AI Start with Marketing: A Simple Step-by-Step Guide

Introduction

If you have been wondering where to start with AI in your business, this episode is for you. I am going to walk you through what I believe is the easiest, quickest, and most cost-effective way to integrate AI into your small business, and it starts with marketing.

Marketing is the perfect function to test and trial AI because it gives you plenty of room to experiment, see what works, and stay within a manageable budget. The best part is that you do not need any technical knowledge to get started. All you need is a clear approach and the right tools.

In this guide, I am going to show you my step-by-step method for using AI to create content, audit your website, and compete with businesses that have much bigger budgets than you. Let us dive in.

Why Marketing is the Best Place to Start

When it comes to integrating AI into your business, marketing is the logical first step. Here is why.

Marketing does not require complex integrations with your existing systems. You are not touching your customer data or your core operations. You are simply creating content, which means the risk is low and the upside is huge.

AI is genuinely good at marketing tasks. It can write copy, suggest headlines, audit your website for SEO improvements, and help you plan your content calendar. The key is giving it enough context about your business so that the output is relevant and useful.

Think about it this way. If you are a small business owner, you probably spend hours every month creating content for your website and social media. Maybe you are doing it yourself, which takes time away from running your business. Or maybe you are paying someone to do it, which costs money. AI can help with both of these problems.

The approach I am going to share with you costs about twenty pounds a month and can save you hours of time each week. It is safe, simple, and it works.

Setting Up Your Claude Project

The tool I recommend for this is Claude, created by Anthropic. It is powerful, easy to use, and perfect for small business owners who want to get started with AI without a steep learning curve.

First, go to the Claude website and download the Claude app. Once you have installed it, open the application and create a project for your business.

A project in Claude is basically a dedicated space where you can store all the information about your business. When you come back to chat with Claude, it will remember everything you have told it about your business, which means the content it generates will be relevant to you.

Now you need to fill this project with context. This is the most important step, so do not skip it.

Add your website URL and your LinkedIn page URL. You can ask Claude to scrape the information from these pages so it understands what your business does and who you serve.

In addition, add any documents you already have about your business. This might include brand guidelines, legal guidelines, sales brochures, company profiles, or anything else that is public-facing and non-sensitive. The more detail you give Claude, the better the content it will create.

The idea is simple. You are building a knowledge base about your business that Claude can reference every time it creates content for you. This ensures that everything it writes sounds like your business, uses your tone of voice, and aligns with your brand.

Creating Your Foundation Documents

Once you have your project set up with all your business context, the next step is to create four foundation documents that will guide all your future content.

These documents are brand guidelines, legal guardrails, tone and voice, and one more document of your choice. To create them, you simply type a prompt into Claude asking it to generate these documents in a .md file format.

The .md file format is a simple text file that AI tools can read and process quickly, which makes everything faster and more efficient.

When you ask Claude to create these documents, make sure you tell it to use all the content you have uploaded to your project folder. This means it will scrape your website, your LinkedIn page, and any documents you have added to create comprehensive, accurate foundation documents.

These documents become the rulebook for all your content. Every time Claude generates a blog post, a social media update, or website copy, it will reference these documents to make sure the content is on-brand, legally safe, and written in the right tone.

This step might take a little bit of time to set up, but it is the foundation for everything that comes next. Once these documents are in place, creating content becomes much easier.

Installing the SEO Content Skill

Now comes the really powerful part. There is a skill you can install in Claude that will help you audit your website for SEO and generate content ideas.

A skill is essentially a set of instructions that tells Claude how to do a specific task. You do not need to understand the technical details. All you need to know is that it makes Claude do more advanced things.

The SEO content skill was created by a generous person in the community and it is free to use. It is not as sophisticated as paid tools, but it is a brilliant starting point and it works well.

To install the skill, you need to go into Claude and look for the three tabs. There is Chat, which is the basic conversation mode. There is Core Work, which is where you can do more advanced things. And there is Code on the right. For this purpose, stick with Core Work.

Once you have found the skill, download and install it into Claude Core Work. It is a straightforward process, but if you get stuck, you can simply ask Claude to walk you through it.

After the skill is installed, you can type a command and Claude will perform a full SEO audit of your website. This typically takes about ten minutes, so just let it run.

Conducting Your Website Audit

Once the SEO audit is complete, Claude will generate a report showing you all the issues on your website. This might include missing alt text on images, broken links, missing meta descriptions, sitemap issues, and more.

The really clever part is that you can ask Claude to fix these issues for you. There are two ways to do this.

The first way is to ask Claude to connect to your browser, log into your website, and make the updates directly. You can type a prompt asking Claude to please connect to your browser, log in, and make the SEO changes. It will work through each issue one by one.

