What a new marketer needs to know in their first week
A new marketer's first week goes best when they learn the context behind the work, not just the work itself. They need to know who your customers are and what makes them buy, how your company describes itself, and how your brand sounds. They also need to know what's already been tried, which choices are already made, and who to ask about what.
Most teams hand that context over in meetings. The founder explains the positioning, the head of sales describes the best customers, and someone forwards a folder of old campaign decks. It takes weeks, and the new hire still ends up piecing things together from Slack threads and half-finished docs. The parts that never get passed on are usually the ones that would save the most time: the LinkedIn campaign that brought clicks but no sign-ups, the pricing test that was inconclusive, and the reason you stopped sponsoring newsletters.
A good onboarding brief puts all of that in one document. It should include:
- your company, products, and positioning, in the words your team actually uses
- your ideal customers, the people involved in buying, and why they choose you over competitors
- your brand voice, with examples of copy that sounds right
- what each channel has taught you, including the experiments that lost
- the decisions that shape your marketing, with the reasoning behind each one
- the standing rules people on the team have set, and who set them
- the open questions and known risks nobody has resolved yet
Writing that document is hard for a busy team because the knowledge is scattered and nobody has time to collect it. It's well suited to an AI agent that already keeps a record of your marketing as it does the work, because most of the brief is already written down by the time you need it.
Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. It keeps your team's marketing knowledge as part of that work, and it can turn that knowledge into an onboarding brief for whoever joins next. Here's how it works.
How Kite writes an onboarding brief for a new marketer
Kite starts from the knowledge base it keeps for your team. When you sign up, Kite researches your company, customers, competitors, and brand, and it records what it learns. From then on, it adds the results of every test, every round of ads, and every decision your team makes. So when you ask for an onboarding brief, Kite isn't starting from a blank page. It's summarizing a record that's been growing since your first day with Kite.
Before it writes, Kite checks what's missing. If your knowledge base is thin on a subject the new hire will own, such as your email program or a channel you haven't run through Kite, Kite tells you and asks you to fill it in. Then it writes the brief around the role. A brief for a content marketer leads with your brand voice, themes, and what your content has taught you. A brief for a demand generation hire leads with your customers, your channels, and what your ads have returned.
Kite finishes the brief with the open questions the new hire should take on first. You review it, change what you want, and send it to the new hire as a Google Doc, a Notion page, or a link they can open in their browser.
- How do I turn what our team knows into an onboarding guide?
- Start with your company, your customers, and how you sound
- Show what your marketing has already tried
- Explain the decisions, the rules, and who owns what
- What does a new marketing manager need to know in their first week?
- Deliver the brief and keep answering questions
How do I turn what our team knows into an onboarding guide?
You turn what your team knows into an onboarding guide by getting it out of people's heads and scattered files and into one shared record first, then writing the guide from that record. Kite does most of the first step as part of its normal work, and it helps you with the rest.
Some of what your team knows is already in documents. If you connect Google Drive, Google Docs, or Notion, Kite can find and read the old campaign recaps, positioning docs, and brand guidelines you point it to. It records the durable facts in your knowledge base with a note about where each one came from, rather than pasting whole documents in. You can also upload PDFs straight into the conversation.
Some of it lives only in conversation. If your team has added Kite to Slack, Kite can also search the public channels it has joined for an earlier discussion, such as the thread where your team decided to stop running Google search ads. It reads files people share in Slack as well.
The rest is in people's heads. The fastest way to capture it is to tell Kite directly. You might say, "Our best customers are clinics with three or more locations, and solo practices almost never convert," or "Priya wants to see every piece of ad creative before it launches." Kite records each fact with the name of the person who said it and the date, so the new hire knows where it came from.
Start with your company, your customers, and how you sound
The first section of the brief explains who you are and who you sell to, because every other part of the job depends on it. Kite writes it from the company pages in your knowledge base: your overview, positioning, ideal customer profile, products, and the competitors you meet most often.
Kite writes this section in plain terms a new hire can act on. Instead of "mid-market healthcare," it says which kinds of clinics buy, who signs the contract, and what made your last few customers choose you. For each competitor, it explains how your team wins and loses against it.
Brand voice comes next. Kite includes your voice rules and a few examples of copy your team approved, along with phrases and claims your team has asked it to avoid. A new marketer can read those examples and write something on-brand in their first week instead of learning the voice through rounds of edits.
Kite also includes a short map of where your marketing data lives: which tool holds your customer records, where your analytics are, which email product you use, and what your website runs on. That saves the new hire a week of asking around for logins and dashboards.
Show what your marketing has already tried
This section tells the new hire what's already been tested and how it turned out, so they build on your results instead of repeating them. It's the part of the brief new marketers find most useful, and the part most teams skip.
Kite keeps a page for every experiment it runs, with the hypothesis, the change it tested, the starting number, the result, and a verdict of won, lost, or inconclusive. It also keeps a running log of what worked and what didn't in each channel, such as paid ads, social, email, website conversion, and content. The brief summarizes those in a form a new hire can scan in a few minutes.
For example, a brief might say that a free-trial button lost to a demo button on the pricing page last spring, that LinkedIn ads aimed at operations managers brought clicks but few sign-ups, and that a test of annual pricing was inconclusive because a product launch changed traffic halfway through. That last kind of note matters. A test marked "lost" tells the new hire not to bother, while a test marked "inconclusive" tells them it might be worth running again.
Kite also includes the backlog of test ideas your team hasn't run yet, with the reason for any idea the team rejected. A new marketer usually arrives with ideas, and this shows them which ones have already been discussed.
Explain the decisions, the rules, and who owns what
This section explains which choices are already made, why they were made, and who to talk to about each area. It keeps a new hire from reopening settled questions by accident, and it tells them which ones are fair to question.
