The Marketing Specialist Persona

What the Marketing Specialist Does

The Marketing Specialist is a purpose-built persona for outbound work. It owns the day-to-day rhythm of growing and nurturing your customer base — finding the right people, sending the right message at the right time, listening for responses, and proposing content variants so you can pick the version that fits your brand voice.

Unlike the general-purpose Business Director or the inbound-focused Customer Support persona, the Marketing Specialist comes with outbound primitives turned on by default: an Outreach module for broadcasts and sequences, an audience builder, social channels (Google Business Profile, Facebook Pages, Instagram, LinkedIn Company, X), a lead-capture webhook, and a content-generation pipeline routed to your own LLM keys.

When to Choose This Persona

Pick the Marketing Specialist when your goal is to:

• Send recurring newsletters or product announcements to your customer list.
• Build a multi-step welcome series for new sign-ups or trial users.
• Reply to comments, DMs, and reviews across multiple social platforms from one inbox.
• Generate three or four versions of a marketing email and let your team pick the best one.
• Capture leads from landing pages or third-party forms without writing webhook code.
• Get a weekly snapshot of campaign performance — open rate, click rate, list growth — without building dashboards yourself.

If your primary need is internal Q&A, ERP lookups, or finance work, choose a different persona — the Marketing Specialist is tuned for outbound and will be over-equipped for those jobs.

Setting Up Your Marketing Specialist

Creating the persona takes about five minutes. The walkthrough below assumes you have already finished the onboarding guide and connected your ERP or POS system.

1. On the dashboard, click "+ New AI Employee."
2. Choose the Marketing Specialist persona from the template gallery.
3. Give the employee a name your team will recognize ("Mia" or "Brand Voice" both work fine).
4. Pick a working-hours window. Outreach respects this — broadcasts will not send outside it, and sequence steps that fall outside hours are deferred to the next valid window.
5. Skip the channel selection for now if you are not ready; you can add channels later from the Settings tab.
6. Click "Create." The employee appears on your team list and ships with the Marketing Specialist procedures and routines already attached.

The Outreach Workflow

Outreach is the heart of the Marketing Specialist. It lives under the Schedule tab as a sub-tab called "Outreach." Two primitives sit here:

• Broadcasts — one-shot mass sends. Audience + subject + body + schedule. Use these for newsletters, announcements, sales, and re-engagement blasts.
• Sequences — multi-step nurture flows. A series of email or task steps with wait days between them. Use these for welcome series, onboarding drips, re-engagement programs, and post-purchase follow-ups.

Both share the same audience model and the same composer. The difference is whether you want a single send (broadcast) or a paced series (sequence).

Building an Audience

An audience is a saved filter that resolves to a list of contacts at the moment a broadcast sends or a sequence activates. You build it once and reuse it across both.

1. Open the Contacts tab.
2. In the left sidebar, click "+ New Audience."
3. Combine filters: recipient type, opt-in status, last order date, source channel, tags, days since last touch. Each row narrows the result.
4. Watch the reach count update at the top of the contact list as you change filters.
5. Give the audience a clear name — "Customers > $5k LTV, no order in 90 days" or "Newsletter opt-ins, last 30 days." Future you will thank present you.
6. Save. The audience appears in the sidebar and is now available inside the broadcast composer and sequence builder.

Audiences snapshot at the moment of send or activation. If a contact opts in tomorrow, they will not be added to a broadcast that already started sending — they will only appear in future broadcasts that re-evaluate the audience. This is intentional: it keeps your campaign reach predictable.

Drafting a Broadcast

1. Go to Schedule → Outreach → click "+ New Broadcast."
2. Pick an audience from the dropdown (or build a new one inline).
3. Write the subject line.
4. Compose the body. You have two options: paste raw HTML, or click "Draft via specialist" to have the AI generate three variants for you to choose from.
5. Set the schedule — send now, or pick a date and time within your working hours.
6. Click "Save as Draft" or "Schedule."
7. If the audience is larger than 50 recipients, an approval card appears in your Decisions inbox. Approve it and the send proceeds.
8. Open-rate, click-rate, and bounce stats stream back to the broadcast row over the next 24-72 hours.

Building a Multi-Step Sequence

1. Go to Schedule → Outreach → click "+ New Sequence."
2. Name it ("New customer welcome," "Trial nurture," "Win-back").
3. Add steps one by one. Each step is either an EMAIL (subject + body + wait days before sending) or a MANUAL_TASK (creates a to-do for your AI Employee or the owner).
4. For email steps, you can again use "Draft via specialist" to get AI-generated drafts.
5. Save as draft to review the full flow.
6. When ready, click "Activate." This snapshots the audience and enrolls each contact. From that moment, the sequence begins advancing them step by step.
7. You can pause the sequence anytime; in-flight contacts stop where they are. Resume to continue.

AI-Drafted Content Variants

When you click "Draft via specialist," the AI Employee calls whichever model you have configured for that task (typically Claude or GPT for HTML email; Gemini's Nano Banana for social imagery). It produces three variants — different angles, tones, or hooks. You see them side by side in the composer.

Two things to know about this feature:

• It uses YOUR API key, not the platform's. You add your Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google AI key on the Specialist Routing screen (per AI Employee) and the costs bill to that key.
• It is optional. You can write every broadcast by hand if you prefer — the composer accepts raw HTML and never auto-generates without your click.

