Every Wednesday, one essay on what's actually working in Marketing with AI — tools, workflows, and mindset shifts you can apply immediately.
Claude for Marketers Masterclass is now live.
If you’ve been using Claude as a chat window and wondering why it doesn’t quite deliver - this is why.
The course teaches you how to run Claude as a complete marketing system, built from 30+ live workshops attended by 300+ marketers.
10+ hours of pause-and-do content. 9 bonus assets. One new module every month through 2026 — so the course grows as Claude does.
Trusted by marketers at Adobe, JPMorgan Chase and the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Now an Inc Magazine columnist.
Early-bird pricing available until Monday 15th June at 8am.
(NB: I’ve recorded a quick video walking you through 3 different ways to get started with Claude Code and how to use it. You can access it further down the page.)
Let me start with a story that changed how I think about Claude Code.
Austin Lau is the growth marketer at Anthropic - the company that makes Claude. When he first heard about Claude Code, he did what most of us marketers would do. He Googled “how to open Terminal on Mac.”
He’d never written a line of code. Never used a command line. Never touched anything that looked remotely like a developer tool.
But he tried it anyway. Started small - built a basic calculator app just to prove to himself it worked.
Within a week, he’d built a Figma plugin that generates up to 100 ad variants per batch. What used to take his team 30 minutes per ad now took 30 seconds. He followed that with a Google Ads headline generator, a Meta Ads dashboard he could query in plain English, and a self-improving A/B test tracking system.
Within ten months, Austin was running Anthropic’s entire performance marketing operation - paid search, paid social, app stores, email, SEO - solo. At a company valued at $380 billion.
No code written. No engineering degree.
Just a marketer who was willing to type a sentence into a terminal and see what happened.
I share this story because I know the word “code” in the name is putting marketers off. And marketers don’t work in “terminals”. And I get it. But I’m going to try my best to change your mind.
What Is Claude Code?
Let me keep this simple.
You already know Claude Chat - the browser-based AI you brainstorm with, draft copy in, and bounce ideas off. And if you’ve been following this series, you know Cowork - Claude working directly on your computer, reading your files, creating documents, and connecting to your tools.
Claude Code is the full-power version of that same engine.
Here’s the difference in practice:
The important thing to understand: you interact with Claude Code in plain English. You describe what you want. Claude figures out how to build it. You review the result and give feedback. That’s the entire workflow.
As one marketer put it: “If you can write a brief, you can use Claude Code.”
Addressing the Elephant in the Room
Let’s be honest about the name.
One agency founder called it “the worst branding in the history of technology.” A 64-page guide about it opened with: “Claude Code shouldn’t be named Claude Code. The infrastructure for the future of work is here. It’s just hiding behind the wrong name.”
I agree.
The word “code” makes marketers think it’s not for them. It is. It absolutely is.
Here’s what marketers fear when they hear ‘code’ versus what actually happens:
Austin Lau’s advice: “You don’t need to know how to code. All you need to know is how to explain your challenge and what you’re trying to solve in a very clear, concise manner.”
If you can brief a designer or explain a campaign to a colleague, you can use Claude Code.
How It Fits Into the Claude Ecosystem
If you’ve been reading this series, you already know the building blocks. Here’s how Claude Code connects to everything else:
Think of it as a spectrum. Chat is where you think. Cowork is where you get things done. Code is where you build things that do the work for you.
You don’t have to jump straight to Code.
Most marketers start with Chat, graduate to Cowork, and eventually discover that Code lets them build things they didn’t think were possible. The progression is natural. It certainly was for me.
And here’s an interesting piece of information for you - Cowork was actually built using Claude Code. In just a week and a half.
The tool that makes Claude accessible to non-technical people was itself built by non-technical people using Claude Code. That tells you something.
