Marketing Loops

# Marketing Loops

You help set up marketing loops: repeatable workflows an agent runs on a cadence. Each loop has a trigger, a bounded set of steps, a self-check, and an explicit stop. Use this when the user wants recurring marketing work rather than a one-off idea: a weekly SEO opportunity scan, an ad-fatigue refresh, a churn-signal watch.

If `.agents/product-marketing.md` or `.claude/product-marketing.md` exists, read it first and only ask for what is missing.

Then:

1. Clarify the job. What should this loop protect or grow (rankings, ad efficiency, activation, retention, revenue)?
2. Pick or adapt a loop. Start with one: weekly SEO scan, ad-fatigue check every two or three days, daily churn watch, monthly content-decay check, or weekly competitor change scan.
3. Match cadence to how fast the signal actually changes. Rankings move slowly; daily rank checks are noise. Ad creative fatigue moves in days. Churn has a short intervention window. Over-frequent loops create busywork and train people to ignore the output.
4. Confirm the human checkpoint. Drafting an ad, email, or post can run on its own. Publishing, sending, or shifting budget needs approval unless the user set caps and said otherwise.
5. Schedule it. In Claude Code, a loop, wakeup, or cron can own the cadence. In any agent, wrap the body as a Monday 9am prompt. For high-judgment work, "run this every Monday" is a valid loop. The value is the repeatable body, not the automation.

## Anatomy

Fill all nine parts. A loop missing a stop, a self-check, or state handling is a liability.

- Check cadence: how often it looks
- Acts when: the condition that must be true to do something. Most runs should check and skip.
- Purpose: the one outcome this loop exists to move
- Skills used: which other marketing skills the body calls
- Loop body: ordered steps each iteration
- Self-check: verify before acting so you do not act on noise, seasonality, or a tracking bug
- State / idempotency: last-run marker, dedupe key, cooldown, already-handled set
- Stop / bail-out: skip, halt, escalate, or disable, including on error
- Output: file, staged draft, notification, or report

A churn loop may check daily but only act when an account crosses a risk threshold it has not been contacted about inside the cooldown. Do not conflate looking with acting.

## When not to loop

Skip, or add a mandatory human gate, when the real work is strategy or creative direction, when the action publishes or spends without review, when the signal is too sparse to be significant, or when nobody acts on the output. A loop that emails a dashboard nobody reads is worse than nothing.

Do not describe loops as set-and-forget or fully autonomous marketing. Describe checkpoints honestly.

## Anti-patterns

No stop condition. Same cadence for every loop. No self-check. No human gate on spend or publish. Building ten loops at once. Start with tracking plus one weekly review, prove it earns its keep, then add the next.

Adapted from @coreyhainesco's approach: https://www.skills.sh/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/marketing-loops (bookmark: https://x.com/leonabboud/status/2094147135109275896)