’s a simple way to walk away with a few takeaways from an event that isn’t recorded.

I also post photos of the cards on social afterward. It’s proof I’m not just inventing a dinner conversation as a LinkedIn hook (a trend that must stop—I want receipts).

Place: Complement your brand, audience, and programming

“People do want to go to a highly rated, nice place. Maybe something that they’ve been to before and they loved, or that’s on their bucket list, or it’s new and they haven’t tried it yet.” –Sheena

The venue is important, but I’d argue it’s the least make-or-break of the three Ps (Sheena and I might disagree here slightly!). Getting the people and programming right matters more. The venue should complement what you’re already doing, not carry the strategy for you. But if you don’t have strong people or programming? Then yes, make the place the draw.

• Match the vibe to your brand: Think about what fits your company and the type of conversation you’re trying to facilitate.

• If you’re a fast-moving startup positioning yourself as the scrappy alternative to enterprise vendors, hosting at a stuffy French restaurant sends the wrong signal.

• Functional matters more than prestigious: Can you actually have a conversation, or is the music too loud? Is there a private room?

Logistically, Sheena recommends booking your venue at least a month in advance, but waiting to send invites until closer to the date. Three weeks out is the sweet spot for invites. I’ve seen the same thing, and often do my invites 2 weeks out.

And don’t be afraid to send last-minute invites if needed: “We had a spot open up at tomorrow’s dinner” or “Our team will be in [city] next week and we’re pulling together a dinner” both work well. I did this on LinkedIn just last week (and then my original “maybe” RSVP ended up coming too, and we added an extra seat!)

NEW for paid subscribers: SF & NYC restaurant guide

It’s not easy finding a great venue, so we polled the MKT1 community for their recommendations. And then, of course, we ended up vibe coding it into an interactive map of 40+ restaurants in San Francisco & New York.

Get our dinner venue map ➜

Making good dinners repeatable

If you’re going to invest in dinners as a channel, you need systems to make them repeatable and measurable. One dinner is an experiment. Three dinners is a tactic. Ten dinners with clear processes is a channel.

Most companies don’t do this. They treat each dinner like a special project: custom invites, one-off logistics, no standard follow-up. Then they can’t scale beyond a few dinners a year, and they definitely can’t prove ROI when someone asks.

Here are some tips for driving the most impact and making sure you can prove it:

Track influence, not just pipeline (or gasp, MQLs):

• These events take time to show impact, sometimes six months or more.

• While they frequently influence deals, it’s rarely the first or last touch. If someone attends your dinner in Q1 and closes in Q3, your CRM needs to capture that the dinner was part of the journey.

• Make sure you are building “campaigns” in Hubspot or Salesforce, then track campaign influence from these events.

• You should also track pipeline influence and revenue influence from these events.

• I also like to look at account stage progression, too, and look at the campaigns that influenced those movements. To do this in Hubspot, you need to create an Account Stage custom object → log when an account hits each stage → then report on campaign interactions that happened before that date.

Rinse and repeat:

Once you determine if this motion works, document it and turn it into an internal playbook. Include which restaurants work in which cities, who your go-to “seed” guests are, what your invite template says, and how you follow up. This is how you turn a time-intensive custom project into something your team can run without reinventing it every time.

Don’t forget: Follow-up matters as much as the dinner itself. Within 24-48 hours, send personalized notes that reference specific parts of the conversation, not a generic “thanks for attending” email. Add value (e.g. Profound sends custom AI brand visibility reports to attendees) and make connections easy (I send LinkedIn profiles for everyone who attended plus a recap of the questions from the Supper Club cards). Build this into your repeatable process so it happens every time.

Get out of spreadsheets:

You need a real system to track invites, RSVPs, attendance, and follow-up, that plugs directly into your CRM. I walked through how we use Attio to manage MKT1 Supper Clubs here.

Conclusion

Now, is the trade show dead? I would never say that.

Dinners are becoming more desirable and scalable than sponsoring trade shows because they’re more targeted, more efficient, and more authentic. But they only work if you approach them strategically, with clear account targeting, intentional programming (including partners, discussion topics, etc), and systems that let you scale.

The companies winning with dinners aren’t just booking nice restaurants. They’re treating dinners as a core channel, with high-quality fuel feeding them, with the same rigor they’d apply to any other part of their go-to-market motion. If you’re going to do dinners, do them right.

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And for paid subscribers…don’t forget about this newsletters resources…

More from MKT1

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: 42 Agency, a paid media and MOPS agency; Ahrefs for SEO & AEO; and GrowthPair for hiring top global talent.

📦 MKT1 Unboxing: Watch our new video series to see Kramer (that’s me) unbox Wistia, Luma AI, & Attio.

🥞 MKT1 Perk Stack: Exclusive discounts worth $40K+ on our favorite GTM tools. For annual & superfan paid subscribers only.

🧰 Revamped, upgraded template & resource library: We have 100+ templates and resources available to paid subscribers in our template & tool library.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community (free to post as a paid subscriber). And our candidate form if you’re looking for a new role (option to remain anonymous included!).

🍽️ MKT1 Supper Club: Get on the list for monthly IRL dinners with Kramer, a small group of smart marketers, good food, and conversations on topics that actually matter in your role—made possible by some of my favorite GTM tools.

