feat(skills): add marketing skills collection

shared/skills/events/references/event-portfolio-strategy.md

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+# Event Portfolio Strategy — Which Events, Why, and the Economics
+
+The layer that sits *above* role and tactics. Events are the most expensive, riskiest, hardest-to-measure channel you can run — so the leverage is in **selection and portfolio design**, not execution. The single most common failure is treating "events" as one channel: attend two bad conferences, get few leads, and write the whole channel off — the same mistake as running Google Ads once, seeing poor results, and concluding all paid media is broken. **Each event is its own ecosystem.** Judge them individually.
+
+## Is in-person even necessary? (segment fit first)
+
+Digital scales efficiently; in-person builds trust that digital can't. In-person earns its cost mainly for high-trust, high-consideration motions. Prioritize events when your ICP looks like:
+
+- **Enterprise / multi-stakeholder** — high ACV, several people must build trust before a big commitment
+- **Regulated buyers** — healthcare, finance, government have strict vendor-evaluation norms
+- **High-touch / heavy customization** — significant integration or configuration work
+- **Conservative industries** — manufacturing, utilities still run on traditional relationship-building
+- **Long cycles** — 6+ month sales cycles get disproportionate acceleration from face time
+
+Reality check: a cybersecurity company found $500k+ ACV deals almost never closed without at least one in-person meeting — the trust to switch security vendors couldn't be built over Zoom. If your ICP is *not* in these buckets, spend on digital first and treat events as a small experiment.
+
+## The 80/20 of event selection
+
+A small number of events generate the majority of event-attributed pipeline (one B2B SaaS program found **3 conferences drove ~70%** of it). The job is to find those and concentrate:
+
+- Increase presence at the winners — secure **speaking slots**, host **larger side events**, send **more of the right people**, buy **better placement**
+- Cut or minimize the long tail of low-yield events
+- Re-rank yearly; the 20% shifts as your ICP and market move
+
+## Bigger isn't better (size ↔ ROI is often inverse)
+
+Major conferences look can't-miss and frequently deliver the *worst* returns:
+
+- **Big events = more noise** — higher cost on everything (booth, hotels, travel), more competing vendors, attendees spread thin across tracks, endless competing side events
+- **Audience dilution** — you're paying to reach a crowd padded with students, investors, press, other vendors, consultants, and industry tourists; your ICP is a thin slice, so effective cost-per-qualified-lead balloons
+- **Small-event advantage** — a 50-person niche meetup can out-produce a 5,000-person conference; highest ROI is often **regional events of 100–200** where you can reach every qualified prospect in the room
+
+## The three event types (three risk profiles)
+
+### 1. Owned events — maximum control, maximum risk
+You control everything from content to coffee breaks, and you carry all the risk. Range: exec dinners → roadshows → summits → user conferences.
+- **User conferences** turn customers into a community and a product into a movement (Dreamforce). Don't attempt before you have an audience that would come unbegged.
+- **Regional roadshows** take the message to scattered markets — one company generated more pipeline from a **6-city roadshow than its annual conference, at a third of the cost**.
+- **Industry summits** build thought leadership by tackling category problems, not product pitches — they pull in partners and influencers who amplify.
+- **Workshops / certifications** tie the event directly to customer success and can pay for themselves via fees.
+- **Three success factors:** ruthless **audience focus** (a clear "who," even at the expense of broader appeal), a **value proposition** attendees can't get elsewhere, and **strategic timing** (align to buyer budget/bandwidth — one company moved its conference Q4→Q1 and lifted attendance 40%).
+- **Model case — Drift HYPERGROWTH:** killed badges and sponsor booths, chose storytelling over product pitches, felt like TED not a software show → 3x pipeline acceleration for attendees, starting at 1,000 people year one.
+
+### 2. Trade shows & conferences — someone else's arena
+Less control, less risk — you rent instant access to an audience but work inside their format. **Success is 120 days of prep, not the 4 days on the floor.**
+- **Pre-show (starts ~120 days out):** mine the attendee list for *stories*, not just names (recent funding, press, job posts) → hooks far better than "want a demo?"; **book ~70% of meeting slots before anyone flies out** ("saw you opened a Singapore office — we helped 3 companies with APAC expansion last quarter, coffee at the show?")
