Every Wednesday, one essay on what's actually working in Marketing with AI — tools, workflows, and mindset shifts you can apply immediately.
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(NB: The Claude Cowork video overview is at the bottom of this article, but I think you will get better context by reading this quickly before watching the video)
Last week I walked you through Claude Skills - reusable instruction sets that teach Claude how to do a specific job, your way, every time.
But Skills on their own are only part of the picture.
Because there’s a new way for marketers to now work with AI:
What if Claude could actually work on your computer? Read your files. Pull from your Notion. Build you a strategy deck. Save it to your desktop…all at the same time. All without you doing the heavy lifting.
That’s Claude Cowork.
And once you see it in action, it fundamentally changes how you think about what AI can do for your marketing.
Chat is for thinking. Cowork is for doing.
If you’ve been using Claude in the browser - brainstorming campaign ideas, drafting copy, organising projects - that’s Claude Chat. It’s your planning and thinking space. Everything still lives in the cloud.
Cowork is different. Very different.
It’s the same Claude intelligence, but now it can take action on your actual computer. It reads and edits your local files. It creates documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. It connects to tools like Notion and Google Drive.
And it breaks complex tasks into sub-tasks, running multiple agents in parallel to get work done faster.
The simplest way I explain it to the marketers I train: Chat is your whiteboard. Cowork is your doer.
And when you combine it with Claude Skills from last week? You’ve got a system. Chat for thinking. Cowork for executing. Skills for consistency. That’s the full workflow.
(Well, not quite, but I’ll share the final piece of the Claude marketing eco-system with you next week!)
Why marketers should be using Claude Cowork
At heart, I’m still a marketer. And my close friends are all marketers. And this is the common problem…
Marketers are drowning in repetitive operational work: reporting, content repurposing, slide decks, data cleaning, campaign briefs. The kind of work that eats hours but doesn’t require strategic thinking.
Regular AI chatbots help you think about these tasks. But they don’t sit inside your file system and actually do the work.
Cowork does. And it’s amazing!
In the video at the end of this article, I connected Cowork to my Notion workspace where I had modules listed for an online education platform I’m building. I also connected it to my project space where my goals for the business are stored.
I gave it a fairly simple instruction: build me a strategy/pitch deck targeting CEOs, pulling from my course content, my project files, and my local documents.
Then I watched it work.
It read my Notion pages. It pulled context from my local files. It used my project instructions in Claude to understand my brand and positioning. It broke the task into sub-steps, worked through each one, and produced a full PowerPoint strategy deck.
What would have taken me hours, literally took 5 minutes.
That’s the shift. You stop asking AI for ideas and then doing the work yourself. You say: here are the inputs, here’s the outcome I want, go.
How I think about working with AI
There’s a simple framework I always come back to, and it applies perfectly to Cowork:
Input → Processing → Output
Input is everything you feed in: files on your local machine (brand guidelines, spreadsheets, tone of voice documents, examples to model from), connectors to tools like Notion or Google Drive, and your project instructions in Claude that give it context about you and your work.
Processing is Claude Cowork itself - reading your inputs, planning the work, breaking it into tasks, and executing step by step. You can watch it work in real time, see which skills it’s using, which files it’s reading, which sub-tasks it’s running.
Output is the deliverable: strategy decks, blog posts, ad creative, data dashboards, research reports - saved directly to your computer, ready to review and refine.
The more context you give it on the input side, the better the output. That’s why Skills, connectors, and local files matter so much, they’re the raw material that makes Cowork genuinely useful.
Getting started: a step-by-step setup
Here’s how to get Cowork up and running. It takes about 2 minutes.
1. Open Claude Desktop You’ll need the Claude Desktop app (not just the browser). Cowork is a mode within Claude Desktop. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, head to claude.ai and grab the desktop version.
2. Switch to Cowork Mode At the top of your Claude Desktop window, you’ll see tabs for Chat, Cowork, and Code. Click into Cowork. You can also access Cowork directly from an existing Claude Project - just click “Add to Cowork” and it’ll carry your project instructions and files across.
