community-marketing

A plan for the community around a product — starting one from nothing, getting a quiet one talking again, or turning its keenest members into ambassadors — picked to fit the platform and the stage it is at.

WHEN TO USE

SCOPE

USE FOR

Get a step-by-step plan for launching a community from zero members.
Audit where new members drop off and design a new-member journey to fix it.
Choose a community platform — Discord, Slack, Circle, Reddit — based on fit, not habit.
Build a brand ambassador program with specific, non-generic benefits and outreach.
Build a health dashboard tracking how many members return daily versus monthly, reply rate, and lurker ratio.

This is a saved copy of the skill's SKILL.md instructions. It may differ from the upstream file or the version you install.

In this document (10)

Community Marketing

You are an expert community builder and community-led growth strategist. Your goal is to help the user design, launch, and grow a community that creates genuine value for members while driving measurable business outcomes.

Before You Start

Check for product marketing context first: If .agents/product-marketing.md exists (or .claude/product-marketing.md, or the legacy product-marketing-context.md filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered.

Understand the situation (ask if not provided):

What is the product or brand? — What problem does it solve, who uses it
What community platform(s) are in play? — Discord, Slack, Circle, Reddit, Facebook Groups, forum, etc.
What stage is the community at? — Pre-launch, 0–100 members, 100–1k, scaling, or established
What is the primary community goal? — Retention, activation, word-of-mouth, support deflection, product feedback, revenue
Who is the ideal community member? — Role, motivation, what they hope to get from joining

Work with whatever context is available. If key details are missing, make reasonable assumptions and flag them.

Community Strategy Principles

Build around a shared identity, not just a product

The strongest communities are built around who members are or aspire to be — not around your product. Members join because of the product but stay because of the people and identity.

Examples:

Indie hackers (identity: bootstrapped founders)
r/homelab (identity: tinkerers who self-host)
Figma community (identity: designers who care about craft)

Always define: What identity does this community reinforce for its members?

Value must flow to members first

Every community touchpoint should answer: What does the member get from this?

Exclusive knowledge or early access
Peer connections they can't get elsewhere
Recognition and status within a group they respect
Direct influence on the product roadmap
Career opportunities, visibility, or credibility

The Community Flywheel

Healthy communities compound over time:

Members join → get value → engage → create content/help others
    ↑                                          ↓
    ←←←←← new members discover the community ←←

Design for the flywheel from day one. Every decision should ask: Does this accelerate the loop or slow it down?

Playbooks by Goal

Launching a Community from Zero

Recruit 20–50 founding members manually — DM your most engaged users, beta testers, or fans. Don't open publicly until there is baseline activity.
Set the culture explicitly — Write community guidelines that describe the vibe, not just the rules. What does great participation look like here?
Seed conversations before launch — Pre-populate channels with 5–10 posts that model the behavior you want. Questions, wins, resources.
Do things that don't scale at first — Reply to every post. Welcome every new member by name. Host a weekly call. You are buying social proof.
Define your core loop — What action do you want members to take weekly? Make it easy and reward it publicly.

Growing an Existing Community

Audit where members drop off — Are people joining but not posting? Posting once and disappearing? Identify the leaky stage.
Create a new member journey — A pinned welcome post, a #introduce-yourself channel, a DM or email from a community manager, a clear "start here" path.
Surface member wins publicly — Showcase user projects, testimonials, milestones. This reinforces identity and signals that participation has rewards.
Run recurring community rituals — Weekly threads (e.g., "What are you working on?"), monthly AMAs, seasonal challenges. Rituals create habit.
Identify and invest in power users — 1% of members generate 90% of value. Give them recognition, early access, moderator roles, or direct product input.

Building a Brand Ambassador / Advocate Program

Identify candidates — Look for people who already recommend you unprompted. Check reviews, social mentions, community posts.
Make the ask personal — Don't send a generic form. Reach out 1:1 and explain why you chose them specifically.
Offer meaningful benefits — Exclusive access, swag, revenue share, or public recognition — not just "early access to features."
Give them tools and content — Referral links, shareable assets, key talking points, a private Slack channel.
Measure and iterate — Track referral traffic, signups, and engagement driven by advocates. Double down on what works.

Community-Led Support (Deflection + Retention)

Create a searchable knowledge base from top community questions
Recognize members who help others — "Community Expert" badges, leaderboards, shoutouts
Close the loop with product — When community feedback drives a change, announce it publicly and credit the members who raised it
Monitor sentiment weekly — Look for patterns in complaints or confusion before they become churn signals

Community Models & Scaling Phases

Before picking tactics, pick the shape of the community and match your effort to its stage. See references/community-models.md for:

The 5 community models — Support-Driven (GreenPal), Product-Development (Ydata), Education/Enablement (LiveAgent), Founder-Led (Bento, Postaga) — each with a "best when…" fit test tied to a primary goal.
The Notion benchmark — 300+ ambassadors, 1M+ template downloads, 25% of new users from community referrals. The north star for community-led growth at scale.
The scaling-phase role shift — Community Architect (0–100) → Manager (100–1,000) → Enabler (1,000+), and what to focus on in each.

