Suede Marketing Loops

---
name: suede-marketing-loops
description: "Suede-affiliated recurring marketing workflow design for cadence, inputs, decision rules, checkpoints, failure states, and measurable outputs. Use when the user wants repeatable ad-fatigue, content-refresh, churn-watch, ranking-drop, or weekly-review loops. NOT FOR: one-off tactic ideation (use suede-marketing-ideas), experiment design (use suede-ab-testing), or creating a live automation without explicit scheduling authority."
metadata:
  version: 1.2.0
---

# Suede Marketing Loops

Suede turns repeatable marketing work into bounded loops with a defined trigger, cadence, input contract, self-check, durable state, human checkpoint, and stopping condition. A loop may watch SEO opportunities, ad fatigue, or churn signals, but it never earns permission to publish, spend, or mutate production merely because it runs on a schedule.

This is the operational counterpart to `suede-marketing-ideas`: ideas identify what may be worth trying once; Suede loops define what approved work should repeat and how public Suede skills coordinate it.

## How to Use This Skill

Read `.agents/product-marketing.md` first if it exists and ask only for what it does not cover; see `suede-product-marketing` for path fallbacks.

Then:
1. **Clarify the job.** What outcome should this loop protect or grow? (rankings, ad efficiency, activation, retention, revenue, referrals)
2. **Pick a loop** from the catalog in `references/loop-catalog.md` — or adapt the closest one.
3. **Tune the cadence** to how fast the underlying signal actually changes (see the cadence rule below).
4. **Confirm the human checkpoint.** Decide what the loop does autonomously vs. what it stages for human approval before publishing or spending — see `references/loop-guardrails.md`.
5. **Schedule it** (see "Scheduling a loop" below).

Building more than one loop, or a whole marketing operating system? See `references/loop-orchestration.md` for how loops compose and the order to adopt them (start with tracking + a weekly review; don't build 45 at once).

## Anatomy of a Marketing Loop

Every loop in the catalog has these nine parts. When you author or adapt one, fill all of them — a loop missing a stop condition, a self-check, or its state handling is a liability, not an asset.

| Part | What it defines |
|------|-----------------|
| **Check cadence** | How often the loop *looks* (weekly / daily / on-trigger). Match it to signal speed. |
| **Acts when** | The action condition — what must be true to actually *do* something, vs. just check and skip. Most runs of a good loop are "checked, nothing to do." |
| **Purpose** | The one outcome this loop exists to move. |
| **Skills used** | Which marketing skills the loop orchestrates each iteration. |
| **Loop body** | The ordered steps run each iteration. |
| **Self-check** | The verification done *before* acting — so the loop doesn't act on noise, seasonality, or a tracking bug. |
| **State / idempotency** | What the loop remembers between runs: last-run marker, dedupe key, cooldown window, "already handled" set. Without this, loops double-act, re-nag the same people, or re-alert the same thing. Non-negotiable for anything scheduled — see `references/loop-state.md` for where state lives and the idempotency patterns. |
| **Stop / bail-out** | When the loop skips, halts, escalates to a human, or disables itself — plus what it does on error. Every loop needs one, including heartbeat loops (their stop is "manual disable + error-halt," never "n/a"). |
| **Output** | Where results go: a file, a PR, a staged draft, a notification, a report. |

The **Check cadence / Acts when** split matters: a churn-signal loop might *check* daily but only *act* when an account crosses a risk threshold it hasn't been contacted about inside the cooldown window. Conflating the two produces loops that either miss the window or spam.

## The cadence rule

Match cadence to how fast the signal actually changes — not to how often you'd *like* an update.

| Signal | Realistic cadence | Why |
|--------|-------------------|-----|
| Rankings, backlinks, domain authority | Weekly | Move slowly; daily checks are noise |
| Ad creative fatigue, CPA drift | Every 2–3 days | Meta/Google feedback loops are days, not hours |
| Activation / onboarding funnel | Weekly | Needs enough signups to be significant |
| Churn signals | Daily or on-trigger | Early intervention window is short |
| Content / copy decay | Monthly | Traffic erosion is gradual |
| Competitor changes | Weekly | Pricing/positioning shifts are infrequent but matter |
| Social listening / mentions | Daily | Engagement windows close fast |

Over-frequent loops are the most common failure mode: they generate busywork, burn budget, and train you to ignore the output.

