The marketing prompt, in blocks

Marketing prompts fail in the same few ways every time, and the fix is the same few blocks every time. So keep the blocks.

Fill these in once for your product and your audience. After that most jobs are a copy, a paste, and one edit.

Use them in any combination. Block 1 on its own is worth more than nothing, and blocks 1 and 4 together handle most of what you’ll write in a week.

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Block 1: audience

The one people skip, and the one that fixes the most.

AUDIENCE
Who: [role, seniority, and the kind of company]
They already know: [what you don't need to explain]
They don't care about: [the parts you find interesting and they don't]
After reading, they should: [the one action, or the one thing they now believe]

“Marketers” is a category. “A marketing manager who has to defend this spend to her CFO on Friday” is a person. Write until a person appears.

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Block 2: voice

Description is slow. A sample is instant.

VOICE
Match the register of this, which I wrote: [paste 100 words of your own]
This sample is for tone and sentence length only. Not structure,
not content, not subject matter.
Never use: [your own banned list]

That last line about the sample being tone-only matters. Left off, a pasted example gets treated as a template and you get your own post back with the nouns swapped.

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Block 3: format

Specific and checkable. “Punchy” means nothing to a machine.

FORMAT
Length: [a number, not "short"]
Shape: [e.g. four short paragraphs, no headings, no bullets]
Opening: [e.g. start with the claim, not a question]
Ending: [e.g. one line, no call to action, no hashtags]

Every one of those should be something you can check by looking. If you can’t verify it at a glance, it’s a wish rather than an instruction.

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Block 4: source

SOURCE
Everything below is the only material you may use.
[paste the release notes, transcript, brief, or research]

If a fact, figure, name, or quote is not in the source above,
leave it out. Do not estimate. Do not illustrate with an example
customer. Write "not stated" if a gap matters.

This is the block that keeps you out of trouble. Marketing copy is exactly where invented numbers and invented customer quotes appear, because that’s the shape of the writing it has seen most of.

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Block 5: the boundaries

DO NOT
No preamble. Start with the first real point.
No summary paragraph at the end restating what you said above.
No em dashes.
Do not use: [the words your industry has worn out]
Do not claim any benefit that isn't in the source.

Long prompts drop instructions, and negatives go first. Put this block last, where it gets read last.

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Assembled

All five, for one job:

Write a LinkedIn post announcing our new reporting feature.

AUDIENCE
Who: operations managers at mid-size logistics firms, existing customers.
They already know: what our product does. They use it weekly.
They don't care about: how it was built, or that it was hard.
After reading, they should: click through to the release notes.

VOICE
Match the register of this, which I wrote: [paste 100 words]
Tone and sentence length only. Not structure, not content.
Never use: "excited to announce", "game-changing", "solution".

FORMAT
Length: under 120 words.
Shape: four short paragraphs, no bullets, no headings.
Opening: start with what changed. Not a question.
Ending: one line pointing at the release notes. No hashtags.

SOURCE
Everything below is the only material you may use.
[paste the release notes]
If a fact, figure, name, or quote is not in the source, leave it
out. Do not estimate. Do not invent an example customer.

DO NOT
No preamble. No closing summary. No em dashes.
Do not claim any benefit that isn't in the source above.

Download the blocks → All five blank, plus the assembled example. Plain text, no signup.

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When it breaks

Still generic. Block 1 is a category rather than a person. Narrow it until one specific reader appears, with a specific Friday problem.

It sounds like you, but says nothing. Voice block landed, source block didn’t. Check that the source is actually pasted rather than referred to.

It invented a customer or a number. The source block wasn’t last enough, or wasn’t firm enough. Move it later in the prompt and add the “not stated” line back.

It gave you your own sample back, reworded. The voice block is being read as a template. Add the “tone and sentence length only” line.

It obeyed the format and lost the point. Too much block 3, not enough block 1. Cut the format rules in half and add a line about what the reader does next.

Everything is fine but it’s boring. That’s a source problem, not a prompt problem. It can only rearrange what you gave it. If the release notes have nothing in them worth reading, no prompt fixes that.