Claude Marketing Skills: How to Put Claude to Work on Real Marketing Tasks
Marketers keep asking the same question in a slightly different wrapper: "can I make Claude just do it my way every time, without re-explaining our brand voice, our brief format, our tone rules?" The answer showed up in October 2025 under a specific name — Agent Skills — and the search term "Claude marketing skills" started appearing in December 2025 as people worked out what that actually means for marketing work specifically. This post answers that directly: what Claude marketing skills are, what Anthropic has shipped officially, what you have to build yourself, and how to build it well.
Short version up front: there is no single Anthropic product called "Claude Marketing Skills." There is a general capability — Agent Skills — and a small number of officially maintained skills, one of which (brand-guidelines) is directly useful for marketing. Everything marketing-specific beyond that — campaign briefs, SEO checklists, social repurposing, competitor teardown workflows — is a pattern you assemble yourself using the same open SKILL.md format. That's not a letdown; it's the point. Skills are meant to be written, not just installed.
What Claude Skills are, in one tight section
A skill is a folder. Inside it, at minimum, a SKILL.md file: a short YAML frontmatter block (name and description) followed by plain-language instructions in markdown. Optionally the folder also holds scripts, templates, and reference documents that Claude reads only when it needs them.
Anthropic calls the loading mechanism progressive disclosure, and it's the whole reason skills scale where long system prompts don't. Three tiers load in order of need:
- Metadata — the
nameanddescriptionfrom every installed skill's frontmatter sit in the system prompt at all times, so Claude always knows what skills exist and when to reach for one. - Instructions — the body of
SKILL.mdloads only when Claude decides the skill is relevant to the current task. - Resources — anything else in the folder (a style guide, a Python script, a JSON schema, a spreadsheet of past campaign data) loads only when the instructions actually point to it.
That means a skill can be arbitrarily large — a full brand book, a library of past ad copy, a 40-page positioning doc — without costing a single token until the moment it's used. Skills work the same way across Claude apps, the Claude Developer Platform, and Claude Code, and Anthropic published the format as an open spec on December 18, 2025, so it isn't locked to one surface. [1][2]
If you haven't built a skill before, our Claude Skills 101 walkthrough covers the folder structure and a first end-to-end example step by step; this post assumes that groundwork and goes straight at the marketing use case.
What exists today for marketing — official vs. DIY
Here's the part search intent for "Claude marketing skills" is really asking about: is there an official marketing package, or do you build it?
Anthropic maintains a public repository, github.com/anthropics/skills, with example skills under an Apache 2.0 license. As of this writing, the skills/ directory contains: algorithmic-art, brand-guidelines, canvas-design, claude-api, doc-coauthoring, docx, frontend-design, internal-comms, mcp-builder, pdf, pptx, skill-creator, slack-gif-creator, theme-factory, web-artifacts-builder, webapp-testing, and xlsx. [3]
Of those, exactly one is squarely a marketing/brand tool: brand-guidelines. It applies a brand's color palette, typography, and visual style to any artifact Claude produces — slides, docs, HTML pages, reports — and ships defaulted to Anthropic's own brand as a working example (Poppins for headings, Lora for body copy, a defined accent palette). Point it at your own brand instead and it becomes a genuinely useful skill for keeping decks, one-pagers, and landing pages visually on-brand without a design review pass. [4] internal-comms and doc-coauthoring are adjacent — useful for writing and editing structured documents — but they're general-purpose, not marketing-specific.
There is no official Anthropic skill for campaign briefs, SEO audits, social repurposing, competitor analysis, or email QA. Some vendors in the marketing/SEO space (Ahrefs among them) have published their own skill libraries that plug into Claude for tasks like content-gap detection and traffic-decline analysis, but those are third-party products, not Anthropic ships. [5] Community collections like ComposioHQ's awesome-claude-skills mirror and extend the official brand-guidelines skill with more examples. [6]
The practical takeaway: one officially maintained skill (brand-guidelines) is marketing-adjacent and directly reusable; everything else marketing teams want is a pattern you write yourself, using the same format. The rest of this post is that pattern, applied to seven concrete jobs.
7 marketing use cases, as skill sketches
Every sketch below is a pattern for you to build — not an installed product. Where a skill leans on the official brand-guidelines skill, that's called out.
