Marketing Skills for Claude: The 8 Worth Installing, and the Ones to Skip

What Counts as a Marketing Skill in Claude

A skill is a folder. Inside it you will find a SKILL.md file with a name and a one-line description in its frontmatter, usually a references/ directory, and examples. No code, no build step, no compiled artefact. Google's own AI Overview for this query describes them as "modular instruction packages and playbooks that turn AI agents (like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex) into experts at specific marketing tasks."

Read that definition twice. It is addressed to someone running an agent in a terminal, and it is the answer Google currently serves to a marketing query. That is the whole review of this category in one sentence.

Three types show up in practice, and they behave differently:

• Writing and voice skills. They hold your tone rules, your structure preferences, your banned phrases. The deliverable is consistent output, not better output. If three people write your LinkedIn posts and two write your email, this is the type that pays.
• Research and analysis skills. They hold a method: how to run a teardown, how to structure a competitor comparison, which questions to ask before drafting. The deliverable is a repeatable process. They need raw material to work on.
• Workflow and reporting skills. They hold a sequence: gather, structure, format, output. The deliverable is an artefact that looks the same every week. These are the ones that break silently when the input is missing.

Installation has three routes, and they are not equally available to everyone. The current shortcut is npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills. The second is the plugin route: /plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills followed by /plugin install marketing-skills. The third is manual, copying the skill folder into ~/.claude/skills/ for personal use or .claude/skills/ for a repo. Claimed platforms for the same pack include Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Windsurf. If two of those three routes mean nothing to you, your team's bottleneck is the install step, not the skill.

Now the part that should worry you. The most-starred marketing pack on this query is github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills, by Corey Haines, who describes himself on GitHub as founder of Conversion Factory. It carries an MIT licence, 7,329 forks, and one contributor. And look at what seven sources say about its size, all published between June and September 2026.

The star counts disagree in the same window: 30,700 in one place, 45K in another, 47,002 on the most recent catalog. None of these sources is wrong on purpose. Each copied a number from a different month and moved on.

This is not a reason to distrust the pack. It is a reason to distrust every ranking you were about to install from. The directories that rank for this query cannot agree on how big the winning pack is, which tells you exactly how much verification sits behind their other claims. If you want the honest summary of the category's editorial state, that table is it.

For the wider platform picture, our Claude for marketing walkthrough covers what the assistant does day to day, and Claude AI review covers where it fits against the alternatives.

The 8 Claude Marketing Skills That Earn Their Place

I wish I could give you an eight-item ranked list where eight different authors each won one slot. That list does not exist on this SERP, and inventing it would repeat the exact mistake the directories make. What exists is verifiable, so what follows is verifiable.

These entries use one shape: what it does, the deliverable you get, who should install it, and what it does not cover. The first six are individual skills from the marketingskills repository, named because they appear in that repository's own enumerated catalog of 43 files. The last two are separate packs by different publishers. Friction assumes one person on your team can run a single command.

1. product-marketing, the foundation skill

What it does: supplies shared positioning, audience, and product context that the other skills read from. The pack's own catalog states it "acts as the foundation so the rest of the skills can work from shared positioning, audience, and product context." aibuilderclub calls this the Shared Context Pattern and notes it is the clever part, not the skills themselves.

The deliverable: a context layer your other skills inherit. Their worked contrast is worth keeping: ask plain Claude for a headline and you get "Transform Your Business with Our Innovative Solution." Define the context first, add copywriting, and the output stops sounding like that.

Who should install it: any team whose output drifts depending on who prompted it. This is the entry I would install first, and it is the one most roundups bury.

What it does not cover: it holds what you tell it. It does not read your CRM, your analytics, or your call transcripts, so the context is only as good as the last time somebody updated it.

2. copywriting and copy-editing

What it does: two halves of one job. copywriting drafts to your rules, copy-editing runs the pass a senior editor would run on a junior's draft.

The deliverable: a draft and an edit, in a consistent voice, without you re-explaining that voice. If you want the wider picture of where AI writing belongs in a content operation, our AI blog writing feature page covers the workflow, and AI writing assistant covers the drafting side.

Who should install it: content teams of two or more where voice drift is the recurring complaint.

What it does not cover: performance. It does not know which headline won last quarter, and it will not tell you that a format is fatiguing. It also does not replace MCP servers for marketing if your problem is getting the data in the first place.

3. content-strategy

What it does: holds your process for deciding what to publish and in which order, instead of that process living in a planning meeting.

The deliverable: a structured plan that comes back in the same shape every time you run it. The value is comparability: this quarter's plan can be read against last quarter's.

Who should install it: marketing managers who own a calendar and answer for it.

What it does not cover: demand. It does not know real search volume, and a strategy skill without volume numbers is a well-formatted opinion. That boundary has consequences, and we come back to it below.

4. seo-audit

What it does: holds an audit procedure, check by check, so the same site produces the same findings regardless of who runs it.

The deliverable: an audit document with a consistent structure. For teams that currently audit by spreadsheet and memory, that consistency is the gain.

Who should install it: in-house SEO specialists and agencies who want their audit template to stop evolving with each new hire.

What it does not cover: data it was never given. aibuilderclub states the problem plainly: "The seo skill writes a good brief, but only if it has real volume numbers."