We also polled the MKT1 community to build a map of 40+ venues great for company-hosted dinners. We have SF & NYC (for now!) and will continue to add to these over time.

Read more on building an IRL event strategy here & hosting successful dinners here. And you can find all MKT1 resources in our template library here.

Read more

What we cover in this unboxing:

• AI-searchable video (LLM-friendly embeds) → Wistia makes video transcripts readable by LLMs, so your videos can show up in AI search—not just the title.

• Remix long-form videos (new + in beta) → Instantly turn podcasts, webinars, and interviews into new videos by pulling the best moments from across the entire recording based on a prompt.

• Easily-repurposable webinars→ A fully native webinar platform with backstage control, higher-quality playback, built-in editing, and clean analytics for live and on-demand views.

• One platform, not eight tools → Hosting, embeds, viewer analytics, recording, editing, social clips, podcast distribution, and multi-language dubbing—all in Wistia.

Get started with a free trial of Wistia here.

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Hopefully, you’ve heard: I hosted a 4-hour virtual Gen Marketer Summit with 500 of you and 11 speakers from companies including Profound, Primer, Framer, Unify, Tofu, Closing Media, Clay, Stripe, and OpenAI in December.

The focus of the event was how to uplevel for the AI era by becoming a Gen Marketer (a term I coined last year).

During the Summit, I felt like I got a glimpse into the future, watching speakers show off the latest AI products and talk about how they are upleveling their teams to handle the AI shift.

And after talking with every speaker, watching the live reactions, and reading hundreds of questions in the chat, I got even more clear on what actually matters heading into the new year. I personally became more confident that “Gen Marketer” isn’t simply a new job title, but a baseline skillset all marketers need.

Since then, a few ideas—let’s call them “mantras”—have been buzzing in my head. So, this newsletter isn’t going to recap the event in full (because you can watch it here, and paid subscribers can get the slides from my keynote here). Instead, I want to focus on what stood out after the event (and trust me, I did a lot of reflection on the event because afterwards I was stuck inside with a flu-like situation for 10 days!)

In this newsletter

Here are 3 marketing “mantras” for the new year that came directly from speakers. I think they’re great reminders, whether you came to the event or not:

1. Being a generalist doesn’t mean being mid at everything

2. With new GTM tools, there’s no excuse for Random Acts of Marketing

3. The new bar: “Learnings per minute” for your audience

This newsletter covers what we mean by each of these phrases, why it matters, and gives you clips and quotes to dive deeper into each.

Watch the event replay

Here are the recordings if you want to catch up on the full event, broken up into chapters so you can jump to what’s most interesting:

• Keynote with Emily Kramer (that’s me) - get my slide deck here

• AI workflows for Gen Marketers with Profound, Tofu, Framer, & Unify

• Scaling paid efficiently with Primer & Closing Media

• Roundtable with marketers from Stripe, Clay, & Pear VC (ex-Vanta)

• Fireside Chat with Dane Vahey, Head of B2B Marketing at OpenAI

• Q&A from the audience with me

Thanks to our Gen Marketer Presenting Sponsors

Primer: Expand your paid efforts with Primer. Primer helps you build, enrich, and sync custom B2B audiences and deploy them across Meta, LinkedIn, Google, Reddit, and DV360 at 40–90% match rates.

🎁 Offer: Get 10% off an annual subscription with code MKT110.
🔒 MKT1 Perk Stack Offer: 30% off for customers new to Primer’s Annual Plan
_

Profound: Improve AI visibility and craft AEO optimized content with Profound. Track how you’re seen across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, uncover real-time AI search insights, and build workflows to generate and optimize content.

🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 for 20% off Profound Growth (new customers only)

—

And thanks to all of our Summit sponsors: Framer, Unify, Tofu, Closing Media

Join my new course: Gen Marketer Bootcamp starts January 27th!

If you loved the Summit and/or want an intensive of becoming a full-stack marketer for the AI era, I’m returning to teaching cohort-based-courses on Maven and my new course is open for applications.

If interested, check if your L&D budget covers courses. And Annual paid subscribers get a $100 discount (you’ll basically net $1 in this deal, since it’s only $99 for an annual subscription). Just comment that you’re an annual subscriber in your application, and if accepted, I’ll apply the discount.

Now on to the mantras…

Being a generalist doesn’t mean being “mid” at everything.

What stood out at the Summit:

Being a Gen Marketer doesn’t just mean you are a generalist. It’s a specific set of skills marketers need to operate in the AI era.

Ting Ting nailed it:

“I’ve always believed that the world sort of belongs to generalists. Being able to understand other functions well, being able to hold different mental models in your head of how sales works or product works, that’s what makes generalists strong. [Being a generalist] is not an excuse to be bad at multiple things or be mid at multiple things.” –Ting Ting Luo, Head of Product Marketing at Clay Watch ➜

And this explanation seemed to land with the audience:

“You might be sitting there thinking, I’m a growth marketer, I’m a product marketer, I’m a content marketer, I’m a partner marketer—does this apply to me? Yes. Gen Marketer isn’t just another job title—it’s actually the new baseline skill set for marketers. So, whatever role you’re in, you need to uplevel your skill set to gain more generalist skills for the AI era.” –Kramer Watch ➜

Why it matters:

Since it’s easier to build products, create content, distribute across channels, and access data due to AI, the skills needed to succeed and get your product noticed have changed. Marketing teams have been a bit slow to keep up here, and it’s time to face the music: Your skillset and your team’s core competencies need to change.