Accepting a variant copies it into the body field; rejecting the rest discards them. Each accept/reject is logged in the activity feed so you can audit what the AI proposed and what your team picked.

Social Engagement Queue

Once you connect a social channel (Google Business Profile, Facebook Page, Instagram, LinkedIn Company, or X), incoming comments, DMs, and reviews appear in your AI Employee's Tasks tab as items of type "Social Engagement."

Each engagement card shows:

• The original message (or review text + rating).
• The sender and the channel it came from.
• A sentiment classification (positive, neutral, negative).
• A reply composer where you can write back manually, or click "Draft reply" to have the AI suggest one in your brand voice.

The Marketing Specialist runs a social-engagement triage routine every 30 minutes during working hours, so you do not have to refresh anything.

Connecting Social Channels

Social channels connect through Nango OAuth — there is no manual token handling.

1. Open your AI Employee, go to Settings, then Channels.
2. Click "Add Channel" and pick a social platform (e.g., Instagram).
3. Sign in to the provider in the popup window.
4. Grant the requested permissions. You can revoke at any time from the provider's settings.
5. The channel appears in the list with status "Connected." Engagement starts flowing in within minutes.

You can connect multiple social channels on the same employee. Each runs independently — pausing Instagram does not affect Facebook.

Lead Capture Webhook

Lead capture is different: instead of OAuth, you get a unique webhook URL to paste into landing pages, forms, or third-party tools (Typeform, Webflow, Calendly, custom HTML forms).

1. In Channels, click "Add Channel" and pick "Lead Capture."
2. Copy the webhook URL.
3. Open your form provider and add a webhook destination. Use the copied URL.
4. Send a test submission. A contact appears in the Contacts tab tagged with source_channel=lead_capture.
5. Optionally, configure auto-enrollment: any new lead can be automatically dropped into a sequence (e.g., a welcome series). Set the sequence ID in the channel's settings.

The webhook URL is a secret — anyone with it can post leads. If you suspect it has leaked, click "Regenerate URL" in the channel settings; the old URL stops working immediately.

Specialist Routing — Bring Your Own Models

High-quality content generation (HTML email bodies, social copy, product imagery) is routed to external LLMs that you control. This is called Specialist Routing.

You assign one model per task category — for example, Claude Opus for HTML email, Gemini Nano Banana for social images. Costs bill to your own API key, not to the platform.

1. Open the AI Employee, click the gear icon, then "Specialist Routing."
2. On the Models tab, browse the catalog. Each row shows the provider, model name, supported tasks, and input/output cost per unit.
3. Switch to the Credentials tab. Click "+ Add API Key," pick a provider, paste your key, and save.
4. Open the Assignments tab. For each task (html_email, image_social, copy_long, etc.) pick a model and the credential to use.
5. On the Budget tab, set a daily cap (e.g., $10/day) and a per-call approval threshold (e.g., $0.50). Any single call estimated above that threshold will ask for your approval before running.

If you skip Specialist Routing entirely, the Marketing Specialist still works — broadcasts and sequences send fine with raw HTML you write yourself. The Specialist Router only powers the "Draft via specialist" buttons and the AI-suggested replies.

Daily Routines

The Marketing Specialist ships with these routines pre-attached. You can see them under Schedule → Routines.

• Weekly Campaign Brief — every Monday morning, summarizes last week's broadcasts (open rate, click rate, top performer) and proposes a theme for this week.
• Audience Growth Check — daily, finds newly-opted-in subscribers and syncs them into the relevant audience filters.
• Social Engagement Triage — every 30 minutes during working hours, pulls new comments/DMs/reviews and creates engagement tasks for items above a configurable sentiment threshold.
• Segment Health Report — weekly recap of opt-out rate, list growth, and churn signals.

You can disable or rename any routine from the Schedule tab. You can also change their cadence if your business runs on a different rhythm.

Tips and Common Pitfalls

• Start with one audience and one broadcast. Resist the urge to build five sequences before you have sent a single email — you will learn more from one real send than from a week of planning.
• Always preview the audience reach before sending. The composer shows the count; if it is unexpectedly large or small, your filter is probably wrong.
• Use the AI-drafted variants as a starting point, not a final word. The model knows campaign best practices; it does not know your customer base. Edit before sending.
• Watch the daily budget on the Specialist Routing screen — large-image generation runs can spend $1-2 per image. Set an approval threshold that matches your comfort level.
• For sequences with more than 5 steps, expect a 10-20% engagement drop after step 3. Cap your nurture series at 5-7 emails unless the data tells you otherwise.
• When connecting a Meta channel (Facebook or Instagram), make sure the connected account is a Business or Creator account — personal profiles are not supported.

Where to Go Next

Once your Marketing Specialist is sending broadcasts and triaging engagement, expand its scope:

• Pair it with the Sales Representative persona for full-funnel coverage — marketing brings them in, sales closes them.
• Connect your ERP or POS so the AI can use real customer purchase data when picking audiences ("Customers who bought product X but not the replenishment").
• Add a knowledge base of brand voice samples and approved phrases under the Knowledge tab — the AI uses these when drafting content.

See the "Choosing a Persona Template" guide if you are still deciding which persona fits your business, and "Configuring Persona Settings" for advanced customization.