Route here when the user asks what kind of community to build, which model fits their goal, or how their role should change as the community grows.

Platform Selection Guide

Platform	Best For	Watch Out For
Discord	Developer, gaming, creator communities; real-time chat	High noise, hard to search, onboarding friction
Slack	B2B / professional communities; familiar to SaaS buyers	Free tier limits history; feels like work
Circle	Creator or course-based communities; clean UX	Less organic discovery; requires driving traffic
Reddit	High-volume public communities; SEO benefit	You don't own it; moderation is hard
Facebook Groups	Consumer brands; older demographics	Declining organic reach; algorithm dependent
Forum (Discourse)	Long-form technical communities; SEO-rich	Slower velocity; higher effort to post

Community Health Metrics

Track these signals weekly:

DAU/MAU ratio — Stickiness. Above 20% is healthy for most communities.
New member post rate — % of new members who post within 7 days of joining
Thread reply rate — % of posts that receive at least one reply
Churn / lurker ratio — Members who joined but haven't posted in 30+ days
Content created by non-staff — % of posts not written by the company team

Warning signs:

Most posts are from the company team, not members
Questions go unanswered for >24 hours
The same 5 people account for 80%+ of engagement
New members stop posting after their intro message

Output Formats

Depending on what the user needs, produce one of:

Community Strategy Doc — Platform choice, identity definition, core loop, 90-day launch plan
Channel Architecture — Recommended channels/categories with purpose and posting guidelines for each
New Member Journey — Welcome sequence: pinned post, DM template, first-week prompts
Community Ritual Calendar — Weekly/monthly recurring events and threads
Ambassador Program Brief — Criteria, benefits, outreach template, tracking plan
Health Audit Report — Current metrics, diagnosis, top 3 priorities to fix

Always be specific. Generic advice ("be consistent," "provide value") is not useful. Give the user something they can act on today.

Task-Specific Questions

What platform are you building on (or considering)?
What stage is the community at? (Pre-launch, early, growing, established)
What's the primary business goal? (Retention, activation, word-of-mouth, support deflection)
Who is the ideal community member and what motivates them?
Do you have existing users or customers to seed from?
How much time can you dedicate to community management weekly?

Related Skills

referrals: For structured referral and ambassador incentive programs
churn-prevention: For retention strategies that complement community engagement
social: For content creation across social platforms
customer-research: For understanding your community members' needs and language

This skill ships inside the Marketing Skills for AI Agents plugin.

Install just this skill

Run this outside your AI tool, using Node.js 22.20.0 or newer. Skills CLI 1.7.2 skips skill selection; prompts cancel installation without an interactive terminal. If choosing Project when asked about installation scope, open your project's folder before running this.

Install checklist

Check selected tools if a picker appears; Claude Code may be unchecked under Additional agents. ↑/↓ moves, Space toggles selections, Enter confirms.
Without a tool picker, check Installing to: for your intended tool. Stop if it names a different tool.
If asked, choose Symlink (Recommended) for shared files or Copy to all agents for separate copies; review the summary before confirming installation.
Install the find-skills skill? defaults to Yes, adding another skill for all projects. Choose No if you don't want that extra installation.

Skills CLI 1.7.2 sends install data to skills.sh by default, including the source, skill names, target tools and file details; GitHub sources are reported only when GitHub confirms the repository is public, while other remote sources can also be reported. Confirmed-public GitHub sources also trigger a security-audit request. Before installing, set the environment variable DO_NOT_TRACK=1 or DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 to disable both.

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill "community-marketing" --full-depth

After installing for Claude Code, open it in the installation project if you chose Project; Global makes the skill available across projects on this computer. Once Claude Code loads the skill, its description helps Claude decide when to use it.

If installation created a top-level skills folder that did not exist when your Claude Code session started, run /reload-skills in that session. Run it again after later changes in that folder.

Install the whole plugin

This route installs the Marketing Skills for AI Agents plugin package selected for your AI tool.

Add the marketplace, then install the plugin

Type both lines inside a Claude Code session, not at your shell prompt. They add Corey's marketplace, which is this repository, and the marketing-skills plugin, with all 50 skills.

/plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills

02
```
/plugin install marketing-skills
```

Installation and loading

The second line opens the plugin's details; Claude Code installs it once you pick one of the install options shown.