The AI era isn’t rewarding marketers who know one narrow thing in isolation; it’s rewarding generalists who can connect the dots.

But being a generalist doesn’t mean giving up your edge or your craft. It means being excellent at one or two core marketing disciplines, and layering on enough cross-functional understanding to move work forward without constant handoffs. Handoffs only slow you down when velocity is the name of the game, and maybe more critically, they hurt creativity. Gen Marketers are well-suited to remove bottlenecks and give your team both the edge on velocity and quality.

You might recall I’ve also called this a π-shaped marketer. A π-shaped marketer has deep expertise in two areas (for example, product marketing and growth), with working knowledge across the rest of the function. A Gen Marketer takes this a step further by becoming proficient in executing campaigns and using AI to orchestrate.

So, you don’t need to change your title, and you still need to be excellent at executing in your key area, but you also need to expand how you operate. The marketers who will thrive are the ones who can retain a core competency, but also translate ideas into campaigns, campaigns into execution, and execution into results—without needing a small army to get there.

What to watch from the Summit:

• Hear from our roundtable of marketers who came up in 3 different disciplines (product marketing, growth marketing, and content & brand) to become Gen Marketing Leaders. Thanks, Zena, Ting Ting, and Jenny! Watch ➜

• Learn why Gen Marketer is the new baseline skillset in my keynote Watch ➜

• See Gen Marketers in action:

  • See how Nick at Profound prototypes AEO products based on his deep understanding of their audience Watch ➜

  • See how James at Framer creates an event landing page and connects the data to other tools Watch ➜

Modern GTM tools leave no excuse for Random Acts of Marketing

What stood out at the Summit:

“Instead of just focusing on my one swim lane, I’m thinking about the whole swimming pool.” –Jenny Thai, Head of Marketing at Pear VC Watch ➜

With each new presenter at the Summit, we saw the future of GTM tools. These tools serve different functions and produce different outcomes, but they increasingly share the same core functionality: enrichment capabilities, workflows & agents, and AI prompting built directly into the product. Together, these tools leave no excuse for shipping generic content across disconnected channels that don’t align with your audience.

1. Enrichment: More of your GTM tools will enable you to pull in demographic, firmographic, and behavioral info about accounts and contacts—without manual research—to give you a full picture of your audience. That includes company size, industry, tech stack, funding, hiring signals, intent data, and increasingly, AI-derived insights from usage and behavior.

   What enrichment enables: When enrichment is built into your GTM stack, “we didn’t have enough context” stops being a valid excuse. Teams can define audiences, prioritize accounts, and personalize campaigns based on real signals—not guesses or static ICP slides.

2. Workflows & agents: Your GTM tools will enable you to define sequences of steps within a product or across products (i.e., lead fills out form from tier 1 account, add to CRM, alert Sales in Slack). AI-powered agents will take this a step further and decide how to progress work through various steps.
   
   Note: Some tools help you orchestrate workflows and build agents across many products (like Make, Relay, and Zapier), while other products (like Tofu, Unify, and Framer) are building workflows and agents directly into their platforms to connect their tools out to the rest of the GTM stack.

   What workflows and agents enable: Disconnected point solutions are becoming a thing of the past. Agents and workflows allow teams to run repeatable, end-to-end campaigns where signals trigger action, actions generate learning, and those learnings continuously improve execution. This is the infrastructure required to eliminate Random Acts of Marketing—and replace them with connected activities that compound.
   

3. AI prompting: More of your GTM tools will enable you to generate, adapt, and personalize content and creative directly inside the product—emails, ad creative, landing pages, call scripts, summaries. Instead of starting from a blank page or a generic template, you’ll be able to prompt to produce relevant “fuel” at scale, tailored to a specific audience, signal, or moment. As a side benefit, prompting within products will also help teams learn how to use the tool.

   What AI prompting enables: Prompting can remove creative bottlenecks, but only when paired with the right structure and inputs. As content creation gets built into tools that already have your proprietary data, brand guidelines, workflows, and analytics, you are more likely to produce work that resonates (and avoid generating slop). Add in a Gen Marketer with a high-quality bar and taste, and you can stand out!

Why it matters:

Now more than ever, Random Acts of Marketing™ just won’t do. When everyone can generate content and spin up channels quickly, throwing more spaghetti at the wall isn’t a strategy. You will simply not be able to keep up.

The good and bad news: It’s getting easier to run tightly coordinated campaigns with the new generation of GTM tools I just described, so:

• If you’re just doing random one-off activities, you’re toast (to put it bluntly).

• If you’re connecting activities, you’re only keeping pace.

• If you’re connecting workflows into repeatable campaigns, flywheels, or loops—and grounding them in real audience insights, leaning into clear Marketing Advantages™, and maintaining a high quality bar—you have a chance to win. (More on that in the next section.)

The other way to win: Most marketing teams are not set up today to meet the AI moment. With no “glue” connecting teams or owning campaigns end-to-end, impact doesn’t happen. By upskilling or empowering your team to act like Gen Marketers, who own connected workflows and campaigns, you can be a step ahead.

What to watch:

During the Gen Marketer Summit, several speakers walked through real workflows using modern GTM tools—showing what connected marketing activities look like in practice.