+- **On the floor:** turn the booth into a **story-collection hub** — senior staff at the edges (not behind a counter), no physical barriers, customer success stories on screens, and bring real customers to tell their story. (One security company ran a live "Security Operations Center" that sparked real technical sales conversations.)
+- **The hidden game — satellite events:** morning coffee meetups and curated private dinners routinely out-generate the booth
+- **Post-show (where most teams fail):** tier leads and reference *specific conversation details* — hot → same-day, warm → personalized within 48h, general → nurture within a week; turn booth conversations into content (video testimonials, FAQ → blog/email)
+
+### 3. Community events — the compound interest of event marketing
+Small, regular investments that grow exponentially — often started on a tiny budget (monthly meetups for ~$500 of pizza and beer).
+- **Regular rhythm beats flash** — same format, same venue, every month builds momentum; chasing a bigger/flashier event each time burns teams out
+- **Never pitch — facilitate.** A "Tech Leaders Dinner" grew 8 → 40+ CTOs because it solved their real problems; the product came up naturally
+- **Turn customers into advocates** — support customer-run user groups but let them stay independent; they become a reference network prospects trust *because* they're not on your payroll
+- **The multiplier effect** — arm your most engaged attendees with playbooks, speaker connections, and seed funding to launch their own city events (one meetup spawned 12 across 3 countries)
+- **Metrics that fit** — monthly active members, conversation depth, community-initiated events, relationship velocity, member→customer conversion. The gut check is the **"Saturday Test": would people show up on a Saturday morning?** If yes, you built something real.
+- **Payoff** — prospects who attended **3+ community events showed an 85% higher close rate and 40% shorter cycle**; they understood the value in context before ever buying
+
+## Economics — real cost benchmarks
+
+Budget the full investment (money *and* time/opportunity cost) against pipeline, not just the sticker price.
+
+| Line item | Typical range |
+|---|---|
+| Conference ticket | $1,500–3,000 / person (major shows) |
+| Booth space (10×10, top-tier) | $15,000–40,000 |
+| Flights | $300–1,000 / person |
+| Hotel | $300–400 / night / person |
+| Booth staff | 3–4 people minimum at any significant show |
+| Private dinner (15–20 ppl) | $150–200 / person |
+| Breakfast meetup | $30–50 / person |
+| Happy hour | $50 / person |
+| Private meeting room | $500–1,500 / day |
+
+**Rule of thumb:** a significant show needs to generate **~5–10 solid opportunities** to justify sending a team. For the sponsor-specific go/no-go math and cost-per-qualified-meeting comparison against other channels, see [sponsorship-roi.md](sponsorship-roi.md).
+
+---
+
+*Distilled from Corey Haines's* Founding Marketing *(chapter: "Events create memorable experiences with potential customers"). Benchmarks are directional and pre-inflation-adjust as needed; re-verify current show pricing.*

shared/skills/events/references/speaking.md

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+# Speaking — Get Booked, Design the Talk, Compound the Recording
+
+Speaking is the highest-leverage event role per dollar: stage time confers borrowed authority no booth can buy, and the recording compounds for years — including in AI answers. Treat it as three separate jobs: getting booked, designing a talk that lands, and harvesting the asset.
+
+## Getting Booked (CFPs and pitches)
+
+Organizers optimize for their audience's experience, not your reach. Pitch accordingly:
+
+- **Pitch the audience takeaway, not your company.** A CFP that reads like a case study of the *attendee's* problem gets accepted; a product story gets filtered. Your product can appear as evidence inside the talk, never as its subject.
+- **Title formula**: specific outcome + specific audience + a tension or number. "How we cut CAC 40% by killing our best channel" beats "Rethinking Growth."
+- **The abstract carries three things**: the problem as the audience feels it, the specific things they'll walk away knowing (2–3, concrete), and why *you* — the proof you've actually done it (numbers, scars). Keep it under 150 words; organizers skim hundreds.
+- **Track and ladder**: local meetups → niche conference tracks → main stages. Recordings of small talks are your CFP portfolio for bigger ones. Podcast appearances feed the same ladder (→ **public-relations** podcast prep — same evidence discipline, same context file).
