Free marketing playbooks for founders and operators

Foundations

Start here.

1. Foundations Playbook

   Foundations

   Topic: Strategy & Positioning

   Get your GTM, messaging, and growth basics right — built for early-stage teams that need clear positioning and a usable analytics foundation.

   B2C variant

2. Pricing, Packaging & Monetization Playbook

   Monetization

   Design pricing that reflects your value, clarifies your plans, and turns monetization into a growth engine — not a guessing game.

3. SaaS Pricing & Packaging Playbook

   Pricing

   Topic: Pricing & Monetization

   Choose a pricing model, package tiers that ladder and anchor, price to value, and figure out where your revenue should actually come from.

4. Customer Segmentation Playbook

   Segmentation

   Topic: Strategy & Positioning

   Segment your market by need and buying process, size and score the candidates, then pick the one segment you can win first.

5. Market Research Playbook

   Research

   Topic: Audience & Customer Research

   Count the market from free official data, interview and survey customers, test price with real offers, map what buyers use today and keep one research file an investor can check.

6. EdTech Marketing Playbook

   EdTech

   Topic: Industry Playbooks

   Decide who pays before you decide what to say: choose a school, college or parent buyer, map the district buying group, build evidence, clear privacy rules and time the budget year.

7. ICP & Account-Scoring Playbook

   Targeting

   Topic: Sales & Pipeline

   Build an ideal customer profile from real closed-won data, score it on weighted signals, and rank your accounts into A/B/C tiers.

8. Lead Management Playbook

   Sales handoff

   Topic: Sales & Pipeline

   Agree your lead stages, score each lead on fit and behavior, respond within the hour, route every lead to one named owner and sign a marketing–sales SLA. Seven steps, one worked example.

Early Growth & Fast Experiments

1. 90-Day Growth Playbook

   Growth

   Topic: Go-to-Market & Growth Planning

   A compact, action-first program for founders. Audit your funnel, run focused experiments, and convert repeatable winners into SOPs.

2. Demand Gen & Performance Marketing Playbook

   Acquisition

   Topic: Paid Media

   Clarify your demand gen strategy, run CAC-driven experiments across 2–3 channels, and build a lightweight performance system.

3. Paid Media Budget Allocation Playbook

   Paid Media

   Topic: Paid Media

   Set a CAC target from LTV, match channels to your model, and split spend so the next customer costs the same on every active channel.

4. Pipeline Coverage & Forecasting Playbook

   Pipeline

   Topic: Sales & Pipeline

   Size pipeline from your win rate, build a weighted forecast you can defend, and run a weekly cadence that flags revenue gaps early.

5. Win-Loss Analysis Playbook

   Win-Loss

   Topic: Sales & Pipeline

   Read your loss composition by segment, reason, and competitor — then interview buyers for the real why.

6. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Playbook

   ABM

   Topic: Sales & Pipeline

   For growth-focused B2B brands — align Sales & Marketing, target the right accounts, and orchestrate plays that win pipeline.

Conversion & Retention Engine

1. Website & Conversion Optimization Playbook

   Conversion

   Topic: Website & Conversion

   Turn your website into a pipeline engine — diagnose friction, implement high-impact fixes, and install a repeatable testing habit.

   B2C variant

2. Customer Onboarding & Retention Playbook

   Retention

   Topic: Retention, Expansion & Advocacy

   Turn new signups into active, retained users — define your First Value Moment, design Golden Paths, and build a repeatable system.

Measurement, Scaling & Launches

1. Analytics & Attribution Playbook

   Analytics

   Topic: Analytics, Experiments & Budget

   Deliver reliable attribution, a live channel dashboard, and optimizations that improve cost per opportunity or conversion rate.

   B2C variant

2. Product Launch Playbook

   Launch

   Topic: Go-to-Market & Growth Planning

   Plan, execute, and optimize successful launches — from pre-launch positioning to post-launch optimization over 6–10 weeks.

   B2C variant

Advanced / Organizational Scale

1. Agentic AI in Marketing Playbook

   Advanced

   Topic: Marketing Ops, AI & Team

   Safely test and deploy Agentic AI in your marketing org — from discovery and pilot to governance and scale.

2. Marketing AI Products Playbook

   AI Products

   Topic: Industry Playbooks

   Sell an AI product on the job and the result, prove it on the buyer’s own work, check every claim before you publish, and price on a metric that grows with value. Eight steps, one worked example.

3. Franchise Marketing Playbook

   Franchise

   Topic: Industry Playbooks

   Recruit the right franchisees and help every location win local customers, within FTC and state rules. Seven steps and one worked example for franchisors.

4. Digital Advertising Playbook

   Advertising

   Topic: Paid Media

   A practical, end-to-end framework for planning, building, optimizing, and scaling high-performing digital ad campaigns.

5. GEO & AEO Playbook

   AI Search

   Topic: AI Search & Agent Readiness

   Get your brand cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and Grok — a 60-day framework for AI search visibility.

6. Earned Media Playbook

   PR

   Topic: PR, Partnerships & Events

   Eight steps for getting press without an agency: find a story only you can tell, pitch the right people, and make coverage work twice.

7. Partner Co-Marketing Playbook

   Partnerships

   Topic: PR, Partnerships & Events

   Eight steps for co-marketing that pays both sides: choose partners by audience overlap, agree terms in writing and share leads with consent.

8. Brand Foundations Playbook

   Brand

   Topic: Brand & Voice

   Eight steps to a brand a startup can keep: a promise you can prove, a few distinctive assets used the same way, and a one-page kit with an owner.

9. Product-Led Growth Playbook

   PLG

   Topic: Go-to-Market & Growth Planning

   Eight steps to product-led growth: find the activation moment, choose the free model, place the paywall and let usage decide who sales calls.

10. Community & Dark Social Playbook

    Community

    Topic: Social, Community & Creators

    Eight steps for marketing where analytics can't see: find where buyers already talk, make thinking easy to forward, and measure by asking.

11. Founder-Led LinkedIn Playbook

    LinkedIn

    Topic: Social, Community & Creators

    Eight steps for founders who are their startup's only voice: what to post before proof, a cadence that lasts, and when to hand it on.

12. Content Creation Playbook

    Content

    Topic: Content, Copy & SEO

    A comprehensive system for planning, producing, distributing, and optimising multi-channel content — blog, social, email, video, and podcast.

13. Brand Voice Playbook

    Brand Voice

    Topic: Brand & Voice

    Eight steps that turn a brand voice into rules a sentence can fail, so writers and AI tools hold the same voice and a check can enforce it.

14. Survey Playbook

    Research

    Topic: Audience & Customer Research

    A practical 5D framework — Define → Design → Distribute → Dig in → Decide — for building surveys that produce decisions, not just data.