• In Tofu, Elaine shows how to re-engage closed-lost accounts by making repeatable, personalized, cross-channel campaigns based on account history and context (like why they churned) pulled in from other tools.
  Watch ➜

• In Unify, Austin shows how to trigger automated follow-up campaigns based on traffic source—specifically LLM-driven traffic—so high-intent, mid-funnel visitors don’t get lost and AEO work actually converts.
  Watch ➜

• With examples from Closing Media clients, Max shows us how to amplify top-performing organic LinkedIn posts into Linkedin Thought Leader Ads, extending the life of that content. I also wrote all about the “LinkedIn Flywheel” in this newsletter. Watch ➜

• With examples from Primer customers, Keith explains how to use paid channels to test messaging and audiences, then feed those learnings back into organic efforts, instead of running paid and organic in isolation. Watch ➜

• Bonus: To understand the AI skills you need, listen to Dane talk about the “AI primitives” he thinks all marketers should be learning. Watch ➜

You can watch all of these workflows and see the future of GTM tools here:

Focus on “learnings per minute” for your audience.

What stood out at the Summit:

I’ve always had a pretty simple bar for marketing work: does this actually add value to the audience?

Truthfully, it’s a quality bar that has annoyed people I’ve worked with over the years—can’t we just ship it?! But this bar, and the rigor behind it, matters more now than ever, because it’s simply too easy to make crap. That’s why I loved when Dane brought this idea up during the Summit, using his own framing:

“I have this informal metric when I think about content, which is learnings per minute…And I don’t think enough marketers really optimize for learnings when they think about their content.” – Dane Vahey, Head of B2B Marketing at OpenAI Watch ➜

And I also loved how Ting Ting reinforced that you can have both speed and quality when you don’t have too many cooks in the kitchen:

“We are able to move fast because people can take things from end to end…the death of a marketing team is when every single idea takes 20 people to execute.” –Ting Ting Luo, Head of Product Marketing at Clay Watch ➜

Why it matters:

You need to become obsessed with putting out work that meets the “learnings per minute” or “adds value” bar.

I can bring on amazing presenters to show you powerful GTM tools and impressive workflows all day, but simply using these tools isn’t enough. The reality is, everyone will be using these tools sooner or later.

These tools help you do your job with increased velocity, but they aren’t a substitute for marketing fundamentals, strategic thinking, and human judgment. Here’s how to balance using AI to move with velocity and coming up with creative ideas that will drive outsize impact for your company:

• Start with a real understanding of your audience, product, and market

• Be clear on your unique Marketing Advantages and how you can actually win

• Plan for big bet campaigns and initiatives that play to those strengths

• Spend time developing high-quality, differentiated creative fuel ideas—humans are needed here!

• Develop creative with a specific engine (or engines) in mind—and get it to the right audience at the right time

• Use AI to help you orchestrate, move faster, and explore ideas

• But, don’t just take what AI gives you: Have a high-quality bar for your big bets. Sameness is invisible! Don’t be vanilla!

And that’s why this is such a great time to be a marketer. We have tools that enable us to execute on anything we can think up, faster than ever before. But creativity, taste, and judgment are still what separate good from great.

What to watch:

All of that can sound abstract: intentionality, judgment, having a bar. So, to ground this in reality, during the Summit, I walked through campaigns that are actually working right now.

These campaigns have the following in common: a clear creative idea, rooted in audience understanding, leveraging real Marketing Advantages, pairing fuel and engine that actually go together, and run by Gen Marketers who are able to move fast without sacrificing quality.

• Watch me explain what works now when it comes to standing out from the crowd. Hint: be human, focus on education, and leverage your “ecosystem”. Watch ➜

• I walked through 4 campaign examples during the Summit:

  • Granola Crunched Watch ➜
    (The only Spotify Wrapped–style clone that actually stood out this year. That said, this is not an endorsement for your company to run yet another Wrapped-style campaign; in fact, probably don’t!)

  • Lovable SheBuilds Watch ➜

  • Profound Index Watch ➜

  • Clay World Records Watch ➜

• Hear Dane from OpenAI’s answer to this question: “What was a big bet or a large campaign that you ran in 2025, why did you choose it, how did it work? Tell me everything.” Watch ➜

Other takeaways and aha moments from the event:

I hope this newsletter has compelled you to watch (or even rewatch) sections of the Summit. I really do think we packed in the learnings per minute (but I’ll leave that to you to decide).

Here are some other moments you may want to check out:

• Nick from Profound on what drives AI brand visibility: “If you’ve heard about AEO research or content, you might know that FAQs are things that LLMs love. Why is that? LLMs are lazy. They want to be served up an answer without spending a lot of compute power figuring this stuff out.” Watch ➜

• Keith from Primer on paid in 2026: “If inventory is constrained, and competition is rising, what is paid for in 2026? I think the new moat is not how much you spend, it’s how quickly you learn. Execution is easy now. AI killed execution, scarcity, everyone can launch fast, everyone can test fast. Everyone can spin up creative fast. The winner is not the biggest spender. It’s the fastest learner in this context. So you just have to optimize faster.” Watch ➜

• Zena Davé from Bridge on career trajectory in the AI era: “I don’t feel the need to build a kingdom of people…just because I don’t have a ton of people around me or under me doesn’t mean [this new role] was a step back by any means.” Watch ➜

🙏 Thanks again to our Gen Marketer Summit sponsors, all of whom have discounts for the MKT1 community!