+- Off-cycle path: many events fill panels and replacement slots late — a short note to organizers with a tight topic + proof of speaking ability lands surprisingly often.
+
+## Designing the Talk: Outline First, Then Feelings
+
+A talk is a journey you take the room on, not a document you read at them. Two passes:
+
+**Pass 1 — the outline.** Before slides, lock four things (write them down; mush here becomes mush on stage):
+
+1. **Who this is for** — one person, their situation, what they already believe walking in
+2. **The Monday takeaway** — what they can *do or decide* on a specific next day; a talk without one is content, not a talk
+3. **What you get** — your win (pipeline, credibility, hiring) so the close can carry it without a swerve
+4. **The blocks** — each with a point and a proof (a story or a number). No proof, no block.
+
+**Pass 2 — storyboard the feeling.** Map how the room should *feel* beat by beat — a beat is a change in energy or emotion, not a slide heading. A 20-minute talk is usually 5–8 beats. For each beat, name:
+
+- **Energy** — the room, in directable words: quiet lean-in, rising unease, laugh-release, peak, still
+- **Feel** — the emotion in the audience's own mouth: "that's me," "wait, we're the problem," "I can try this Monday"
+- **The hit** — the one thing this beat must land, in one sentence
+
+Then check the journey: does the sequence of feelings *earn* the Monday takeaway, or is the takeaway merely stated at the end? If a load-bearing block produces no feeling change, cut or merge it — two blocks that feel the same are one beat. If the close needs a feeling that never appeared, the outline isn't done. One well-placed contrarian take stands out most on stages that have converged on a consensus.
+
+*(This outline → emotional-storyboard method is distilled from Knowatoa's `talk-storyboard` and `presentation-outline` skills — [ai-visibility-skills](https://github.com/Knowatoa/ai-visibility-skills), MIT, credited.)*
+
+## The Recording Is the Real Audience
+
+The room holds 200 people for 25 minutes; the recording works for years. Design for both at once:
+
+- **Talks get transcribed, and transcripts get crawled and cited by AI assistants** — the same compounding as podcast guesting. Say the important things in liftable form: your company name next to your category ("we build X, the Y for Z"), numbers spoken aloud rather than gestured at on a slide, and your quotable one-liner delivered *on a beat the room will feel* — the sentence you want quoted needs to sit where the energy peaks, or it dies in the transcript too (→ **ai-seo**'s text-layer logic).
+- **Slides are not the asset.** Anything that exists only visually (the key number, the framework name) doesn't exist for the transcript, the podcast version, or the attendee retelling it — speak it.
+- **Get the recording.** Confirm before accepting the slot that you'll receive it and may republish. If the event doesn't record, record your own re-delivery of the talk within a week while it's tight.
+
+## Around the Talk
+
+- **Before**: post the *why this topic now* angle; invite specific people to your session; make plans to meet the other speakers — speaker-to-speaker is the strongest networking lane at any event.
+- **During**: end with one clear, low-friction pointer (a memorable URL to the slides + a related asset — which doubles as a lead magnet, → **lead-magnets**). Q&A questions are content research; note every one.
+- **After**: publish the recording + a written version of the talk (→ **content-strategy**), clip the peak beats (→ **video**), follow up with everyone who asked a question or approached you — same 24–48h window as every event motion, and these are the warmest leads an event produces.
+- Roll the talk forward: the same core talk, sharpened by each delivery's Q&A, can run a full conference season. Retire it when the Q&A stops surprising you.

shared/skills/events/references/sponsorship-roi.md

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+# Sponsorship & Exhibiting — Evaluate, Negotiate, Work the Floor, Follow Up
+
+Sponsorships are the most expensive way to do event marketing and the easiest to waste. The discipline: treat every sponsorship as a paid-acquisition channel with a cost-per-qualified-meeting, and make it beat your alternatives or don't buy it.
+
+## Should We Sponsor? (the evaluation)
+
+Run this before looking at the prospectus pricing:
+
+1. **Audience–ICP overlap, in absolute numbers.** Not "5,000 attendees" but *how many attendees are your buyer*. Ask organizers for the attendee breakdown by role/company type; check last year's attendee/speaker lists and social chatter. A 5,000-person event with 200 ICP attendees is a 200-person event for you.