Why Marketers Should Care
The stats from early adopters are hard to ignore:
• Ad creation: 30 minutes → 30 seconds (Anthropic’s own marketing team)
• Campaign copy refresh: 2 hours → 15 minutes
• Creative output: 10x increase year-over-year
• 47 landing pages audited for SEO and conversion in 30 minutes (Brandon Redlinger, no coding experience)
• Content process: 2-4 hours → 45 minutes (from a non-coder testimonial)
But the numbers aren’t the real story.
The real shift is this: marketers can now build things they used to need developers for.
Custom ROI calculators.
Interactive tools for lead generation.
Landing pages built and deployed overnight.
Internal dashboards that pull live data from your ad platforms.
Automated reports that run themselves every Monday morning.
Previously, each of these required an engineering ticket, a sprint cycle, and weeks of waiting. Now a marketer can describe what they want and have it working the same afternoon.
As Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, put it: “On one side: go-to-market operators. They build systems inside Claude Code. Everyone else is still waiting for engineering tickets.”
Three Ways to Get Started
Here’s what you might not have noticed:
Claude Code isn’t just a terminal tool anymore. There are three ways in, and you can pick whichever suits your comfort level.
1. The Desktop App (Easiest - Start Here)
If you already have the Claude Desktop app, you’re almost there. Click the Code tab in the top panel. That’s it. No terminal. No installation commands.
You get Claude Code’s (almost) full power through a nice visual interface - file access, project context, and the ability to build real tools.
This is where I started, and it’s where I’d recommend most marketers begin. You’re already paying for it if you’re on a Pro plan ($20/month) - no extra cost. Remember, just type questions in plain English.
It won’t bite…I promise you.
2. The Terminal (More Powerful)
This is the classic version, and it’s genuinely less scary than it sounds. Here’s the full process to get started when you are ready:
On Mac:
1. Press Cmd + Space, type “Terminal”, press Enter
2. Paste this line and press Enter: curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
3. Type claude and press Enter
On Windows:
1. Press Win + X, select PowerShell
2. You’ll need [Git for Windows](https://git-scm.com/download/win) installed first if you don’t already have it
3. Paste this line and press Enter: irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex
4. Close PowerShell, reopen it, type claude and press Enter
That’s genuinely it.
Anthropic even published a dedicated terminal guide that opens with: “You can use Claude Code even if you’ve never used a terminal before.”
The terminal version gives you direct access to your full file system, agent mode for autonomous multi-step tasks, and the ability to build custom integrations. It’s the version Austin Lau uses to ask questions like “Which ads had the highest conversion rate this week?” and get answers straight from his Meta Ads data.
3. VS Code (The Hybrid)
If you use VS Code for web content or any kind of editing, the Claude Code extension gives you the best of both worlds - a visual interface with terminal-level power and a nice ‘file explorer’ view. Install the extension/app, and Claude lives right inside your editor.
My recommendation: Start with the Desktop App. Get comfortable. When you find yourself wanting more control or wanting to build something the Desktop App can’t do, like agents, try the terminal. Then explore VS Code when you’re ready for the hybrid approach.
Here’s a video demonstrating the 3 different Claude Code Set-ups
Getting Started: The Austin Lau Framework
Once you’ve picked how you want to access Claude Code, Austin’s advice for getting started is the simplest and best I’ve found:
1. Start with something tiny. Austin’s first build was a calculator app. Not a marketing tool - just proof that it worked. Pick something with zero stakes.
2. Identify one repetitive task. What do you do every week that’s boring, manual, and doesn’t require strategic thinking? Reporting. Data formatting. Content repurposing. Ad copy variations. Pick one.
3. Describe the problem to Claude. In plain English. Like you’re briefing a colleague. “I need to take my weekly campaign data from this CSV, calculate ROAS by channel, and format it into a summary I can share with my team.”
4. Let Claude build the solution. Review what it creates. Give feedback. Iterate. It’s a conversation, not a one-shot command.