Profound: Get your brand mentioned by LLMs, track visibility & improve AEO
🎁 Offer: 20% off Profound Growth Plan with code MKT1

Primer: Target your B2B ICP on B2C ad channels with precision targeting
🎁 Offer:10% off annual subscription with code MKT110

Framer: Site builder trusted by startups to fortune 500: Integrated CMS, SEO, & Analytics
🎁 Offer: Free Year of Pro ($360 Value). Apply to startup program.

Tofu: Ship integrated, cross-channel campaigns faster
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 for 10% off Tofu Starter package

Unify: Capture intent signals, run AI agents, and send personalized outbound
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 for 10% off an annual plan

Closing Media: Boutique agency partner for LinkedIn ads and paid media campaigns
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 for $5,000 of free ad spend for your next campaign

More from MKT1

🏕️ Gen Marketer Bootcamp: My new course starts January 27th and is open for applications! Paid annual subscribers get $100 off (pending acceptance; mention your subscription in your application to redeem).

📦 MKT1 Unboxing: Watch the first in our new video series to see Kramer (that’s me) unbox Luma AI & Attio.

🥞 MKT1 Perk Stack: Exclusive discounts worth $40K+ on our favorite GTM tools. For annual & superfan paid subscribers only.

🧰 Revamped, upgraded template & resource library: We have 100+ templates and resources available to paid subscribers in our brand-new template library.

🛠️ MKT1 GTM tools library: An organized, sortable list of recommended products on MKT1.co.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community (free to post as a paid subscriber)

🍽️ MKT1 Supper Club: Get on the list for monthly IRL dinners with Kramer, a small group of smart marketers, good food, and conversations on topics that actually matter in your role—made possible by some of my favorite GTM tools. Join the list here.

Read my takeaways from the Gen Marketer Summit in this newsletter. And you can find all MKT1 resources in our template library here.

Read more

But before we get to our most sought-after resources and templates this year, we have some housekeeping items.

1. Gen Marketer Summit replay: If you couldn’t make it or just want to relive the 4-hour experience over and over, here’s the link. And if you missed out on the partner discounts we shared live for Primer, Profound, Framer, Tofu, Unify, or Closing Media, you can access them here.

   We’ll share edited, chapterized, and clipped up versions in early 2026, but many of you simply couldn’t wait for our editing process to catch up. So before we send that to everyone, our paid subscribers get a first (second, really?) look.

2. MKT1 Perk Stack: Need to use up your end of year budget for tools? Get started on yo…

Read more

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As I proclaimed back in September, we’re in the era of Gen Marketers™. Gen Marketers are generalists who are fluent in generative AI, and who are ready for the generational shift we’re seeing in marketing.

But “Gen Marketer” isn’t another job title. It’s the new baseline skillset marketers need to succeed in 2026 and beyond. No matter your role in marketing, you will benefit from gaining a Gen Marketer skillset.

In other words, how we build B2B marketing teams has fundamentally changed in the last 2 years. And if you’re still hiring, interviewing, or organizing teams the old way, you’re probably struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

Candidates need to bring different skills to interviews (and to their roles!). Hiring managers need to evaluate candidates against new criteria. And Heads of Marketing need to evolve their org charts and practices.

This newsletter will help you get hired and hire in 2026. It’s your guide to the Gen Marketer skillset: the foundational capabilities every marketer needs to be effective now. It covers what types of candidates are most needed in the AI era and how to tactically gain those skills if you’re on the job market—or if you just want to stay competitive in your current role.

Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

➜ Default puts scheduling, routing, and enrichment in one platform, so the data in your CRM stays clean and you can orchestrate GTM 10x better. Plus, it’s used by startups like Replit, Profound, Unify, JustWorks, and Decagon.

🎁 Offer for all readers: Mention MKT1 to get 2 months free on any plan for up to 10 seats ($1500+ value)
🔒MKT1 Perk Stack offer for annual paid subscribers: Get 5 seats free + 1 year of free intent data with a new annual plan.
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➜ 42 Agency: Let 42 Agency handle the MOPS work your team avoids. From routing logic and fixing scoring, to aligning Hubspot + Salesforce, to setting up new GTM tooling, 42 Agency is ready to help your B2B startup clean up and scale your ops.

🎁Offer: Mention MKT1 to get 10% off a Hubspot Audit or Hubspot Sprint.

__

➜ Ten Speed is an organic growth agency that unifies SEO, AEO, content marketing, and digital PR. They know how to combine the right fuel and engine for your ICP—and they’ve supported many of my advisees.

🎁Offer: Mention MKT1 to get up to $5,000 off.

In this newsletter:

• Part 1: The skills all marketers need (and need to hire for) in the AI era

• Part 2: Actionable steps to learn these skills and become a highly in-demand candidate

• Part 3: Interview questions to assess these skills—whether you’re practicing or hiring

• Bonus: Open roles that value the Gen Marketer skillset

• Conclusion: How to network like it’s [almost] 2026

This newsletter is a companion to the Gen Marketer Summit next week!

• The virtual Summit is for paid MKT1 Newsletter subscribers only. It’s only $9 a month or $99 a year. You also get access to our template library, Perk Stack (for annual subs), and all the other benefits of being a paid subscriber.