Kite records each decision your team makes with the reasoning, the evidence, and the person who approved it. The brief lists the decisions still in force, such as "We stopped sponsoring newsletters in March because cost per sign-up was three times higher than referrals." A new marketer who disagrees can see the original reasoning and argue with the evidence rather than with a memory.
Standing rules come next. These are the instructions people on your team have given, such as "use UK spelling on UK pages" or "never advertise to students," each with the name of the person who set it. Kite also notes who on the team owns what and how they like to work, such as who runs paid ads and who wants to see creative before it launches.
What does a new marketing manager need to know in their first week?
In their first week, a new marketing manager needs to know who the customers are, what the company has already tried, which decisions are settled, and which questions are theirs to answer. The last part is what turns a brief into a plan. Kite ends every onboarding brief with the open questions and known risks from your knowledge base.
Open questions are the things your team knows it doesn't know, such as whether your best customers come from search or from referrals. Known risks are things that could hurt you, such as a partner contract that renews in the spring. Kite lists both and suggests which ones fit the new hire's role.
Kite is also clear about how sure it is. The brief notes which facts your team stated and which ones Kite inferred from its own research, and it flags any fact that's past the date when it should have been checked again. A new hire who reads "Kite's research suggests your main competitor is Acme, but no one on the team has confirmed it" knows exactly where to start asking.
Deliver the brief and keep answering questions
Kite delivers the brief where your new hire will read it. If you've connected Google Docs or Notion, Kite can create the brief there. Otherwise, it can publish the brief as a report with a shareable link, which you can limit to people at your company, or write it straight into the conversation.
The brief is a starting point, not the whole handoff. Once you add the new marketer to your Kite team, they can see the team's conversations with Kite and ask it questions of their own. "Why did we stop running Google search ads?" and "What did we learn from the spring webinars?" both get answers from the same record, with the date and source behind them. That lets the new hire go deeper on whatever matters to their role without booking a meeting for every question.
The brief also stays easy to refresh. Kite keeps adding to the record as work happens, so the next time someone joins, you can ask for a new brief and it will include everything that's happened since.
What you get
An onboarding brief for the role
Your company, customers, competitors, and brand, followed by what's been tried, what's been decided, and what's still open, written for the job the new hire is starting.
A record of past experiments and channel results
Each test with its result and verdict, plus what each channel has taught you, so the new hire builds on your results.
A list of settled decisions and standing rules
Each one with the reasoning and the person behind it, so the new hire knows what's settled and why.
A first-week starting point
The open questions and risks that fit the role, with the facts Kite is less sure of clearly marked.
A colleague the new hire can ask
Kite answers follow-up questions from the same record, in the Kite web app or in Slack.
How to get started
Sign up with your company's website. You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack. Kite starts building your team's knowledge base by researching your business, and it adds to it with every piece of work it finishes.
When you have a hire starting, tell Kite about the role. You might say, "We have a content marketer starting on Monday. Write them an onboarding brief." Kite checks what it knows, tells you where the record is thin for that role, and asks you to fill in what it can't find. Answer in the conversation, upload documents, or connect Google Drive, Google Docs, or Notion so Kite can read what your team already wrote.
Kite then writes the brief for you to review. Edit what you want, ask for changes, and tell Kite where to put it. When the new marketer starts, add them to your Kite team so they can ask their own questions.
Integrations used to write an onboarding brief
Kite writes the brief from its own knowledge base, so you can get one without connecting anything. Connected accounts let Kite read what your team wrote down before Kite arrived and deliver the brief where your team already keeps documents.
Read what your team already wrote down
Kite finds the campaign recaps, positioning docs, and brand guidelines in the folders you point it to, and records the lasting facts in your knowledge base.
Kite reads the documents your team uses to explain your marketing, such as an old strategy doc or a messaging guide.
Kite searches and reads your team's Notion pages, such as a marketing wiki or a launch retrospective.
Find decisions made in conversation
Common questions
How long should a marketing onboarding brief be?
A marketing onboarding brief should be short enough to read in one sitting, usually a few pages. Its job is to give the new hire the shape of the business and point them to the details, not to hold every fact. Kite keeps the brief to summaries and the most important examples. The full experiment pages, decision entries, and competitor research stay in your knowledge base, where the new hire can ask Kite about them when they need more.
Does an onboarding brief replace meetings with the team?
No, and it shouldn't. A brief handles the context, so the meetings can be about judgment and relationships instead of facts. Instead of spending an hour explaining your positioning, the founder can spend that hour on where they think the positioning is wrong. The brief's open questions also make good agendas for those first conversations.
How is a marketing onboarding brief different from HR onboarding?
HR onboarding covers the company as an employer: paperwork, benefits, policies, tools, and introductions to the wider team. A marketing onboarding brief covers the work itself: the customers, the brand, the results so far, and the decisions that shape what the new hire will do. Most companies need both. Kite writes the marketing brief and leaves contracts, payroll, and company policies to your HR process.
What if we haven't been using Kite for long?
Kite can still write a useful brief. Its research during sign-up gives it your positioning, customers, competitors, brand, website, and search and AI visibility from the start. What it won't have yet is your history, such as past experiments and the reasons behind old decisions. Kite tells you where those sections are thin, and you can fill them in by telling Kite what you know or connecting the documents where your team recorded it. Everything you add stays in the record for the next brief.
Can Kite write a brief for a contractor or agency instead of a full-time hire?
Yes. The same record works for anyone who needs to learn your marketing quickly, whether that's a freelance writer, a contractor running your ads, or an agency starting a new engagement. Tell Kite who the brief is for and what they'll work on, and it focuses the brief on that part of the job. If you're an agency yourself, each client can have its own Kite team with its own knowledge base, so a brief for one client's account never includes another client's material.