1. Brand voice guardrails (builds on official brand-guidelines)
A skill that keeps every piece of copy — email, ad, landing page, social caption — inside your brand's tone rules, banned words, and formatting conventions. Pairs with the official brand-guidelines skill for visual identity; this one covers voice, which Anthropic's skill doesn't touch.
---
name: brand-voice
description: Apply our brand voice, tone, and terminology rules to any marketing copy. Use whenever drafting or editing customer-facing copy — emails, ads, landing pages, social posts.
---
# Brand Voice
Tone: direct, a little wry, never corporate. Second person ("you"), active voice, no exclamation points in body copy.
Never use: "leverage," "synergy," "solutions," "revolutionize," "game-changer."
Always use: "customers" not "users" in external copy; "the product" not "the platform."
See voice-examples.md for before/after rewrites across 12 formats.
See banned-terms.json for the full list (checked programmatically before copy ships).
2. Campaign brief generator
Turns a scattered Slack thread or bullet list into a structured campaign brief your team actually uses.
---
name: campaign-brief
description: Generate a structured campaign brief from rough notes, a goal, and a target audience. Use when starting a new campaign or asked to turn notes into a brief.
---
# Campaign Brief Generator
Output sections in this order: Objective, Audience, Key Message, Channels,
Timeline, Success Metrics, Budget Notes, Risks.
Pull audience definitions from audience-segments.md. Never invent a metric —
if success criteria aren't given, ask for them before finalizing.
3. SEO content checklist
A pre-publish gate: heading structure, keyword placement, internal links, meta description length.
---
name: seo-checklist
description: Run a pre-publish SEO check on a draft article — headings, keyword usage, meta description, internal links. Use before publishing blog or landing page content.
---
# SEO Pre-Publish Checklist
Check, in order: target keyword in title, H1, first 100 words, and one H2;
meta description 140-160 chars; at least 2 internal links to related posts
(search /posts for candidates); no more than one H1; images have alt text.
Flag anything missing as a bulleted list. Do not auto-rewrite copy —
recommend, don't overwrite.
4. Social post repurposing
Takes one long-form asset and produces platform-specific variants without losing the source's substance.
---
name: social-repurpose
description: Turn a published article or report into platform-native social posts (LinkedIn, X, short video script). Use when given a URL or article and asked to create social content from it.
---
# Social Repurposing
Produce 3 LinkedIn variants (different hooks, same core insight), 1 X thread
(5-7 posts), 1 short-video script (60-90 sec, hook in first 3 sec).
Apply brand-voice rules. Never repeat the source's headline verbatim in the hook.
5. Competitor analysis workflow
Structured, repeatable teardown instead of an ad hoc prompt each time.
---
name: competitor-teardown
description: Produce a structured competitive analysis for a named competitor covering positioning, pricing, and messaging gaps. Use when asked to research or compare a competitor.
---
# Competitor Teardown
Sections: Positioning statement (their words), Pricing model, Primary CTA,
Messaging gaps vs. us (reference our-positioning.md), Recommended response.
Cite every claim to a source URL. Flag low-confidence claims explicitly
rather than presenting them as fact.
6. Email sequence QA
Checks a drafted nurture or lifecycle sequence for consistency and deliverability basics before it ships.
---
name: email-sequence-qa
description: Review a drafted email sequence for tone consistency, CTA clarity, and spam-trigger language. Use before scheduling any multi-email sequence.
---
# Email Sequence QA
Check each email for: one clear CTA, subject line under 60 chars, no
ALL-CAPS or excessive punctuation, consistent sender voice across the
sequence, unsubscribe language present.
Score each email pass/fail per check; summarize in a table at the end.
7. Landing page brand pass (official brand-guidelines in action)
Not a new pattern — the direct, as-shipped use of Anthropic's official skill: point brand-guidelines at a drafted landing page or deck and let it apply your palette and type hierarchy automatically, no separate design pass required. [4]
| Use case | What the skill does | Data it needs |
|---|---|---|
| Brand voice guardrails | Rewrites/checks copy against tone and terminology rules | Voice examples, banned-terms list |
| Campaign brief generator | Structures rough notes into a standard brief format | Audience segment definitions, brief template |
| SEO content checklist | Flags missing keyword placement, meta length, internal links | Target keyword, list of existing posts to link |
| Social post repurposing | Generates platform-specific variants from one source asset | Source article/report, brand voice rules |
| Competitor analysis workflow | Produces a structured, sourced competitor teardown | Competitor URLs, your own positioning doc |
| Email sequence QA | Scores a drafted sequence against deliverability/consistency checks | Drafted email sequence |
| Landing page brand pass (official) | Applies brand colors/type to drafted artifacts | Brand color palette, font choices |
Building one marketing skill end to end: brand voice
Let's build #1 for real — the brand-voice guardrail skill — since it's the one every marketing team needs and none get for free.
