Your marketing plan

A marketing plan is a newer, optional layer that sits above campaigns. Campaigns are still where posts actually get drafted and scheduled; a plan does not replace that. What it adds is a strategic view: the phases you are moving through, the audiences you are supposed to be reaching, and whether your campaigns are actually covering them. You can run Squawk entirely through campaigns and never open this page. If you already have a strategy document sitting somewhere, the plan is where it becomes a live picture instead of a file nobody reopens.

Reaching it

Click Marketing Review in the sidebar (it lives in the Workflow group, next to Campaigns). That page is the shared review hub for your organization: a top-level metric strip, a person selector, and a row of tabs starting with Overview (which loads by default), then Needs review, Campaigns, Full plan, All draft copy, All posts, and Feedback. The plan lives on the Overview tab. Everything below is about that tab.

If there is no plan yet

The Overview tab shows an empty state: "No marketing plan yet," with a short explanation that the overview turns your strategy into a live picture of what the plan is, where you are in it, and whether output is on pace. Organization admins get two ways to start:

Import your strategy opens the import wizard, described below.
Start blank opens the same edit sheet you would use to change an existing plan, empty.

If you are not an admin, you will just see a note that an organization admin can create the plan.

Importing a strategy document

The import wizard is a three-step sheet: paste, review, commit.

Paste. Drop in your strategy document, Markdown is fine. Squawk needs at least 200 characters before it will let you continue. The copy on this screen is direct about what happens: "The AI reads phases, audiences, channel targets, and open decisions; you review everything before it saves." Click Extract plan.
Review. Nothing is saved yet, the sheet says so plainly. You get an editable plan name, thesis, and start/end dates, followed by four lists pulled from the document: phases found, segments found, targets found, and decisions found. Each phase shows its label, focus text, dates, and, if the document's wording matched an existing theme or segment name, which story arc and audience it landed on ("No arc matched" if it didn't). Every item has a checkbox, uncheck anything you don't want. Segments render as toggle chips and get tagged "(existing)" if the name already matches one you have. When you're ready, click Confirm and import.
Commit. Squawk saves everything as a sequence of steps you can watch: create or update the plan, then (for a re-import) remove the old phases, then create new segments, add phases, set output targets, and add decisions. If a step fails, the ones before it already saved, "retrying only picks up where it left off," so you fix the failure and hit Retry remaining steps rather than starting over.

Once a plan exists, admins get a Re-import button on the plan header instead of the initial import prompt. Re-importing replaces the current phases and targets with whatever the new document produces, but segments and decisions are only ever added, never deleted, the sheet warns you about this before you confirm.

One thing worth knowing: a phase's arc and audience are matched by name against your existing messaging themes and segments, case-insensitive but otherwise exact. If your document calls something "Q3 Launch" and your theme is named "Q3 launch push," it won't match automatically. Fix it afterward from Edit plan.

Phases and story arcs

Phases are the plan's time-boxed stretches, each with a label and a focus description. They render as a horizontal Timeline card, sized by how long each phase runs relative to the whole plan, with a line marking today. Each phase is colored by readiness: on track (green), needs review (amber), nothing planned (rose), or done (muted, past phases). Hovering shows the phase's focus text; clicking jumps to that phase.

Story arcs are the messaging themes you've chosen to associate with this plan, set from the "Story arcs" picker in Edit plan ("Pick the messaging themes this plan tells a story with. Only these themes are used for this plan's arc coverage; other org themes stay out of it"). They show up wherever the overview talks about arcs: as rows in the coverage grid and as cards in "Campaign arcs" further down, each showing how many pieces of content have been produced under that arc so far.

Audience segments and coverage

Audience segments are named groups you tag campaigns and posts with, shared across the whole organization rather than scoped to one plan. The Coverage by audience card lists each segment with a bar showing how much content it has (published, scheduled, or drafted) and a badge: "Gap" if it has none yet, "On track" otherwise. If no campaigns carry a segment tag yet, the card just says so.

Below that, Show full arc by audience grid expands into a matrix: story arcs down the rows, audience segments across the columns, with a channel filter (All channels or a specific platform). Each cell is shaded by volume and shows published / scheduled / drafted counts; clicking a cell opens a small breakdown and a "View all posts" button that jumps you to the Posts tab. Cells stay empty until a campaign carries both an arc and an audience tag.

If existing campaigns or posts predate your segments, admins can click Classify content on the plan header. It asks the AI to read your unassigned campaigns and posts and propose a segment for each one ("Campaign → Enterprise buyers," for example). You review the proposed list, uncheck anything wrong, and click Apply selected. If everything already has a tag, or nothing matched with enough confidence, it says so instead of forcing a guess.

The executive-briefing overview

The rest of the Overview tab is a compressed status readout, meant to be read in under a minute:

The header shows the plan name, its status (Draft, Active, or Archived), the thesis you wrote, its date range, a pace badge (Ahead, On track, Behind pace, or Not started), a progress bar for the current week, and a single line summarizing what needs you: open decisions, channels behind pace, and the first audience with no content, or "Nothing needs you right now" if none of that applies.
A stat strip repeats the week number, how many decisions need a call, and how many audiences are still uncovered. Once you have set output targets, it adds a tile for total output against target ("posts and articles"), so a plan with no targets yet shows one fewer.
Strategy at a glance is a collapsible card (open by default) that only appears if your plan has a message stack, campaign arcs, or an offer ladder to show, drawn from what the import extracted. Plans without that narrative data skip the card entirely rather than showing it empty.
Output pace shows each target (a platform or CMS output, per week/month/or total) as a progress bar against a marker for where you should be by today, labeled Ahead, On pace, Behind (catching up), Behind, or Not started.
Decisions needed lists open decisions with a comment thread; admins can record the actual decision and its reasoning, which moves it into a collapsed "Decided" list.

Switching between plans

If your organization has more than one active or draft plan (archived plans drop out of the list), a plan switcher appears above the plan name: a dropdown of plan names, with "(draft)" next to any that haven't gone live. Picking one navigates to /marketing-review?plan=<id>. Without a plan selected in the URL, Squawk defaults to your active plan over your newest one, so if you're ever unsure which plan you're looking at, check the switcher rather than assuming.

Where this fits

Nothing about campaigns changes because a plan exists. Campaigns still draft and schedule posts the same way described in Your first campaign. What the plan adds is a way to check, at a glance, whether the campaigns you're running actually add up to the strategy you meant to run, and a place to import that strategy once instead of re-explaining it every time you brief someone.