The second way, which is often easier, is to connect Claude to your website through the WordPress REST API. This is simpler than it sounds. In WordPress, go to your user settings, create a unique password for external API access, and then feed that to Claude. Once connected, Claude can post directly to WordPress without logging in through the browser.

Either method works. The goal is the same. Claude will work through all the SEO issues, fixing them systematically. This includes things like updating image tags, adding alt text, fixing broken links, and improving your metadata.

This process usually takes about half an hour of your time, and the results can be significant. Better SEO means more people find your website when they search for what you offer.

Analysing Your Competition

One of the most valuable things you can do with AI is understand what your competitors are doing online. After you have audited and fixed your own website, you can use the same SEO tool to scrape your competitors’ websites.

Simply type in the command to compare your website with competitors, and then enter the URLs of businesses that you consider your competitors or ones you aspire to be like. Claude will scrape their websites and give you an outline of their keywords, content ideas, and page structure.

This is incredibly valuable because it tells you what terms and topics are working for people in your space. You can see what keywords they are targeting, what kind of content they are producing, and what pages they have that you might be missing.

It is pretty basic in terms of sophistication, but it is free and it gives you a great starting point. You can use this information to inform your own content strategy and find gaps that you can fill.

Building Your Content Calendar

Now that you know what your competitors are doing and what keywords are relevant in your industry, it is time to build a content calendar.

Ask Claude to create a keyword calendar for you. Tell it to use the keywords from your competitor research and recommend a posting frequency. I would suggest starting with three posts a week. This is manageable and consistent enough to show search engines that your website is active and regularly updated.

Once you have your keywords, ask Claude to create an article outline for each piece of content. Make sure you tell it to optimise for SEO, including the correct length and all the basic SEO elements. Claude will create a detailed outline that you can then expand into a full article.

The beauty of this approach is that Claude knows your business, your brand guidelines, and your tone of voice. It knows what keywords to target and how to structure an article for maximum SEO impact. All you are doing is providing the topic and letting AI do the heavy lifting.

Creating and Publishing Content

Here is where the magic happens. You set up a simple schedule. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you log into Claude, and it will draft your article based on the outline you created.

If you have connected Claude to your WordPress site, it will automatically push the content to your website. If not, you can copy and paste the content manually. Either way, the process is fast.

The only part I still do manually is generating images for the articles. I use Google AI Studio and NanoBanana to create images. I write the prompt in Claude, generate the image in Google AI, and then add it to the article. This whole process takes about five to ten minutes a day.

The result is that you are publishing three pieces of medium-quality content on your website every single week. This is brilliant for search engines because they favour websites that are regularly updated with fresh content.

Think about it. If you do this for a couple of months, you will have dozens of high-quality articles on your website. This will significantly improve your organic search traffic and make your business look active and engaged.

Repurposing Across Platforms

One of the best things about creating content with AI is how easy it is to repurpose it across different platforms.

After Claude has generated your article, you can simply ask it to repurpose the content for LinkedIn. Type a prompt asking Claude to please repurpose this as a LinkedIn post and provide the URL link. It will create a well-formatted LinkedIn post that you can copy and paste onto your profile.

If you have a team, get them to share and repost the content. This amplifies your reach without any extra effort.

You can do exactly the same for Facebook. Ask Claude to repurpose the content for Facebook, and it will adapt the tone and format for that platform.

This approach is incredibly efficient. You are creating one piece of content and turning it into multiple posts across multiple platforms. The total time investment is about half an hour to an hour a day, and the results can be substantial.

Key Takeaways

• Start with marketing because it is low-risk, high-reward, and does not require complex system integrations
• Use Claude to create a project and fill it with all your business context, including your website, LinkedIn, and brand documents
• Generate foundation documents for brand guidelines, legal guardrails, and tone of voice to ensure consistent content
• Install the free SEO content skill to audit your website and fix SEO issues automatically
• Analyse your competitors’ websites to discover keywords and content opportunities
• Create a content calendar with three posts per week to build organic traffic over time
• Repurpose every article for LinkedIn and Facebook to maximise your content investment
• The total cost is about twenty pounds a month for Claude Pro, making it accessible for any small business

Over to You

This is a really simple way to start using AI in your business. You do not need a big budget. You do not need technical skills. You just need to follow the steps and put in a little bit of time each day.

The beauty of this approach is that it works while you sleep. Once you have set up your project, created your foundation documents, and built your content calendar, the system essentially runs itself. You are essentially leveraging AI to compete with the big boys who have massive marketing budgets.

If this approach sounds useful, I would encourage you to start today. Set up your Claude project, add your business context, and run your first SEO audit. Within a couple of months, I guarantee you will see more organic traffic and a website that looks active and professional.

Have you tried using AI for your marketing yet? What worked and what did not? Drop a comment below.