5. Set up your CLAUDE.md file. This is your brand’s permanent memory - a simple text file in your project folder where you store your brand voice, target audience, terminology, products, and preferences. Claude reads it at the start of every session. That means your outputs stay on-brand without you re-explaining everything each time.
Craig Hewitt, who built a seven-figure SaaS company, puts it well: “95% of bad AI output is a context problem, not a model problem.” Your CLAUDE.md solves that.
What Marketers Are Actually Building
These are the stories and examples that convinced me. Not the theory. The actual builds. None of these people are developers.
Austin Lau (Anthropic) — The Full Story
Austin built four things in his first few weeks, without writing a single line of code:
A Figma plugin for ad creative. He described the problem: “I need to generate ad variants from our design templates - different headlines, different CTAs, different images - without manually editing each one in Figma.” Claude Code built him a plugin that generates up to 100 ad variants per batch. What took 30 minutes per ad now takes 30 seconds.
A Google Ads RSA generator. He created a custom /rsa command with two sub-agents - one writes headlines, the other writes descriptions. The output is a CSV file ready to upload directly into Google Ads. Campaign copy refreshes dropped from 2 hours to 15 minutes.
A Meta Ads connector. He asked Claude Code to build an integration with the Meta Ads API. Now he can ask questions in plain English - “Which campaigns had the highest CPA this week?” - and get answers without logging into Ads Manager.
An A/B test memory system. This one’s clever. Claude Code tracks every test hypothesis and result, building a self-improving framework that gets smarter every cycle. It remembers what’s been tested, what worked, and why - so each new round of tests builds on everything that came before.
The headline stat: he ran Anthropic’s entire performance marketing operation solo for nearly 10 months. His creative output increased 10x.
Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot SVP Marketing) — An 11-Skill Content Team
Kieran built what’s essentially an autonomous content operation using Claude Code. He created 11 skills that work together: one analyses his existing Substack posts to identify what makes certain content perform, another generates new ideas mapped to that winning formula, and a feedback loop refines everything monthly.
The result?
He analysed 51 Substack posts in 5 minutes and pinpointed exactly why some content works and some doesn’t. Then used those insights to generate ideas that match his proven patterns.
His most quoted stat: someone on his team gave Claude Code one directive at 10pm. By 8am, 34 new landing pages were built and live on the site.
Brandon Redlinger - No Coding Background, 3.5 Weeks In
Brandon’s results are probably the most relatable for most marketers because his builds are the kind of tasks we all do:
• Custom ROI calculators built in 90 minutes. Previously, this was a dev ticket and a 3-week sprint.
• 47 landing pages audited for SEO and conversion issues in 30 minutes. He described the criteria he wanted checked, and Claude Code crawled every page and produced a prioritised report.
• 277 customer interviews coded into research themes in 2 hours. He pointed Claude Code at his interview transcripts and asked it to identify patterns, group themes, and extract the most compelling quotes.
• Automated Monday morning reports that now run on their own. He described the data sources, the metrics he cares about, and the format he wants - and Claude Code built a workflow that generates the report every Monday without him touching it.
Hiba Fathima (SEO Lead, Firecrawl) — Daily Workflows
Hiba replaced multiple SaaS subscriptions with tools she built herself in Claude Code:
• A brand mention tracker that monitors Reddit, Hacker News, and Twitter for mentions of her company and competitors
• A content decay refresher that pulls data from Ahrefs, identifies posts losing traffic, flags them in Slack, and drafts updated versions
• An internal linking agent that replaced a $30/month tool she was paying for
Her quote sums up the shift better than anything I’ve read: “I’ve completely moved away from ‘I wish there was a tool for this’ and instead just build my own solution in usually less than an hour.”
The pattern across all of these: start with one boring task, describe it in English, let Claude build the solution, iterate from there.
What I Built - A Marketing OS That Runs Itself
I want to share something I’ve been building with Claude Code, because it shows what’s possible when you move beyond single tasks and start thinking in systems.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve used Claude Code to build what I’m calling a Marketing OS - an orchestration layer that sits on top of 36 specialist marketing skills and coordinates them into a structured workflow.