• But, if you’re currently unemployed, you can get free access to the event. Fill out this form (passcode: 1010) to RSVP.

RSVP for the Summit

Part 1: Skills all marketers need right now, in the AI era

If you’re job searching, these are the skills that will make you stand out. If you’re hiring, these are the capabilities you need to evaluate for—not just nice-to-haves, but fundamentals that determine whether someone can operate effectively in the AI era.

Do you need to abandon everything you ever learned and just focus on this skillset? Of course not. But since publishing my Gen Marketer newsletter, I’ve had many conversations about what this means for specialists. So let me be clear: This isn’t about abandoning specialization. If you’re a killer demand gen marketer or a product marketing expert with deep domain knowledge—great, keep that. But that specialization alone isn’t enough. You need to layer generalist skills on top of your depth to stay valuable in 2026 and beyond.

Read more

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This past week I’ve been spinning on newsletter topics. Staring at a list of ideas, starting to write, backtracking, scrapping paragraphs, rewriting them again. Nothing felt quite right.

And honestly, that feels like the default state of marketing right now.

We’re all scrambling to break the mold and stand out. We’re overwhelmed by everything we could do, yet underwhelmed by the results of what we are getting.

Then it hit me: The best follow-up to my recent annual planning newsletter isn’t more prioritization frameworks or more structure. It’s the opposite. Whenever I’m advising marketers, the biggest breakthroughs come from thought experiments: hypothetical exercises with a few intentional constraints. These conversations force new ideas to the surface and bend your brain just enough to reveal ideas that might actually work.

So this newsletter shares 5 of my go-to thought experiments. Simple, occasionally uncomfortable prompts to jolt you out of the rut and help you rethink your 2025 strategy with a fresh, more creative brain.

Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

➜ Default puts scheduling, routing, and enrichment in one platform, so the data in your CRM stays clean and you can orchestrate GTM 10x better. Plus, it’s used by startups like Replit, Profound, Unify, JustWorks, and Decagon.

Offers:

🎁 All subscribers: Mention MKT1 to get 2 months free on any plan for up to 10 seats ($1500+ value)

🔒MKT1 Perk Stack offer for Annual paid subscribers: Get 5 seats free + 1 year of free intent data. Redeem here.

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➜ Luma AI: Before you outsource your next video production, try Luma AI’s Dream Machine, an AI-powered video generation platform. Start with text, an image, or another video to produce and edit on-brand, cinematic-quality content in minutes.

See more: Luma AI is featured in today’s Unboxing video!

🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get 20% off an Enterprise Essentials plan.

__

➜ 42 Agency: Let 42 Agency handle the MOPS work your team avoids. From routing logic and fixing scoring, to aligning Hubspot + Salesforce, to setting up new GTM tooling, 42 Agency is ready to help your B2B startup clean up and scale your ops.

🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get 10% off a Hubspot Audit or Hubspot Sprint.

In this newsletter:

5 thought experiments and how to run them:

1. No new content

2. No new target accounts

3. Positioning stress tests

4. Would you rather

5. Pick your dream speaker

More from MKT1:

• I unbox Luma AI in our 2nd video in our new Unboxing series, which helps you discover new GTM tools

• Gen Marketer Summit: Registration is open for our first-ever virtual conference! We’ve announced the first wave of speakers, more coming soon. Free for all paid subscribers.

• MKT1 Perk Stack: Exclusive discounts worth $40K+ on our favorite GTM tools (like Lovable, AirOps, Framer, Default, and more). For annual & superfan paid subscribers only.

Thought experiment newsletter

Use these when you’re stuck, overwhelmed, or circling the same ideas during planning. Thought experiments work because they drop you into a constraint that forces new thinking. Pick a prompt, treat the constraint as real, and follow it through with hypothetical examples to see where the discussion goes. The goal isn’t to “solve” anything; it’s to shake you out of your defaults, surface blind spots, and make you see things from a new angle.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT 1

No new content

To start, here’s one of my favorite questions to ask startup marketing teams to get them out of their comfort zones. I first shared this thought experiment in a series on my own content strategy.

The prompt

What if you weren’t allowed to create any net-new content for the next quarter, or even six months? In this hypothetical, you can reuse things you have and modify things slightly for new channels, but you must grow by distributing existing assets. What would you do? Do you think this would help or hurt your ability to hit your KPIs?

Why this experiment

If you are over-indexing on creating “fuel” and under-indexing on building an “engine” to distribute, this thought experiment will help you recalibrate.

Teams default to creating new things instead of deepening and compounding what already works. They set content goals around volume (i.e. “15 new pieces of content a month”), but never meaningfully distribute that content.

The best ideas may just be extensions of things you’ve already created. More ROI may come from redistributing things you already have (aka getting more mileage). This experiment exposes how much growth is trapped inside your existing content.

Consider this..

• What would happen if distribution—not creation—became your focus for a whole quarter?

• Which pieces of existing content have never been fully distributed?

• What would happen if you “franchised” your best ideas? What could become a series or workshop?

• What content is outdated but fixable?

• What 5–10 existing pieces, if improved, would outperform anything net-new?

• Which assets should have driven a key KPI but didn’t? Would distributing or repackaging help?

• What content types perform best channel by channel, and could these be extended or tweaked to serve other ICPs and/or work on other channels?

Read more

• Paid subscribers: Jump down to get the access code and RSVP.

