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.
There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes with AI sometimes.
It does the work. It nails the brief. And then the next day, it’s forgotten everything.
Claude Cowork already let Claude read your brand voice docs, style guides, and templates from a local folder. That part worked from day one.
And it was a huge leap forward when it came to working with Claude on practical day-to-day work.
But every time you opened a new session, you had to:
1/ Re-select that folder you wanted to work in
2/ Wait for Claude to re-read the same files, and…
3/ Start the working relationship from zero.
Very frustrating.
As I said, Claude Cowork could access your context - but it couldn’t remember what you done with it last week.
Those outputs you’d approved, the formatting decisions you’d made, and the angles that worked - all of that was gone.
Not a lack of context, but a lack of memory.
Cowork Projects fix this.
They give Claude persistent memory, so recurring work - reporting, content, client deliverables - all builds on what came before instead of resetting every session.
If you’ve been following this Claude for Marketers series from Skills through Cowork through Plugins through Claude Code, Projects are the piece that ties the entire ecosystem together.
What Are Cowork Projects?
You already know the Claude building blocks.
Skills teach Claude your processes. Cowork gives Claude access to your files. Plugins bundle everything into installable packages. Claude Code is the workshop underneath it all.
Projects are the workspace layer that sits on top.
A Project is a persistent workspace that keeps your folder, your instructions, and your accumulated memory in place between sessions. No re-selecting. No re-reading. You pick up exactly where you left off.
Each Project maintains its own scoped memory, its own custom instructions, its own files, and its own task history - all persisting between sessions.
Past conversations sit there. Artefacts Claude created sit there. The fourth time you ask Claude to write your newsletter inside a Newsletter Project, it already knows your voice, your structure, your audience. You just say “here’s this week’s topic” and go.
And you don’t need to be technical to manage any of this.
Where Cowork previously relied on CLAUDE.md files to store context - which felt a bit developer-oriented - Projects let you update Claude’s memory directly through the interface. No file editing required.
In fact, you can review what Claude remembers, correct it, and add to it in plain English in the chat space. It really is as simple as that. So your newsletter Project doesn’t bleed into your client reporting Project.
Each workspace stays clean and focused.
Why This Matters for Marketers
Last year was all about prompts - crafting the perfect instruction to squeeze a useful output from a blank-slate AI. This year is about context.
Projects are what make context compound. Each session adds to the Project’s memory.
The fourth weekly report is better than the first, because Claude has seen three examples of what you approved, what you edited, and what you rejected. It’s not just remembering your instructions - it’s learning your preferences through accumulated work.
The way I think about it: a Project without Skills is context without process. A Skill without a Project is process without memory. Together, they create a system.
The marketers who win here won’t be the best prompters. They’ll be the ones who think in systems.
Setting Up Your First Claude Marketing Project
It takes about ten minutes if not less. Here’s your step-by-step.
1. Create a New Project
In Claude Desktop, switch to the Cowork tab and click + to create a new Project. Three options: start from scratch, import from an existing Claude.ai Project, or wrap an existing Cowork folder you’ve already been using.
2. Set Up Your Folder
Next, create a folder structure on your local computer drive before letting Claude loose. Here’s what I recommend:
Pro tip: Take three of your best pieces of content and ask Claude to reverse-engineer the patterns. “Read these 3 articles and create a voice-profile.md based on them.” That’s exactly how I created the style guide for this newsletter series.
3. Write Your Custom Instructions
Think of this as an onboarding doc for a new team member. Keep it to 5–8 lines - purpose and guardrails only. You don’t want to clog up the available context window before you even get started on the task at hand.
Here’s what mine looks like for one of my Projects:
Read ABOUT ME and brand voice-guide.md before every task.
Match this voice exactly. Never use banned words.
Keep paragraphs under 3 sentences.
Always ask me clarifying questions before writing.
Output as markdown.
Important: Instructions should define what the Project exists for - not workflows. Workflows belong in Skills. This keeps your instructions lean and your token usage efficient.
4. Install Plugins and Connect Your Tools
Install the Marketing Plugin (Settings → Customise → Browse Plugins) for instant access to seven slash commands and five persistent skills.
Then head to Settings → Connectors and activate the integrations you actually use — Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, and your CRM are the essentials for most marketers.
Skills stack automatically inside a Project - your brand voice skill, report template skill, and analytics skill all fire together when the task requires it.
(Refer back to my Claude Skills or Claude Plugins articles for how to get started if you have not set these up already)
5. Set Up Scheduled Tasks
Use /schedule to automate recurring work - a Monday morning performance summary, a weekly competitor scan, a daily content brief. Set the cadence, and Claude runs it automatically.
