What Goes in a Marketing Playbook (and What Does Not)

The first version should take a week of part-time work, not a quarter. Anything that needs new research is a second-version problem.

1. List the questions the team keeps re-answering. Go through the last three months of chat and meeting notes and write down every question that got two different answers. Five to ten of these is normal. Each one becomes a section heading, and the list is your table of contents.
2. Write the positioning on one page. Who it is for, the alternative they would otherwise pick, the one thing you do better, and the evidence for it. If four people would write four different versions of this page, stop and settle it before continuing.
3. Fix one wording per message level. Pick the single sentence the company uses for the top-level claim, then the three supporting claims under it, then the proof for each. Wording, not themes, because a theme is what people were already disagreeing about.
4. Name an owner and a cadence for every channel. One line per channel: who publishes, how often, and what that channel is for. Any channel you cannot fill in is a channel you are not really running, so remove it from the list rather than aspiring to it.Two people can hold two channels properly. A list of six is a list of six things to feel guilty about.
5. Write three competitor response plays. Pick the three moves most likely to happen: a rival cuts price, a rival launches the feature you were about to ship, a rival starts outspending you on ads. Write who decides, what we say, and what we do not do.
6. Circulate for objections, not approval. Ask three colleagues to mark any line they would contradict in front of a customer. Marked lines are unresolved decisions and need one more conversation. Unmarked lines are done, whether or not anyone praised them.

Three rules that keep ownership workable in a small team:

• One owner, named on page one, with a date next to their name. In a two-person marketing team this is whoever writes more of the copy.
• Proposals go to the owner in writing, with the decision they want changed quoted verbatim. A proposal that cannot quote the line it disagrees with is not about the playbook.
• Every edit gets a dated line at the bottom of the document. One sentence is enough, and it is what lets somebody returning after a quarter see what moved.

Four questions for the quarterly review, in writing, in under thirty minutes:

1. Which decision in here would we now make differently, and why?
2. Which channel missed its stated cadence, and do we keep it or drop it?
3. Which competitor move since the last review has no play covering it?
4. Which section has nobody quoted or used, and can it be deleted?

Four tests, each of which takes under ten minutes:

1. The wording test: ask three people "why do customers choose us over the cheaper option" and compare their answers to the playbook line. Different wording is fine, a different reason is not.
2. The new-hire test: give it to the newest person and ask what they would still need to ask somebody. Two or fewer questions means it covers the ground.
3. The edit test: check the dated change log. No edits in a quarter means either nothing changed or nobody is reading it, and it is almost never the first.
4. The citation test: count how often somebody links to it in a discussion instead of re-explaining. Zero links in a month is the clearest failure signal there is.