+2. **Do the meetings math backwards.** Realistic qualified conversations = a small fraction of ICP attendees (a well-worked booth might convert 10–20% of relevant walk-bys into real conversations — directional, varies wildly by event). Then: total cost (sponsorship + travel + staff time + booth build) ÷ expected qualified meetings = **cost per qualified meeting**. Compare against what a meeting costs you from outbound or ads. If the event is 3× your outbound cost with no strategic upside, pass.
+3. **Strategic multipliers that justify a premium**: your exact buyers concentrated nowhere else, a category-defining event where absence is conspicuous (late-stage), or access you genuinely can't buy elsewhere (exec attendees who ignore cold outreach).
+4. **The counterfactual check**: what would the same budget produce in your best-performing channel? Sponsorship must beat that, not zero.
+
+Red flags in prospectuses: attendee counts without composition, "impressions" as the headline metric, leads defined as badge scans, and last year's sponsor logos heavy on companies that didn't return.
+
+## Negotiation: The Prospectus Is a Starting Point
+
+Sponsorship pricing is soft, especially inside 8 weeks. What to negotiate for (in rough order of value):
+
+1. **A speaking or panel slot** — worth more than a bigger booth; stage time converts better than floor space (see [speaking.md](speaking.md)).
+2. **Side-event rights** — permission/space to host a dinner, breakfast, or workshop for a curated list during the event.
+3. **Attendee list reality check** — full lists are increasingly rare (privacy); negotiate for opt-in scans, the registration-page question, or sponsored-session registrant lists. Get what's actually deliverable in writing.
+4. **Placement and timing** — booth position near traffic (coffee, entrances, main stage exit); demo-day timing if the event has one.
+5. **Price** — last, after the package is right. Unsold inventory close to the date discounts heavily.
+
+## The Side-Event Play (often better than the booth)
+
+The highest-leverage move in field marketing: skip or downgrade the booth, and **host a curated dinner or breakfast adjacent to the conference**.
+
+- 8–14 seats, hand-picked ICP attendees + a couple of magnetic guests (a respected practitioner draws acceptances)
+- Invite via personal outreach 2–4 weeks out (→ **cold-email** for craft); "join 10 [role]s for dinner during [event]" converts far better than any booth pull
+- No pitch. The host halo and the conversations are the product; follow-up carries the commercial weight
+- Economics: a dinner typically costs a fraction of a mid-tier sponsorship and produces *deeper* meetings with *chosen* accounts. This is also the play when you can't afford (or aren't allowed) to sponsor at all — you don't need the event's permission for your own dinner across the street.
+
+## Working the Booth (if you buy one)
+
+- **Staff it with people who can qualify and demo**, not whoever was free. Two energetic people beat five tired ones; write a shift schedule — floor fatigue is real and visible.
+- **A 30-second qualifying question** beats a pitch: "what does your team use for X today?" sorts buyers from swag collectors instantly. Have a graceful fast exit for non-ICP traffic.
+- **Capture context, not just scans**: after every real conversation, 15 seconds of notes — what they said, what they care about, the agreed next step. Voice memo or CRM app, same-hour. This is the raw material of follow-up that converts; a bare badge scan is a name with amnesia.
+- Demo stations for depth, one clear message on the booth itself (the category problem, not your feature list), and book-a-meeting QR that goes to a calendar, not a form.
+- **Book meetings before the event** with target attendees — the booth is a venue for pre-booked meetings, not just a net for walk-bys.
+
+## Follow-Up: Where the Sponsorship Is Won or Lost
+
+- **24–48 hour SLA**, tiered:
+  - **Hot** (real conversation, next step agreed): personal email referencing the conversation, calendar link, same or next day.
+  - **Warm** (conversation, no commitment): personal note + one relevant asset matched to what they said.
+  - **Scan-only**: one light "we were both at [event]" touch or nothing. Never dump scans into a sales sequence — it burns domain reputation and brand on people who don't remember you (→ **revops** for routing/scoring).
+- Whoever worked the booth writes or reviews the follow-up — the context lives in their heads and their notes.
