Quickstart

This guide walks you through the full Skeleton Key workflow, from setting up a brand profile to generating a finished media plan. Adding up the stages below, expect about 21-28 minutes of wall-clock time (excluding optional Research reports, which add another 3-4 minutes). At the end you'll have a research dossier, a four-part strategy, and a tactical media plan ready to review and refine. If you haven't read What is Skeleton Key? yet, start there. It covers what the platform produces and how the five steps connect.

1. 01

   Create a brand

   Under Brand in the sidebar, open Profile and click Create brand. Fill in the required fields: Brand Name, Category, Products/Services, URLs (at least one website or social link), and Business Goals.

   Save the form. The Brand Profiler agent kicks off automatically on first save. It pulls signals from the URLs you provided, runs web research, and constructs a detailed brand profile. This takes 2-3 minutes.

   When it finishes, the Brand Profile page populates with your brand's positioning, target audience, voice, and competitive context.

   Optional: attach brand documents

   If you have PDFs, Word files, Markdown, CSVs, or Excel sheets that contain brand context (guidelines, previous research, product specs), attach them directly on the new-brand form, or upload them on the Documents page once the profile has completed. When you regenerate the profile, you can attach those documents and the Brand Profiler will treat them as high-priority input alongside web research.

2. 02

   Create a campaign

   Under Campaign in the sidebar, open Campaigns and click to create a new campaign. Fill in the brief: campaign name, type (B2B or B2C), objectives, target audience, budget, timeline, landing URL, and any campaign-specific competitors.

   Save the form. The campaign now exists inside the brand. No agents run at this step. Creating the campaign brief gives the Research, Strategy, and Media Plan agents the campaign-level context they need to produce aligned outputs.

3. 03

   Run Research

   Navigate to Research from inside the campaign and launch the workflow. Five analyst agents run in parallel: Category, Competitor, Consumer, Culture, and Social. Each covers a distinct dimension of market intelligence.

   Research takes about 5-7 minutes. When the run finishes, you have five individual analyst outputs. You can optionally generate a synthesized executive one-pager and a long-form narrative research report from those outputs (another 3-4 minutes).

   Running Research at the brand level

   Research can also be initiated from the brand level, outside of any campaign. For this walkthrough, run it from inside the campaign so the outputs are scoped to your campaign brief and feed directly into Strategy and Media Plan.

4. 04

   Run Strategy

   Navigate to Strategy from inside the campaign and launch the workflow. Four strategists run in sequence (Goals, Audience, Communication, Media), each picking up from the previous strategist's output. A Strategy Summary then unifies all four into a single executive document.

   Strategy takes about 7-8 minutes for the four strategists, plus another 1-2 for the Strategy Summary. When it completes, you have four individual strategy outputs plus the summary, all grounded in your research and campaign brief.

5. 05

   Generate the Media Plan

   Navigate to Media Plan from inside the campaign and launch the workflow. The planner builds a tactical document from your strategy and campaign brief: plan overview and Goals, communications and media pillars, geo-language budget allocation, flighting phases, channel budgets with bid strategies, audience-to-channel mapping, and auto-generated UTM tracking URLs. Budget charts update automatically across all plan dimensions.

   Media Plan generation takes about 6-8 minutes. Once it lands, the plan is read-only. To change it, click Refine and describe what should change (for example, shifting budget between channels, or compressing the flighting). The planning agents re-run with your feedback and produce a new version, and the previous one stays in version history. You can export the plan to Excel or Markdown at any point.

When something goes wrong

If a workflow takes longer than the expected time range, one likely cause is a temporary issue with the underlying model API. A page reload usually restores the correct state. If a workflow shows as failed, you can rerun it from the same page without losing your campaign brief or prior outputs.

If an output feels off or misses the mark, use the Refine feature on that phase rather than rerunning from scratch. Refine lets you submit targeted feedback and re-runs only the agents that need updating, preserving the rest. See the Refine workflow guide for details.

For budget validation errors when saving an edited media plan, the error messages identify which levels are out of alignment. Adjust the flagged rows and save again.

If you hit a UI issue (a section that doesn't load, an output that appears blank), a manual page reload typically resolves it. For anything that persists or reproduces consistently, see Limitations & caveats.

What's next

Core concepts explains the underlying structure: how orgs, brands, campaigns, and runs relate, and what "current run" means for version history. For per-phase detail, see Research, Strategy, and Media Plan. When you're ready to iterate on your first set of outputs, the Refine workflow guide covers the full feedback and versioning model.

The brand details and campaign brief you entered, the documents you uploaded, and the outputs the agents generated also feed the brand's Wiki: a browsable directory of what Skeleton Key now knows about the brand, where each factual statement cites the claim and source behind it. Open it under Explore to read what the agents found, see it drawn as a graph in Maps, or ask Chat a question and get an answer cited to those pages. When you plan the next campaign for this brand, that knowledge is there to return to.

To turn a finished Brand, Research, or Strategy output into something you can share, open Pages or Slides under Present, or see the Pages and Slides guides. Organization Owners and Admins can set the colors, fonts, and logo for new pages and decks first under Design.

Once you know the flow, you don't have to run the three phases one at a time: the end-to-end chain dispatches Research, Strategy, and Media Plan back-to-back from the campaign page.