Emily Kramer was the first marketer at Asana, Carta, Astro (acquired by Slack), and Ticketfly (acquired by Eventbrite). She now runs MKT1, where the newsletter reaches 80,000 marketers and the fund has invested in 75+ B2B startups. She’s seen every version of the problem she’s about to name.

Most marketing teams use AI to produce more of the same content, faster. Emily wants them doing something else entirely.

Emily’s term for the default failure mode: doing every request that comes in, copying what another company did five years ago, redesigning the homepage because someone read a book on the flight, scattering energy across a checklist that nobody traced back to strategy.

The cause isn’t laziness. Teams do set strategy. They might half-ass goals, sometimes write them down. Then they never look at the doc again, and within a quarter they’re back to random acts.

The fix is making strategy referenceable on every request. Not a deck. A live artifact your team and your AI both check against.

Emily’s prescription: load your marketing strategy into Claude as a skill, then reference it on every content brief, campaign idea, and prioritization call. Her team at MKT1 already ships an MCP server that loads their frameworks straight into Claude, so the playbook isn’t theoretical. They’re running it.

Eight components go in:

1. Company overview. Business model (PLG, sales-led, hybrid), stage, GTM motion, pricing, industry, audience. Claude can pull most of this from your URL.

2. Tiered ICPs. Don’t just define audiences. Tier them by maturity. Which are scaling, which you’re building up, which have one or two customers, which you’re explicitly not focusing on (the anti-tier). Different tiers get different strategies, since the growth motion for a mature audience and the motion for landing a first referenceable customer don’t look anything alike.

3. Marketing advantages. Emily’s list has 12. The diagnostic question: if we look back a year from now and we’ve won the market, why? Founder presence? Proprietary data? An ecosystem nobody else has? A vertical the horizontal players can’t serve? Your marketing work should accelerate those advantages, not try to cover everything.

4. Perceptions. The 3 or 4 key narratives you’re driving from the customer’s point of view. Skip this one if you’re not leading content.

5. Positioning. Four questions: what is the product, who is it for, what’s the alternative, why is yours better. Multi-product companies get sub-positioning under a top-line.

6. Four ways to grow. There are only four. More of the same audience at the top of funnel. New audiences. Better efficiency at the same spend. More value per customer (enterprise mix, expansion, pricing). Most teams obsess over lever one and ignore the other three. The skill should know which mix you’re running and in what order.

7. Big bets. These come from your advantages crossed with your growth levers. At Carta, the advantage was aggregated anonymized data across venture-backed companies, an asset no competitor could replicate. The big bet became the salary gap and equity gap reports, which put proprietary data to work at the scale the company actually had. At Asana, the advantage was an internal network effect: one person on a team using it pulls in the rest. The big bet was cross-team use cases, the kind that required two teams to complete, since every cross-team assignment generated invites and turned single users into team activations. Different advantages, same logic.

8. Goals. Whatever stage you’re at, the numbers go in.

Loading the skill once doesn’t change behavior. Two moves make it stick.

Point your CLAUDE.md (the master instruction file Claude reads on every session) at the marketing strategy skill, so every marketing question routes through it automatically. Then schedule a monthly revisit. Every request becomes “use my marketing strategy skill to write this brief,” “use my marketing strategy skill to prioritize these experiments.” Strategy stops being a doc and starts being the rails.

If you want to know whether your team is actually aligned, run Emily’s diagnostic. Ask five people on your marketing team, plus a founder and a sales leader, the same question: which of these are we prioritizing right now and how should marketing spend its time?

You’ll get five different answers. Usually that surprises people.

The skill is what makes the answer the same the next time you ask.

AI-native marketing isn’t more content faster. It’s strategy that no longer lives in a doc nobody opens. Loading the eight components into Claude means every request your team makes runs through the same filter, every quarter, every brief, every prioritization call.

The horizontal AI players can’t customize that filter for you. That’s the marketing advantage the rest of us actually have.

What’s the last decision your team made that they couldn’t trace back to strategy?

- Emily Kramer, Founder at MKT1 Newsletter

Want to learn from more Revenue Creators like Emily? Join the RevGenius community and be part of the movement rewriting the GTM playbook.

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