+- Sequence the not-nows into nurture with event source tags (→ **emails**).
+
+## Measuring the Sponsorship
+
+- Log every touched contact with an event source tag; measure **qualified conversations → meetings → opportunities → pipeline → closed-won influenced**, on an influence window that matches your sales cycle (90 days is common for B2B; long cycles need longer windows).
+- Report **cost per qualified meeting and cost per opportunity** against your other channels — this is the renewal decision for next year, made with data instead of vibes.
+- Self-reported attribution ("met you at [event]") catches influence that source tags miss (→ **attribution**); badge-scan counts and booth traffic are activity, not outcomes — track for logistics, never report as results.
+- Judge a first-time event against a discount: your team's first run of any event underperforms its potential. A promising-but-unprofitable first year is a redesign signal, not necessarily a no.

shared/skills/events/references/webinar-funnel.md

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+# The Webinar Funnel — Registration → Show-Up → Live-to-Close → Nurture
+
+The webinar is the flagship hosted format because it's the whole event arc in miniature, repeatable monthly, and every stage is measurable. Work the four stages in order — each stage's conversion rate is a separate lever with separate fixes.
+
+**The funnel at a glance** (typical B2B ranges — directional benchmarks, not targets; your own trend line is the real baseline):
+
+| Stage | Metric | Typical range |
+|---|---|---|
+| Registration page | Visitor → registrant | 30–50% (warm traffic), 10–25% (cold) |
+| Show-up | Registrant → attendee | 35–45% live; lower for cold/ads traffic |
+| Hold | Attendee stays past minute 40 | 50–70% |
+| Convert | Attendee → next step (trial, demo, offer) | 5–15% of attendees for a soft CTA; 1–5% direct purchase |
+
+## Stage 0: Topic & Offer (decided before anything else)
+
+The topic does the targeting and most of the selling:
+
+- **Pick a problem-aware topic, not a product topic.** "How [ICP] does X without Y" out-registers "Intro to [Product]" — the audience you want shows up for their problem, not your roadmap.
+- **Name the transformation in the title**: specific outcome + specific audience + (optionally) a number or timeframe. Test titles the way you'd test ad headlines — the title *is* the ad.
+- **Decide the offer before writing the content.** What's the next step for an attendee who loved it — trial, demo, audit, purchase? The entire live structure builds toward that one step. A webinar with no decided offer becomes a lecture with an awkward ending.
+- One topic, one promise, one offer. Stack more and every rate drops.
+
+## Stage 1: Registration
+
+**The registration page** is a landing page (→ **copywriting** for craft); webinar-specific rules:
+
+- Headline = the promise from the title; subhead = who it's for and what they'll walk away able to do
+- 3–5 "you'll learn" bullets written as outcomes, not agenda items
+- Speaker credibility in one tight block (why should they listen to *you* on this)
+- Date/time with timezone handling; "can't make it? register anyway for the replay" — replay-registrants are real leads
+- Short form: name + email (+ one qualifying field max if sales needs it)
+
+**The promo plan** — start 2 weeks out, not 6 (urgency compresses better than it stretches):
+
+- **Email list** — 3 sends: announcement, value-add reminder (share a preview insight), last-call day-of (→ **emails**)
+- **Social** — founder/host personal posts outperform brand posts; share the *why this topic now* angle (→ **social**)
+- **Partners** — a co-hosted webinar doubles reach for free; partnership mechanics → **co-marketing**, but note: co-hosted registrant lists need explicit consent handling for both parties
+- **Paid** — only after the topic is proven organically; retargeting warm traffic to a reg page works, cold-to-webinar ads are an expensive way to buy no-shows (→ **ads**)
+- **Speakers' own audiences** — for panels/summits, every speaker promotes; make it effortless (pre-written posts, custom links)
+
+## Stage 2: Show-Up (the hardest metric)
+
+Registrants are cheap; attendance is the funnel's leakiest joint. The show-up system:
+
+- **Calendar add at registration** — the single highest-leverage fix. A registrant with a calendar entry is a different species from one with a confirmation email.
+- **Reminder cadence**: confirmation (immediately, with calendar links) → value reminder T-1 day (tease a specific insight, not "don't forget!") → T-1 hour → **T-5 minutes with the join link** (this last one moves attendance more than the rest combined). SMS reminders where consented lift show-up meaningfully (→ **sms**).
