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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Picture this.
It’s Monday, 8:47am. You walk to your desk with a coffee, open your laptop, and before the lid is fully up, there are three emails waiting for you. Not from your colleagues.
But from Claude.
One is a competitor digest, summarising every blog post, pricing change, and LinkedIn post your top three competitors published over the weekend.
The next is a content briefing, pulling the week’s top Reddit threads in your niche and turning them into five fresh post ideas.
The third is a performance report, reading last week’s numbers out of your Google Sheet, flagging the two metrics that moved more than 15%, and suggesting what to do about them.
You’ve not opened a single tab. You’ve not written a single prompt. And your laptop was asleep all night.
That’s the feature we’re talking about this week. It’s called Claude Routines. And it is, quietly, the single biggest upgrade to marketing automation I’ve seen this year.
What Claude Routines Actually Are
Claude Routines are scheduled, recurring prompts that run automatically in Anthropic’s cloud.
You write the instruction once, pick a schedule, and Claude executes it forever until you switch it off.
And here’s the bit that matters most: none of this depends on your laptop being on. The Routine fires on schedule, does its work, and delivers the result whether you’re asleep, on holiday, or in a different time zone.
Anthropic launched the feature on the 13th April 2026 and positioned it for developers, which is why most marketers haven’t heard of it.
You’ll find Routines sitting inside Claude Code, and I know that might sound like this could be technical but it’s not. So stay with me, because you don’t need to write a single line of code to set one up.
(If you’d like the full picture of what Claude Code actually is (and isn’t) before going further, I covered it in The Marketer’s Guide to Claude Code earlier this year. If not, carry on. Nothing in the rest of this article assumes any technical knowledge.)
But nothing about Routines requires code.
The trigger is natural language, the instructions are natural language, and the connectors are just click-to-authorise.
So, if you can use Cowork, you can use Routines.
And to get you in the right frame of mind, the right mental model when thinking about Routines is:
“I’m hiring a virtual assistant who works the night shift.”
Every Routine has three parts:
1. A trigger. When should this run? Daily at 7am, every Monday, first of the month, whatever you need.
2. An instruction. What should Claude do, in plain English?
3. A delivery. Where should the output go? Your inbox, a Slack channel, a Google Doc, a Notion page.
That’s it. Just three fields, one schedule, and a set of connectors. The rest of the work happens without you.
Why Routines Matters - Specifically for Marketers
Most coverage of Routines so far has been written by developers for developers.
The top YouTube tutorials demo automated code reviews, dependency updates, and CI pipelines. That framing has hidden what is arguably a bigger shift for marketers than for engineers.
Think about the actual shape of marketing work for a second.
Competitor scans.
Keyword reports.
Content calendars.
Social listening.
Newsletter drafts.
Campaign performance digests.
Customer feedback triage.
These tasks share three traits: they’re repeatable, they’re time-boxed, and they’re mostly about gathering and summarising information.
That is exactly what Routines are built for.
The team at Firecrawl put it well. Claude Routines, they wrote…
“collapse the gap between marketing idea and marketing execution.”
You describe the workflow in English once, and it runs forever. Developers will use this to maintain codebases.
Marketers, however, will use it to build something much closer to a team.
The Big Unlock: Your Laptop Doesn’t Need to Be On
If you’ve used Claude Cowork’s Scheduled Tasks before, you already know how powerful they are.
But you also know the obvious frustration. Your computer has to be on.
You set up a task to run at 7am. You wake up. Your laptop has gone to sleep. The task didn’t fire. Back to square one.
Why does this happen?
Because Cowork’s ‘Scheduled Tasks’run locally on your machine, so your computer has to be on and awake for anything to happen. That limits them to tasks you could have just done yourself when you sat down at your desk anyway.
Routines fix that. They run server-side on Anthropic’s infrastructure, on a real 24/7 schedule.
Your laptop can be off. You could be on holiday. But the Routine still runs, it still uses the connectors, and it still writes the output to wherever you told it to.
That is the difference between automation and true delegation.
If you’ve ever thought, “I’d love a competitor report on my desk every Monday morning,” that’s a Routine. You, personally, could never reliably deliver that because you’d need a machine running at 6am on a Monday. Claude can with Routines.
Setting Up Your First Routine In Less Than 5 Minutes
Yes, seriously.
Here’s a video on how to set up your first Claude routine:
Follow steps below if you prefer:
1. Open Claude Code. You can do this through the web UI or the desktop app, whichever you already use. Head to claude.ai/code and log in with your Claude account.
