skills/marketing-loops/references/loop-orchestration.md
Loops aren't independent scripts — they compose into a marketing operating system. This reference covers how they fit together and the order to adopt them so you never build 43 at once.
Loops fall into four layers. Data flows down and learnings flow back up.
SENSING analytics-anomaly · tracking-QA · weekly-marketing-review
│ (detect what changed; trust the numbers first)
▼
DIAGNOSTIC per-stage watchers — onboarding drop-off, churn-signal,
ranking-drop, landing-page regression, ad-fatigue, …
│ (figure out what to do about it)
▼
ACTION staged drafts, nudges, outreach, budget moves
│ (mostly human-checkpointed)
▼
LEARNING experiment-backlog · campaign-postmortem · voice-of-customer
│ (capture what worked)
└──────────────► feeds back into SENSING & DIAGNOSTIC
Key connective tissue:
ab-testing. Don't let each loop run its own tests.Avoid duplicate ownership: when two loops could act on the same signal, one owns the action and the other just flags. (E.g., an at-risk account belongs to churn-signal, not expansion/upsell — never upsell an account that's churning.)
Add a loop only when the loops before it are running and earning their keep. Each stage assumes the previous one is solid.
Stage 0 — Foundation (trust the data + see the board).
tracking-QA, weekly-marketing-review.
You cannot run any loop responsibly on untrustworthy data or without a full-funnel pulse. This is non-negotiable and comes first.
Stage 1 — Plug the leaks (highest ROI, protects existing revenue).
failed-payment/dunning, churn-signal, lifecycle-email-refresh.
Recovering customers you already have is cheaper than acquiring new ones. Dunning alone often pays for the whole system.
Stage 2 — Convert what you already get (fix the bucket before adding water).
onboarding drop-off, signup-funnel-leak, trial-conversion.
More traffic into a leaky funnel is waste. Seal activation and conversion next.
Stage 3 — Grow the top (now scale acquisition).
keyword-gap, content-repurposing, ad-fatigue, social-listening, analytics-anomaly.
With the bucket sealed, turn on demand generation and the safety-net anomaly watcher.
Stage 4 — Optimize monetization.
pricing-page-experiment, paywall-optimization, PQL/upgrade-intent, expansion/upsell.
Once volume is healthy, tune revenue per user — judged on revenue quality, not conversion alone.
Stage 5 — Compounding & advocacy.
referral-nudge, review-and-UGC-harvest, review-site-management, case-study-sourcing, partner-pipeline, brand-mention/reputation, experiment-backlog, campaign-postmortem.
The flywheel: happy customers and earned media that feed back into acquisition, plus the learning loops that make everything compound.
The remaining catalog loops (content-decay, internal-linking, programmatic-SEO quality, content-calendar refill, paid-search query-mining, retargeting-hygiene, landing-page regression, community-engagement, competitor-watch, backlink-prospecting, directory-submission, feature-adoption, lead-capture-asset, email-deliverability, voice-of-customer) slot into the stage that matches their function as each channel becomes a priority.