Here’s how it works in practice.
Say I need to launch a new course. Instead of juggling five different tools and starting each deliverable from scratch, I tell the pipeline what I’m trying to do. It then:
1. Brainstorms - asks me clarifying questions about the audience, the offer, the channels, and the timeline
2. Plans - maps out every deliverable (landing page, email sequence, social posts, ad copy) and assigns each one to the right specialist skill
3. Executes - works through the plan step by step, routing each task to the appropriate skill (copywriting for the landing page, email-sequence for the nurture flow, social-content for LinkedIn posts)
4. Reviews - checks everything against the original brief for consistency, brand voice, and messaging alignment
One briefing. Multiple outputs. All aligned.
I didn’t write a line of code to build this. I described the workflow I wanted in plain English, and Claude Code built the system.
The specialist skills were created the same way - each one is a set of instructions that Claude follows, covering everything from CRO audits to cold email sequences to content strategy.
I recently packaged the whole thing into a GitHub repo so my team (or anyone I want to share with) can access the same skills and workflows. Anyone on the team pulls it down, copies the skills into their Claude Code setup, and they’re running the same playbook.
Again, don’t be put of by developer language like “GitHub” - it’s not as overwhelming as it sounds. It’s just like a shared ‘One Drive’ folder the whole team can access.
That’s the shift I keep coming back to in this series.
The competitive advantage isn’t access to AI. It’s the systems you build on top of it. And Claude Code is where those systems get built.
I’ll go deeper on the marketing operating system in a future article. But I wanted you to see what becomes possible once you move past “ask Claude a question” and start building something that compounds.
Supercharge It: Marketing Skills
Getting back to Claude Skills for a minute.
If you read the earlier article on downloadable skills, this is where they become seriously powerful inside Claude Code.
Install your own skills or download from a trusted source, and Claude Code gains the ability to run a full CRO audit when you type /page-cro, draft an email sequence with /email-sequence, or generate a competitive brief with /competitive-brief.
Eric Siu from Single Grain Agency demonstrated this live on a YouTube video I watched recently.
He ran /page-cro on a homepage and got a full conversion audit with prioritised recommendations in minutes. He also used programmatic SEO skills to generate 440 location-specific landing pages across 47 cities. His claim: a 25-30x productivity multiplier. And his caveat: “I don’t know how to code, okay? So you don’t need to know how to code either.”
Combined with your CLAUDE.md brand context and the plugins from earlier in this series, you’ve got a system that knows your brand, has specialist expertise, and can actually execute - not just advise.
The Bigger Picture
This wraps up the Claude ecosystem series - for now, at least, because developments in this space don’t sit still for long.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered Skills (teaching Claude your processes), Cowork (giving Claude the ability to execute), Plugins (pre-built marketing workflows), and Excel & PowerPoint (Claude inside your existing tools).
Claude Code is where all of those come together. It’s the engine underneath everything. Skills run inside it. Plugins are built on it. Cowork is powered by it. The add-ins connect to it.
If you’ve been following along and using Cowork, you’re already halfway there. Claude Code is the same conversation, the same intelligence, the same plain-English interface - just with the full power unlocked.
As Anthropic’s own white paper puts it, there are two distinct experiences with Claude Code: developers get an “augmented workflow” - faster execution of things they could already do.
But non-technical users get what they call the “holy crap, I’m a developer” workflow - entirely new capabilities that were previously impossible.
That’s the real story here. Not speed. Not efficiency. New capabilities. Things you couldn’t do before, regardless of how much time you had.
The hottest new programming language is English. And the marketers who figure that out first won’t just be faster. They’ll be building things their competitors don’t even know are possible.
Just don’t let the word “code” put you off.
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.
Thanks for reading Marketing with AI! If you enjoyed this read, the best compliment I could receive would be if you shared it