2. Find the Routines tab in the sidebar. Click “New Routine.”
3. Choose “Remote,” not “Local.” This is the single most important setting, and the one most new users get wrong. When you create a Routine, Claude asks whether you want it to run locally (on your computer) or remotely (on Anthropic’s servers). Pick Remote. Local Routines can only fire when your machine is on, which is exactly the limitation we set out to escape. Remote Routines run 24/7 in the cloud, which is the whole point.
4. Give it a name. Something descriptive like “Monday Morning Competitor Scan.” You’ll have a library of these soon, so name them like you’d name files.
5. Pick a schedule. The UI has presets (every weekday at 8am, every Sunday at 6pm, the first of the month) or you can enter a custom schedule if you need something more specific. It shows the next three run times as a sanity check.
6. Write the prompt in plain English. Treat Claude like a junior marketer. Be specific about the sources, the format, the length, and where the output should go.
7. Enable the connectors it needs. Web browsing for scraping, Gmail for email delivery, Google Drive for doc output, Slack for channel posts. One click each.
8. Hit “Test run.” Let it execute once immediately. Check the output. Adjust the prompt if the tone, format, or length isn’t right.
9. Turn on the schedule. That’s it. It will now run forever until you pause it.
This was a tip I found from the no-code community: keep a running Google Doc of your best one-off Claude prompts. When one of them proves consistently useful, promote it to a Routine in five minutes.
Just an idea.
Seven Routines Every Marketer Can Build This Week
Here are the seven I’d start with after giving this some thought. Remember, Routeins only launched last week, so I have not tried all of these yet.
But each one replaces a recurring task that eats an hour or two of your week, so the cumulative reclaim is significant.
1. Monday Morning Competitor Digest
Connectors: Web browsing, Gmail
The prompt: “Every Monday at 7am, visit the blogs and LinkedIn company pages of the following competitors: [Competitor A URL], [Competitor B URL], [Competitor C URL]. Summarise any new content from the past 7 days into three bullet points per competitor. Flag any pricing changes, product announcements, or new feature launches separately. Email the digest to me at [your email] with the subject line ‘Weekly Competitor Brief: [date]’.”
Why it matters: Most marketers check competitors reactively, usually when someone in a meeting mentions them. A weekly proactive digest means you spot shifts in messaging, pricing, and positioning before your team does. Over a quarter, you’re operating from a completely different baseline of competitive awareness.
2. Daily Content Idea Generator
Connectors: Web browsing, Gmail or Notion
The prompt: “Every weekday at 6am, scan the top 20 posts from the past 24 hours on r/marketing, r/digital_marketing, and r/growmybusiness. Identify the three most common questions, frustrations, or themes being discussed. For each theme, suggest one LinkedIn post angle and one newsletter topic in my voice (direct, practitioner-led, specific rather than generic). Email the ideas to me at [your email].”
Why it matters: Running out of content ideas is almost always a symptom of being too far from where your audience is actually talking. This puts you back in the room, daily, without the time cost of scrolling Reddit yourself.
3. Weekly SEO Position Tracker
Connectors: Web browsing, Slack
The prompt: “Every Friday at 4pm, search Google for these keywords and record my current position for each: [list 10-15 target keywords]. Compare against last week’s positions (stored in [Google Sheet URL]). Flag any keywords that dropped more than 3 positions, any that moved into the top 10, and any that moved into the top 3. Post a short summary in the #seo Slack channel. Append this week’s data to the spreadsheet.”
Why it matters: Most SEO tools cost £99 a month and still require you to log in and read dashboards. This replaces the dashboard habit with a Slack post you actually read.
4. Newsletter Curator
Connectors: Web browsing, Google Docs
The prompt: “Every Thursday at 2pm, scan these sources for the past week’s top stories: [list RSS feeds, newsletters, or URLs]. Pick the top 5 that would be relevant to [describe your audience]. For each, write a 2-sentence teaser in my newsletter tone (conversational, British English, no jargon). Save the full draft as a Google Doc titled ‘Newsletter Draft: [date]’ in my Newsletters folder.”
Why it matters: The hardest part of a weekly newsletter isn’t writing. It’s curating. Having a pre-curated shortlist waiting for you on Thursday afternoon compresses a 90-minute task into a 15-minute review.