+- **Close the gap between registration and event.** Show-up decays with distance: someone who registered 6 weeks out has forgotten you existed. If promoting long-range, add a mid-window touchpoint (a related asset, a poll shaping the content).
+- **Pre-engagement**: ask a question at registration ("what's your biggest challenge with X?") — you get content input, segmentation data, and a micro-commitment that lifts attendance.
+- Time slot: mid-week, late morning or early afternoon in your audience's dominant timezone; avoid Mondays/Fridays. Test against your own data.
+
+## Stage 3: Live-to-Close (sell without being salesy)
+
+The arc that converts without feeling like a pitch:
+
+1. **Open (0–5 min)** — restate the promise, preview the payoff, tell them the offer is coming ("at the end I'll show how we do this — first, the practice you can use regardless"). Naming the pitch upfront *removes* the salesy feeling; the ambush is what people hate.
+2. **Content (5–35 min)** — teach the real thing. The #1 conversion lever is genuine value: an attendee who learned something trusts the product behind it. Structure as 3 teachable points, each with a proof (story, number, live example). Use attendee questions/polls to keep hold rate up.
+3. **The transition (1 min, scripted)** — the hardest 60 seconds; write it word for word. The honest bridge: "everything I showed you can be done manually — here's what it looks like when [product] does it for you." The product enters as the *implementation* of the content, not a topic change.
+4. **Offer (5–8 min)** — one offer, concretely: what they get, what it costs (or what the next step is), why now (a real reason — expiring bonus, cohort start, limited seats; never fake scarcity, → **offers** for legitimate urgency design).
+5. **Q&A (10+ min)** — conversion happens here; questions are objections in disguise. Seed 2–3 starter questions for cold starts, answer the objection behind the question, and re-state the offer + link once mid-Q&A and once at close.
+
+Hold-rate mechanics throughout: deliver on a specific promise made in minute 1 at minute ~35 (announced), use pattern breaks every ~7 minutes (poll, story, screen change), and never front-load housekeeping.
+
+## Stage 4: Post-Webinar (half the revenue is here)
+
+Segment by behavior, then sequence (→ **emails** for craft):
+
+| Segment | Play |
+|---|---|
+| **Attended, engaged** (stayed for offer, asked questions) | Personal follow-up within 24h referencing their question; direct next step |
+| **Attended, left early** | Replay + timestamp to what they missed; softer CTA |
+| **No-show** | "Sorry we missed you" + replay with a deadline. No-shows are warm — they raised their hand once; a 2–3 email replay sequence recovers a meaningful fraction |
+| **Replay-registrants** | Same as no-shows, minus the apology |
+
+- **Replay strategy**: time-limited replay (72h–1 week) preserves urgency for the offer; evergreen replay converts the offer to a standing CTA and becomes a lead magnet (→ **lead-magnets**). Pick per goal — limited for launches/offers, evergreen for education-led capture.
+- **Cart/offer close**: if the offer had a deadline, run a real close sequence (deadline reminder → objection email → final hours). All urgency claims must be true.
+- **Recycle the asset**: transcript → recap post (→ **content-strategy**), clips (→ **video**), quotable stats for AI-citable content (→ **ai-seo**). A monthly webinar run this way is a content engine with a lead-gen side effect.
+
+## Metrics That Diagnose
+
+- **Low registration** → topic/title/promise problem (or traffic quality). Fix the offer of the webinar itself before touching promo volume.
+- **Low show-up** (<30%) → reminder system or reg-to-event gap; check calendar-add rate first.
+- **Low hold** → content front-loading or promise mismatch; find the drop-off timestamp.
+- **High hold, low conversion** → transition or offer problem; the audience liked the class but wasn't shown a reason to act.
+- Cost per qualified attendee and per opportunity — comparable against your other channels, and the number that decides the program's future.
+
+---
+
+*Skill category identified via 2026-07 competitive research (webinar-marketing in alirezarezvani/claude-skills, MIT — idea credited; content authored from scratch to this repo's standard). Benchmarks are directional industry ranges — treat your own trend line as the baseline.*