Good to know

/plugin does not work in Claude Code on the web, GitHub Actions or other non-interactive setups. For those, Corey gives a shell form: claude plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills, then claude plugin install marketing-skills@marketingskills.

Add the marketplace, then pick the plugin in Codex

Run the first line in your terminal to add Corey's marketplace, which is this repository. Then start a Codex session, type /plugins and select marketing-skills to install all 50 skills. To get new releases later, run codex plugin marketplace upgrade.

codex plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills

02
```
/plugins
```

Open plugin page ↗

What's inside

Files included with this skill.

View on GitHub

Same repository

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When the user wants to generate, iterate, or scale ad creative — headlines, descriptions, primary text, or full ad variations — for any paid advertising platform. Also use when the user mentions 'ad copy variations,' 'ad creative,' 'generate headlines,' 'RSA headlines,' 'bulk ad copy,' 'ad iterations,' 'creative testing,' 'write me some ads,' 'Facebook ad copy,' 'Google ad headlines,' 'LinkedIn ad text,' 'static ads,' 'ad templates,' 'iMessage ad,' 'chat reveal ad,' 'ChatGPT ad,' 'Apple Notes ad,' 'AirDrop ad,' 'creative strategy,' 'creative roadmap,' 'creative retro,' 'hook writing,' 'creative review page,' 'present ad creative for approval,' 'motion video ad,' 'faceless video ad,' 'UGC ad,' 'greenscreen ad,' 'TikTok/Reels ad format,' 'which ad format to make,' 'Meta ad format tier list,' or 'creative format taxonomy.' Use this whenever someone needs to produce ad copy at scale or iterate on existing ads. For campaign strategy and targeting, see ads. For landing page copy, see copywriting.Read full description
ads
When the user wants help with paid advertising campaigns on Google Ads, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), LinkedIn, Twitter/X, or other ad platforms. Also use when the user mentions 'PPC,' 'paid media,' 'ROAS,' 'CPA,' 'ad campaign,' 'retargeting,' 'audience targeting,' 'Google Ads,' 'Facebook ads,' 'LinkedIn ads,' 'ad budget,' 'cost per click,' 'ad spend,' 'should I run ads,' 'ABM,' 'account-based marketing,' 'B2B ads,' 'lead quality,' 'negative keywords,' 'Performance Max,' 'thought leader ads,' or 'when should I kill an ad.' Use this for campaign strategy, audience targeting, bidding, and optimization. For bulk ad creative generation and iteration, see ad-creative. For landing page optimization, see cro.Read full description
ai-seo
When the user wants to optimize content for AI search engines, get cited by LLMs, or appear in AI-generated answers. Also use when the user mentions 'AI SEO,' 'AEO,' 'GEO,' 'LLMO,' 'answer engine optimization,' 'generative engine optimization,' 'LLM optimization,' 'AI Overviews,' 'optimize for ChatGPT,' 'optimize for Perplexity,' 'AI citations,' 'AI visibility,' 'zero-click search,' 'how do I show up in AI answers,' 'LLM mentions,' 'optimize for Claude/Gemini,' 'llms.txt,' 'llms-full.txt,' 'OKF,' 'Open Knowledge Format,' 'knowledge bundle,' 'agent-readable site,' 'agent readiness,' 'is my site agent-ready,' 'WebMCP,' 'do listicles still work for AI,' 'ChatGPT stopped citing comparison pages,' or 'AI citation format shift.' Use this whenever someone wants their content to be cited or surfaced by AI assistants and AI search engines. For traditional technical and on-page SEO audits, see seo-audit. For structured data implementation, see schema.Read full description
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When the user wants to set up, improve, or audit analytics tracking and measurement. Also use when the user mentions "set up tracking," "GA4," "Google Analytics," "conversion tracking," "event tracking," "UTM parameters," "tag manager," "GTM," "analytics implementation," "tracking plan," "how do I measure this," "track conversions," "Mixpanel," "Segment," "are my events firing," or "analytics isn't working." Use this whenever someone asks how to know if something is working or wants to measure marketing results. For choosing attribution models, comparing multi-touch/MMM/incrementality, or reconciling conflicting numbers across tools, see attribution. For A/B test measurement, see ab-testing.Read full description
aso
When the user wants to audit or optimize an App Store or Google Play listing. Also use when the user mentions 'ASO audit,' 'app store optimization,' 'optimize my app listing,' 'improve app visibility,' 'app store ranking,' 'audit my listing,' 'why aren't people downloading my app,' 'improve my app conversion,' 'keyword optimization for app,' or 'compare my app to competitors.' Use when the user shares an App Store or Google Play URL and wants to improve it.Read full description