3. Select Your Working Folder Cowork will ask you to choose a folder on your computer. This is the only place it can read from and save to. Choose a folder that contains the files relevant to your task i.e. brand guidelines, briefs, data exports, templates, whatever you need.
4. Connect Your Tools Under Settings → Capabilities, you can enable connectors to external tools like Notion, Google Drive, or Chrome and many more. These let Cowork pull data from your existing workflow tools, not just your local files.
5. Enable and Add Skills If you’ve already built Skills (from last week’s article), make sure they’re enabled in Settings → Capabilities → Skills. These give Cowork repeatable workflows it can follow automatically. You can also install community Skills or official integrations - more on that in next week’s article on Marketing Plugins.
6. Give It an Outcome Now just tell Cowork what you want. Be specific about the deliverable: “Create a 10-slide strategy deck using the brief in this folder and the brand guidelines in my project.” Cowork will create a plan, break it into tasks, and start working. You can watch the progress tracker in real time.
7 marketing workflows you can run today with Cowork
Here are practical examples of what marketers can do with Cowork right now — each framed as Input → Processing → Output.
1. Strategy Deck from Messy Inputs Drop a call transcript, project brief, and brand guidelines into your working folder. Ask Cowork to create a strategy presentation following a specific structure. Cowork reads everything, synthesises the key points, and produces a polished slide deck saved to your desktop. What used to take half a day takes 15 minutes.
2. 30 Days of Content in One Go Input your brand voice doc, ICP profile, and a handful of existing blog posts. Ask Cowork to plan 30 days of LinkedIn and email content, write the hooks, and map which existing assets to repurpose. You get a content calendar with first drafts - not just ideas, but actual copy to edit.
3. Ad Copy and Creative Pipeline Set up a folder with product images, a master spreadsheet of SKUs, and your copywriting guidelines. Cowork can run parallel agents - one writing ad descriptions, another generating creative variations, a third updating your master sheet with everything. Twenty product variants, done in the time it takes to make a coffee.
4. Data Analysis and Reporting Point Cowork at your CSV exports from ad platforms or your CRM. Ask it to clean and merge the data, build charts, and produce a slide deck with commentary. You go from raw exports to a client-ready performance report without opening Excel.
5. Research Repository to Playbook Feed Cowork a folder of podcast transcripts, market reports, or competitor research. Ask it to extract the top frameworks, build an interactive dashboard summarising the themes, and create a strategy playbook applying the best insights to your brand. Three deliverables from one prompt.
6. Webinar Campaign Builder Drop in a webinar transcript, speaker bios, campaign brief, and brand voice guide. Cowork uses your Skills to build out a full promotional campaign — landing page copy, email sequences, social posts, and a summary one-pager. All consistent with your tone because it’s pulling from your actual brand files.
7. Landing Page Audit Connect Cowork to Chrome, give it your URL and a competitor’s. Ask it to audit both pages against a conversion framework and produce a scored report with side-by-side comparisons and prioritised recommendations. A two-hour manual review becomes a 20-minute exercise.
This is part two of three in the Claude for Marketers Series
Last week was Claude Skills, teaching Claude your processes so it delivers consistent results every time.
This week is Cowork, giving Claude the ability to work directly with your files and tools, turning it from a thinking partner into a doing partner.
Next week: Marketing Plugins - pre-built bundles that combine Skills, file access, and integrations into complete marketing workflows you can share with your team.
Skills are your processes.
Cowork is your execution layer.
Plugins bring everything together.
If you’re a subscriber, you’ll get the next video when it drops.
Here’s the Claude Cowork Video Walkthrough:
Enjoy!
Want hands-on help with Claude?
I work with marketers 1:1 in Claude Marketing Power Hours and help teams embed Claude into their workflows from first steps to full-scale systems. Book a call using the link below.
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