## When NOT to loop

Not everything should be automated on a cadence. Skip a loop — or add a mandatory human checkpoint — when:

- **Strategy or creative direction is the real work.** Loops maintain and optimize; they don't set positioning, invent campaigns, or make brand calls.
- **The action publishes or spends without review.** Auto-*drafting* an ad, email, or post is fine. Auto-*publishing* or auto-*shifting budget* needs a human checkpoint unless the user has explicitly authorized autonomous action and set guardrails (caps, allowlists).
- **The signal is too sparse to be significant.** A weekly conversion-rate loop on 40 visitors/week is measuring noise.
- **It's a vanity loop.** If nobody acts on the output, delete the loop. A loop that emails a dashboard nobody reads is worse than nothing.

For any loop that sends, spends, publishes, or touches personal data, apply `references/loop-guardrails.md` — the two-tier action model (autonomous-safe vs. gated), spend/send caps, CAN-SPAM/GDPR/FTC/ToS rules, the always-escalate list, and a required kill switch.

## Scheduling a loop

These loops are agent-agnostic — the *body* works in any agent. The *scheduling* depends on your environment:

- **Scheduling-capable environment** — discover the installed scheduler, automation connector, or native scheduling primitives first and read their current instructions. Use them only when they are actually available and the user authorizes scheduling. Proof of a created schedule is the connector's own confirmation record — the created job's id or name and its next run time, quoted back.
- **Cron-capable host** — when cron is available, wrap the loop body as a scheduled prompt or script (`0 9 * * 1` for Mondays at 9am, for example). Proof is `crontab -l` output showing the new line.
- **Manual cadence** — for high-judgment loops, "run this skill every Monday" is a perfectly good loop. The value is the repeatable *body*, not the automation. Proof is the copyable cadence instruction itself, plus an explicit statement that nothing was scheduled.

Never report a loop as scheduled without showing that proof. If no scheduling mechanism is available, return the complete loop body plus a copyable cadence instruction and mark scheduling as not created.

Default to time-of-day cron for review-style loops (weekly review, ranking watch) and dynamic pacing for monitor-until-threshold loops (churn watch, launch-day tracking).

## The Catalog

`references/loop-catalog.md` holds the full library — 45 marketing loops with thorough funnel coverage: SEO & Content, Paid, Earned/Social/Partnerships, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral & Advocacy, and Ongoing Ops. Each is a complete, adaptable spec. Start there, pick the closest match, and tune it to the user's product, stage, and tooling.

## Authoring a new loop

When nothing in the catalog fits, author a new loop from `references/loop-template.md` — a copy-paste template with fill-in prompts, a worked before/after example, and a ship checklist. Fill all nine anatomy parts; if you can't answer the self-check, state/idempotency, and stop/bail-out concretely, the loop isn't ready to run.

**Halt format when a part can't be filled.** Stop. Name which of the nine anatomy parts is unfilled and what is missing to fill it. Offer these options and wait for the user's choice — (1) supply the missing part now, (2) downgrade to a manual cadence and ship the body without scheduling, (3) narrow the loop's scope until the missing part is no longer needed, or (4) abandon this loop. Do not schedule, and do not present a partial loop as ready. The same halt applies to the human-checkpoint decision in step 4 above: if what runs autonomously versus what stages for approval is undecided, stop there rather than picking a default.

## Anti-patterns

- Looping without a stop condition → runaway spend or infinite churn.
- Same cadence for every loop → most run too often and get ignored.
- No self-check → the loop acts on noise, seasonality, or a tracking bug.
- No human checkpoint on spend/publish actions.
- Building 10 loops at once → start with one, prove it earns its keep, then add the next.

## Banned vocabulary

Avoid: "set it and forget it," "fully autonomous marketing," "AI does everything," "10x on autopilot," "growth hacking machine." Loops are disciplined systems with checkpoints, not magic. Describe them honestly.

## Boundaries

- Do not create, enable, schedule, or modify a recurring automation without explicit authorization.
- Do not let a loop publish, spend, message, delete, or change production state without a named human checkpoint.
- Do not claim a loop ran, detected a condition, or improved a metric without a current execution record.
- Do not hide missing data, permissions, thresholds, owners, or stop conditions behind "autonomous" language, and do not decide those controls for the user.

## Routing

- Use `suede-marketing-ideas` for one-off tactics and `suede-ab-testing` for experimentation.
- Use `suede-analytics` for measurement inputs.
- Use `suede-content-strategy` for the portfolio decision behind a content loop — which pillars exist, and what should be refreshed, consolidated, or killed. This skill owns the recurring cadence; that skill owns what the cadence operates on.
- Route channel actions to `suede-ads`, `suede-seo-audit`, `suede-emails`, `suede-social`, `suede-churn-prevention`, `suede-pricing`, or `suede-referrals`.