One useful detail: Claude rewrites your prompt after the first run, optimising it based on what it learned. So the task genuinely gets smarter over time.
Caveat: your computer needs to stay awake and Claude Desktop needs to stay open. Close the lid and tasks get skipped.
6. Run Your First Task
Treat it like a briefing, not a search query.
Instead of: “Write me a content plan for next month.”
Try: “Using my brand-context.md and the performance CSVs in the inputs folder, create a 30-day content calendar for LinkedIn and email. Prioritise topics that performed in the top 25% by engagement last quarter. Output as .xlsx with separate tabs for each channel. Ask me questions first before starting.”
The formula: Context + end state + constraints = great output.
Here’s a quick video walkthrough of the Claude Cowork Projects Workspace:
Five Claude Projects You Can Build This Week for Marketing
1. The Weekly Newsletter Machine
What’s in the Project: Your about-me.md, writing style guide, five past newsletters that performed well, reference material on topics you cover.
How it works: Each week, drop research and notes into the folder and tell Claude the topic. It reads your context, matches your voice, asks clarifying questions, and generates a draft. By the third or fourth issue, you stop explaining your style — Claude already knows it.
This is, quite literally, the workflow I use for this newsletter.
2. Client Performance Reporting
What’s in the Project: Your report template, two or three strong example reports, the client brief, and any reference docs.
How it works: Drop CSV exports from ad platforms or your CRM into the folder. Claude reads them against your template and past examples, generates a multi-tab report with charts, trends, and recommendations, and drops a formatted .docx into your outputs folder.
Reports that used to take three or four hours are ready in minutes. And by the third report, Claude has learned your formatting preferences and the detail level you expect.
3. Content Repurposing Pipeline
What’s in the Project: Platform-specific format rules for LinkedIn, Substack, Instagram, and email. Your voice profile.
How it works: Drop a finished article into the folder. Claude identifies the three strongest standalone insights and creates a LinkedIn post, a video script, and a Twitter/X thread outline for each — all matching your voice, all output as separate files.
One early adopter documented 60 social posts from 20 articles in a single session.
4. Automated Outbound Pipeline
What’s in the Project: Your ICP definition, messaging playbook, winning email sequences, and CRM connector.
How it works: Set it to run weekly. Claude pulls recent closed-won deals from your CRM, identifies lookalike companies, finds relevant contacts, and drafts personalised email sequences and LinkedIn messages — delivered to Slack for human review before anything gets sent.
The ICP and messaging live permanently. Each weekly run builds on what Claude has learned about which language and angles generate replies.
5. The Monday Morning Briefing
What’s in the Project: Last four weekly briefings, a one-page template, your team’s communication channels.
How it works: Schedule it for every Monday at 8am. Claude pulls updates from Slack, reads against previous briefings to detect patterns, and aggregates everything into a formatted executive summary.
Because memory is scoped to this Project, Claude starts noticing trends — “this is the third week the content pipeline has flagged a bottleneck.” That kind of continuity used to require a chief of staff.
The Honest Caveats
I always try to include these when they matter.
No team sharing yet. Cowork Projects are local to your machine. Browser-based Claude.ai Projects are still needed for shared team workflows. Team sharing is coming.
Token-heavy. One complex Project session can consume the equivalent of 20+ regular chats. If you’re on the Pro plan ($20/month), you’ll hit limits faster than expected. Heavy users should consider Max ($100–$200/month).
Desktop must stay open. Scheduled tasks only run while your computer is awake and Claude Desktop is open.
Still a research preview. Cowork can make mistakes, especially on complex multi-step tasks. Always review outputs before sending to clients. The 10/80/10 principle applies perfectly here — you do the first 10% (the brief, the context) and the last 10% (the review, the judgment). Claude handles the 80% in between.
Local storage only. Projects live on your computer. No cloud sync. Working across two machines requires manual file management.
The Bigger Picture
If you’ve followed this Claude for Marketers series from Skills through Cowork through Plugins through Excel/PowerPoint, Projects are where everything converges. They’re the connective tissue that sits at the top of them all
Skills are your processes. Cowork is your execution layer. Plugins bundle everything into specialist toolkits. Claude Code is the workshop for building custom tools. And Projects are the persistent workspace that gives all of it memory, context, and continuity.
The shift isn’t subtle. It’s the difference between an AI that answers questions and an AI that knows your business and works it.
This is how you stop building prompts and you start building systems.
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
I’ve typically be building my projects around clients rather than workflows - so each project folder contains the contextual documents for that client. Every client has unique workflows so it’s not as easy to organize around a task that would become repeatable. Is this still an effective setup?