Step 1: Create the folder.
skills/
brand-voice/
SKILL.md
voice-examples.md
banned-terms.json
Step 2: Write the frontmatter. Name and description are the only fields Claude sees at all times, so the description has to be specific enough that Claude reaches for the skill unprompted — vague descriptions are the single most common reason a skill never fires.
---
name: brand-voice
description: Apply our brand voice, tone, and terminology rules to any marketing copy — emails, ads, landing pages, social posts, blog drafts. Use whenever writing or editing customer-facing copy, or when asked to check copy for tone.
---
Step 3: Write the body with concrete rules, not vibes. "Sound friendly" doesn't transfer; "second person, active voice, no exclamation points in body copy, never say 'leverage'" does.
Step 4: Push long material into resource files. voice-examples.md holds a dozen before/after rewrites across formats (email subject lines, ad headlines, error messages). banned-terms.json holds the full disallowed-word list as structured data a script could also check programmatically. Neither loads until SKILL.md references it — that's progressive disclosure doing its job, and it's what keeps a skill built from a 40-page brand book cheap to keep installed.
Step 5: Test it against copy that should fail. Feed the skill a paragraph stuffed with "leverage our synergistic solutions" and confirm Claude flags every violation, not just the obvious one.
Step 6: Install it where your team works — as a project skill in Claude Code, or uploaded in the Claude app/API for use across conversations — and keep iterating the resource files as your style guide evolves. Skills are just files; updating one is a pull request, not a redeploy.
Skills + MCP: the full marketing stack
Skills and MCP solve different problems and compose well. A skill teaches Claude how to do a task — the workflow, the format, the house rules. MCP gives Claude access — live data from a system it doesn't otherwise see. Our Claude Skills vs. MCP comparison goes deeper on the distinction; the short version for marketing is that the campaign-brief and competitor-teardown skills above get considerably more useful once they can pull real numbers instead of working from what you paste in.
Concretely: a campaign-performance-review skill can carry the instructions — which metrics matter, how to structure the readout, what counts as underperforming — while an analytics MCP server (Google Analytics, a warehouse connector, an ad-platform API) supplies the actual numbers Claude reasons over. The skill is the analyst's playbook; the MCP server is the analyst's dashboard access. Neither replaces the other, and a marketing stack that only has one of the two ends up either well-instructed but data-blind, or data-connected but inconsistent in how it reports.
A production-grade version of the SEO checklist skill above, for instance, stops being "check headings and meta length" and becomes "check headings, meta length, and whether this keyword is already ranking, via a live search-console MCP connection" — same skill file, a fetch tool bolted on through MCP instead of pasted-in numbers.
Conclusion
"Claude marketing skills" isn't a single Anthropic product you install and get a finished marketing department. It's a format — SKILL.md, progressive disclosure, folders of instructions and resources — with exactly one officially maintained skill that's directly marketing-relevant (brand-guidelines) and a wide-open field for everything else your team actually needs: brand voice, campaign briefs, SEO gates, social repurposing, competitor teardowns, email QA. The seven patterns above are a starting library, not a finish line. Write the ones your team repeats every week first, keep the instructions concrete and the reference material in separate files, and wire in MCP once a skill needs live data instead of pasted-in numbers. That combination — official skills where they exist, custom skills where they don't, MCP for the data layer — is what "Claude marketing skills" actually means in practice.
Sources
[1] Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills — Anthropic [2] Agent Skills — Claude Platform Docs [3] anthropics/skills — GitHub [4] anthropics/skills — brand-guidelines/SKILL.md [5] Claude Skills for SEO and Marketing: What They Are and How to Use Them — Ahrefs [6] ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills — brand-guidelines/SKILL.md