• Free subscribers: This event is for paid MKT1 Subscribers only. Not paid? Upgrade for costs $9 a month or $99 annually.
  If you upgrade for just 1 month to attend the conference, I won’t hold it against you, but a paid plan also gives you access to our 100+ templates & resources and archive of posts—plus annual subscribers get access to our new Perk Stack.

Subscribe now

Thanks to our presenting partners: Primer | Profound
And our sponsors: Framer | Tofu | Unify | Closing Media

Agenda

All times approximate and in Pacific Time, but I 🧡 my global audience.

• 9:00 - 9:35 AM: Welcome & Keynote with me, Emily Kramer

• 9:35 - 10:40 AM: AI Workflows in Profound, Tofu, Framer,& Unify

• 10:45 - 11:15 AM: Paid Marketing in the AI Era with Primer & Closing Media

• 11:15 - 11:55 AM: How we became Gen Marketers: Zena Davé (Bridge by Stripe), Ting Ting Luo (Clay), Jenny Thai (Pear Ventures, Ex Vanta)

• 12:00 - 12:35 PM: Fireside Chat: Emily Kramer & Dane Vahey (Head of B2B Marketing at OpenAI)

• 12:35–1:00 PM: Q&A with Emily Kramer

Discounts from our Summit partners

Each partner of the Gen Marketer Summit is offering a special discount for attendees. These discounts are for new customers only. Some of these partners are also in our Perk Stack for annual paid subscribers.

• Primer: 10% off an Annual Plan with code “MKT110” or unlock the Perk Stack Offer for annual subscribers

• Profound: 20% off Profound Growth Plan with code “MKT1”

• Framer: Get a free year of Framer Pro ($360 value) by applying to their startup program at framer.com/startups or unlock the Perk Stack Offer for annual subscribers

• Tofu: 10% off Tofu Starter Package, mention “MKT1”

• Unify: 20% off an Annual Plan, mention “MKT1”

• Closing Media: Get $5,000 of free ad spend for your next campaign, mention “MKT1”

RSVP now

(Below the paywall!)

This event is for paid MKT1 Subscribers only. Not paid? It costs $9 a month or $99 annually. And if you upgrade for just 1 month to attend the conference, I won’t hold it against you.

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We’re getting a headstart today with our most valuable launch to date: The MKT1 Perk Stack. Think of it as a caffeine for your GTM Tool budget…still working on the metaphor here.

➜ Perk Stack
➜ Gen Marketer Summit access for paid subs
➜ New resources & tools recap

MKT1 Perk Stack: $40K+ off GTM tools for $99 annual paid subscription

Read more

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Annual planning can feel like a herculean task. In fact, I wrote a four-part series on the topic last year; it came in at around 18,000 words. Admittedly, that probably didn’t make the process feel any less daunting.

So this year, I’m taking the opposite approach. I want to help you create a lightweight, first draft of an annual plan—especially if you’re at a smaller startup or working at an AI company where annual planning can feel like a fool’s errand given the pace of change.

You can boil most of marketing planning down to 3 questions you’ve likely already been asked for next year: What will marketing do to drive growth? How much budget does marketing need? Marketing, can you hit this revenue target?! This newsletter and our new tools will help you answer these questions.

Of course, if you want to go deeper after making your lightweight plan, you can still read the full series from last year. But if you want to plan 2025-style, you can use our vibe-coded tools to guide you. Two are totally free, and one’s for paid subscribers. Because my MKT1 2026 annual plan says: make the MKT1 paid subscription even better and more valuable.

In this newsletter:

• Answers to the 3 big questions you’ll get asked during annual planning. Here’s the short version:

  • Question 1: What will marketing do to drive growth next year?

    Answer: Plan 3–5 big bets for the year, based on your specific marketing strategy.
    New: Marketing Decision Dashboard tool - for paid subs only

  • Question 2: How much budget does marketing need?

    Answer: Start with marketing efficiency metrics to ballpark the right budget range.
    Bonus: Budget calculator - free tool

  • Question 3: Marketing, can you hit this revenue target?

    Answer: Build a bottom-up forecast to see if your top-down target is realistic
    Bonus: Forecast estimator - free tool

• Plus, how to take these basic planning exercises to the next level of detail

• Our new video series, MKT1 Unboxing: Attio

• More details about our Gen Marketer Virtual Summit on 12/10/25

Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

Profound helps brands like Ramp, MongoDB, and DocuSign understand and control what AI says about them. With the largest dataset of AI prompts and conversations, Profound generates AI-optimized content in minutes—complete with brand kits, citations, and topic research.

🎁Offer: Use code MKT1 for 20% off Profound Lite (new customers only).
—
Primer: Primer lets you build, enrich, and sync custom B2B audiences using your CRM, CSVs, and Primer’s proprietary datasets, then deploy them across Meta, LinkedIn, Google, Reddit, and DV360 at 40–90% match rates.

🎁Offer: Get 10% off an annual subscription with code MKT110.
—
Closing Media is a boutique agency that runs LinkedIn and Google campaigns for growth-stage startups. They know the best ways to build and scale ad campaigns in 2025 (hint: thought leader ads!) and have years of expertise (I worked with them in 2018!).

🎁Offer: Reach out to Closing Media here & mention MKT1 to get $5,000 of free ad spend for your next campaign.