5. Social Listening and Brand Monitoring
Connectors: Web browsing, Slack
The prompt: “Daily at 8am, search Reddit, X, and Google for mentions of [my brand name] and these competitor brands: [list]. Categorise each mention as positive, neutral, or negative. Flag anything negative about my brand immediately and anything positive or viral from competitors. Post a morning summary to #brand-watch in Slack with links to the source posts.”
Why it matters: You cannot respond to a crisis you haven’t noticed. A daily Slack brief is the cheapest early-warning system you can build, and it doubles as a source of ready-made content whenever a positive mention deserves amplification.
6. Weekly Performance Briefing
Connectors: Google Sheets, Google Docs, Slack
The prompt: “Every Monday at 8am, pull this week’s data from the Marketing Dashboard spreadsheet in Google Sheets. Compare every metric against the previous week. Flag anything up or down more than 15% week-on-week. Write a 250-word narrative summary (not bullet points), highlighting the single most important trend and one recommended action. Save it to the Weekly Reports folder in Google Drive and post a 3-line summary to #marketing-updates in Slack.”
Why it matters: Monday morning reporting is the task most marketing teams struggle to do consistently. This turns a “we should really write one of those up” task into a “it’s already written, I just need to review it” task. Over a month, it also builds a longitudinal record you can ask Claude to analyse later.
7. Monthly Strategy Retrospective
Connectors: Google Sheets, Google Docs, Gmail
The prompt: “On the first Monday of every month at 9am, pull the previous month’s blog traffic, social engagement, and pipeline data from [Google Sheet URL]. Write a 500-word retrospective covering: what worked, what didn’t, what surprised me, and the top three priorities for the coming month. Save it to the Monthly Retros folder in Google Drive and email a copy to [leadership email list].”
Why it matters: Monthly retrospectives are the work that most teams know they should do and almost never actually do. A scheduled Routine makes it structurally impossible to skip, which is the only way these habits ever stick.
What It Costs to Run Claude Routines
The clear picture: If you’re already on Claude Pro, Routines cost you nothing extra. Seven Routines running daily or weekly will not push you into Max territory unless you’re also doing heavy Cowork work on top. For most marketers, this is the lowest-friction, lowest-cost automation upgrade available in 2026.
The Honest Caveats
Quality control matters. A Routine is only as good as its prompt. I recommend running every new Routine in “shadow mode” for the first two weeks: let it execute on schedule, but review the output yourself before forwarding it or trusting it in a report. Refine the prompt based on what it gets wrong. Only once the output consistently matches what you’d have produced yourself should you let it run unreviewed.
Connectors can be temperamental. OAuth tokens occasionally expire and need re-authorising. A Routine that’s been running for weeks can suddenly fail silently if a connector drops. Check your run history at least weekly until you trust the setup.
Claude has no memory between Routine runs. Each run starts fresh. If you want Claude to compare this week to last week, you need to give it somewhere to store the data (a Google Sheet, a Notion page, a Google Doc). This is a prompting habit, not a limitation, once you know about it.
The feature is a research preview. Anthropic labels Routines as a research preview, which means pricing, limits, and behaviour can change. It’s stable enough to rely on for non-critical workflows. I wouldn’t put my quarterly board report on it. Yet.
The Bigger Picture: Claude for Marketing Ecosystem
Here is how the Claude ecosystem looks now based on some recent Claude for Marketing articles I have written for context.
Skills give Claude your processes. Cowork gives it your files. Plugins give it specialist knowledge. Projects give it memory. Apify gives it data. Zapier gives it the ability to act across your tool stack.
And now Routines give it time.
Specifically, the time you are not working. Evenings, weekends, early mornings, holidays, the three days a year you actually manage to switch off. The hours that were previously dead space in your automation stack are now productive hours.
Think about what that means in practice.
A marketer with 20 Routines running is operating at a completely different scale than a marketer still doing this work manually every Monday morning.
Not because they’re smarter or faster.
But because they’ve built a team that doesn’t sleep. The competitor digest runs while they’re asleep. The content ideas land before they’ve had a coffee. The performance briefing is already in Slack before the Monday standup begins.
Every Routine is a permanent asset. You set it up once. It runs forever.
And the leverage compounds: each new Routine reclaims time you can spend setting up the next one.
From what I’ve been reading in a few online communities, users of Routines are already suggesting a library of ten Routines can reclaim five to ten hours a week of recurring reporting and monitoring work.
And if you are able to scale that to twenty, you’re looking at a full working day back every week.
Five Routines is useful. Twenty Routines? That’s a genuine operating advantage.
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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