Set Up Claude Code for a Marketing Team From Scratch

The version of Claude Code your team actually uses daily is wildly different from the one out of the box. Five minutes of setup turns it from "generic LLM in a terminal" into "the colleague who already knows the brand."

Here's the order of operations.

1. Install + sign in (5 min)

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
claude login

Pick the workspace you want billing to go to. Done.

2. Create CLAUDE.md for your project (10 min)

This is the file Claude reads on every session start in this directory. Put the things you'd otherwise paste 100 times:

# [Brand name]

## What we do
[2-3 sentences. Be specific.]

## Who we sell to
[ICP in plain English]

## Voice rules
- Contractions: yes
- Hedging words: no
- Banned: [list specific words]
- Reading age: [target]

## Channels we actually use
- Google Ads (B2B intent)
- LinkedIn (thought leadership)
- Email newsletter (Mondays, 800-1200 words)

## Things that have NOT worked
- [be honest — saves Claude from re-suggesting them]

The "things that have NOT worked" section is the highest-value part. It stops Claude from confidently recommending the thing you already tried in Q2.

3. Install the marketing skill pack (3 min)

claude --add-plugin marketing

This loads marketing:campaign-plan, marketing:competitive-brief, marketing:seo-audit, etc. You can browse with /help after restart.

4. Connect MCP servers (10 min)

The MCP servers that actually pay back the setup for marketing:

• GSC — read Search Console data into Claude
• Slack — post drafts, summaries, briefs
• Gmail — draft outreach with full thread context
• Your CRM (HubSpot, Apollo, Close — see if there's an MCP)
• Notion or Linear — for task creation

Each one takes 2 minutes via the connector UI.

5. Share with the team (2 min)

Commit your CLAUDE.md to the repo. Anyone who runs Claude Code in that directory inherits all the context. New hire onboarding for "how do we use Claude here" becomes "open the project and start."

What I'd skip on day one

Don't try to build custom skills before you've used Claude with this setup for two weeks. You'll catch yourself doing the same task 5+ times — that's the signal to build a skill for it. Building skills speculatively wastes more time than it saves.