Question 1: “What will marketing do to drive growth next year?”

Whatever you do, do not answer this question with “We don’t know yet.” If you do, you’ll be flooded with “What if we did X?” and “Have-you-seen-what-this-company-is-doing?” Slacks. That’s a recipe for Random Acts of Marketing (RAM). You need a plan that includes the big bets you’re going to focus on, whether you run content, growth, or the whole marketing show.

So before you jump to a quick answer or start calculating forecasts or budgets, figure out what projects can actually move the needle. To do this, codify and evaluate your marketing strategy, then identify 3–5 big bets for the year.

🪞What the answer looks like

The output here isn’t a laundry list of incremental improvements. Those don’t count, they just keep the lights on.

• To truly answer this question, you should share 3–5 big bets, each with its own GACCS Brief™, which stands for Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, and Stakeholders.

• Your big bets should be initiatives that combine Fuel and Engine™ for a specific audience, with a specific goal—and have a strong chance of driving step-change growth.

• You should also share your strategic thinking that led to these big bets, for those who want to dive deeper. This can be a one-page strategy doc, I like to use a Marketing Decision Dashboard™.

• Getting to the right answer here requires a varying amount of pre-work, depending on how well you’ve defined your marketing strategy already. The steps below will help you zero in on the most useful exercises for identifying big bets.
  » But if you need to back up & do a deep dive on your strategy first, the MKT1 Field Guide is a good starting point, as is last year’s annual planning series.

Read more

• In this episode, MKT1 Unboxing, Prince Boucher shows how to make cinematic videos in Luma AI Dream Machine instantly.

• Prince shows me how to generate videos with a text, image, or video prompt. We change the color of my shirt, make a Dragonfly fly, and renovate my office.

• I get a full tour of all of their features, including: Reframe for resizing videos, Brainstorm for idea generation, Annotate for marking up scenes, and tools to share and collaborate with my team.

Luma AI is kind of enough to offer MKT1 fans 20% off the Enterprise Essentials plan, just mention MKT1.

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You’re doing LinkedIn wrong. No, this isn’t a rant about the algorithm or a personal manifesto on quitting LinkedIn. LinkedIn is still one of the best places for B2B startups and marketers to spend time right now (that’s why I basically live there).

The problem is your LinkedIn strategy isn’t really a strategy—it’s a collection of disconnected efforts.

You might have the right ingredients: an influencer program, an exec thought leadership calendar, a few ads running through an agency, and occasional follow-up DMs to social commenters. Adding insult to injury, these efforts are usually handled by multiple marketers. But this is not a strategy, it is random acts of marketing, as I love to say.

If you combine these ad hoc efforts, rework the recipe, and streamline ownership, you can build a LinkedIn Flywheel that actually spins out pure gold. Okay, I’ve gotten carried away. But it is not an exaggeration to say that most startups doing any of these individual activities are truly sitting on a LinkedIn goldmine; they just have the wrong tools and workflows to mine it.

The fix isn’t to post more, spend more, or switch agencies. It’s to build a LinkedIn Flywheel™ that makes these pieces work together, helping you avoid wasted effort and allowing your results to compound. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to LinkedIn, but there is a method to the madness you can adapt for your startup.

In this newsletter:

• What is the LinkedIn Flywheel?

  • Step 1: Executives and influencers post on LinkedIn

  • Step 2: Boost organic posts with Thought Leader ads

  • Step 3: Qualify LinkedIn post “engagers”

  • Step 4: Send follow-up campaigns to LinkedIn “engagers”

• Why you need a Gen Marketer to own your LinkedIn Flywheel

• Templates & resources (for paid subscribers): Influencer campaign brief, Walkthroughs: How to run Thought Leader ads and extract “leads” on LinkedIn

Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

42 Agency: Let 42 Agency handle the MOPS work your team avoids. From routing logic and fixing scoring, to aligning HubSpot + Salesforce, to setting up new GTM tooling, 42 Agency is ready to help your B2B startup clean up and scale your ops.

🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get 10% off a HubSpot Audit or HubSpot Sprint.
—
Attio is the AI-native CRM. With automatic enrichment, call intelligence, AI agents, customizable record pages, flexible workflows, and detailed reporting, it just works better and doesn’t require months of set-up. We even use it at MKT1.

🎁 Offer: MKT1 subscribers get 15% off your first year.
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Default: Automate inbound with enrichment, meeting scheduling, AI workflows, and alerts when target accounts browse your company’s website.
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Part 1: What is the LinkedIn Flywheel™?

The LinkedIn Flywheel combines ecosystem marketing and executive thought leadership, with organic and paid LinkedIn posts, and signal-based campaign efforts into a single program. I’ll break down each piece in detail.

When done in this specific order, you’ll get high-quality “fuel” from people who know your space best to kick-off the process, boost distribution on the best posts, and finally follow up with engagers. This engagement will drive more social followers, both the individuals who posted and your company, and you’ll be able to rinse and repeat.

Before I go any further, I know what some of you might be thinking: SPAM! In my previous LinkedIn post teasing this topic, I heard these concerns about building this flywheel.

So let me just get this out of the way: Don’t spam people. Every LinkedIn “like” shouldn’t trigger a 12-step outbound sequence. The trick is to identify people who may be interested in more content, community, and products your company offers and engage with them in meaningful and valuable ways.

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