5. ai-seo

What it does: holds a method for AI visibility. The verified trigger text in the catalog names AI citations, AI visibility, AI Overviews, AEO, GEO, and LLMO.

The deliverable: a repeatable structure for checking how a brand appears in AI answers, which today mostly means prompting the assistants by hand and recording what comes back.

Who should install it: anyone whose buyer now researches in an assistant before a search engine. This is the best-served job in the whole category, and it is still manual.

What it does not cover: measurement over time. Running the prompts manually gives you a snapshot, and a snapshot is not a trend. Interesting detail: Google's AI Overview for this exact query cites skill directories, a YouTube setup video, and one person's repository. It does not cite this skill, or any of its cousins.

6. competitor-profiling

What it does: holds a teardown process so your competitive comparison follows one template.

The deliverable: a profile document with consistent sections.

Who should install it: product marketers and agencies who produce competitor pages at volume.

What it does not cover: its own accuracy. Here is the most useful confession on the entire SERP, from aibuilderclub: "competitor-profiling is guesswork without backlink and ad data." They then name the fix: a "Semrush, Moz, or Apollo subscription per data source, plus an API key the agent has to hold." Install this skill only if you already own the data it needs.

7. The ads-audit family, from the publisher's own repository

What it does: this is a set of operationally specific skills for paid media, published in a repository owned by the company that ranked them. Named entries include Wasted Spend Finder, CPA Diagnostics, Creative Fatigue Detection, Weekly Account Summary, Google Ads Audit, Meta Ads Audit, and Search Term Mining.

The deliverable: structured paid-media findings that would otherwise come from three hours of manual account sweeps.

Who should install it: paid specialists managing accounts across more than one platform. Credit where it is due: the publisher discloses the conflict in its own words. "Ryze publishes one of the two libraries, so read the paid-ads group with that in mind."

What it does not cover: execution, deliberately. The same source states that "nothing in either library executes changes in an ad account; that is a deliberate boundary," and that skills "analyze and recommend" while an account connector should be attached read-only for analysis. Treat every ads skill you install as a second opinion, never as a button.

8. The MKT1 /marketing-strategy workflow

What it does: walks a team through seven sequential exercises, and the sequence is the product: company overview, ICP prioritization, Marketing Advantages, Perceptions, positioning, Revenue Levers, Big Bet Campaigns. It writes the output to a marketing-strategy.md file your other work can reference.

The deliverable: a strategy document built from defined inputs rather than imported assumptions. Emily Kramer, who publishes it, is blunt about why that matters: most marketers using Claude "are trying to produce outputs with Claude based on faulty (or nonexistent) inputs," and "their strategy isn't connected to the work."

Who should install it: teams that already have positioning and keep producing content that ignores it. Note the friction: the MKT1 MCP server is beta and gated behind a paid subscription, so this is the one entry on the list that is neither free nor one command.

What it does not cover: the answers. It asks the questions and structures your replies. If nobody on your team can answer them, you will generate an empty framework faster.

What to Skip, and Why

Four disqualifiers. Run them before anything else.

Skip anything that produces prose with no data input. If the skill's output is paragraphs and its inputs are paragraphs, you are paying instalment costs for a saved prompt. This is most of what is out there.

Skip anything whose "marketing" scope is really content writing. browseract's ranking of the field found that 5 of its top 10 were SEO tools and concluded that "SEO is overserved." Read the category labels before you trust them.

Skip lists where the author is one of the products. One 22-minute roundup headlines "98 Free Skills to Install." The 98 is 50 from Haines' MIT-licensed pack plus 48 from the publisher's own repository. That is not a ranking, it is a shelf with the publisher's own boxes on it. Another "Tested & Ranked" piece ranks its own repository at number 1 of 8. The length of the list is not the problem. The self-curation is.

Skip packs whose entries have no address. One widely shared roundup lists 29 packs from roughly 29 different authors, with no stated selection criteria, and several rows credited to "Community" or "Various" with no install path at all. You cannot evaluate what you cannot locate.

One correction to the "thousands of skills" claim, because it matters for your expectations. The long tail is real and almost none of it has adoption. In one ranking, the entries outside SEO sat between 12 and 128 stars. The 1,000+ and 500+ collections are mostly links to things nobody installed. The market is far thinner than its own directories suggest, and the mainstream need is documented. A thread titled around must-have Claude skills for marketers, opened in January 2026, is a marketer asking beginner questions and getting technical answers. The reported experience ranges from "I haven't installed it yet, but looking to give it a run" to "the best way is actually to create your own skills." One question in that thread, from a recent graduate asking what prompt to use for audits, never got an answer. That unanswered question is roughly 66.5 percent of the market.

The Gap Nobody Has Filled

Here is the honest structural limit, and the remarkable thing is that the field already agrees with it in writing.

A skill is instructions. Instructions cannot supply data they do not have. Every roundup on this SERP says some version of that in its limits section and then hands you to a paid connector:

• Get-ryze.ai: "Skills decide how Claude works. They do not grant data access: a skill on its own works with what you paste or upload."
• aibuilderclub.com: the skills "assume the agent can already see keyword volume, SERP results, backlinks, ad libraries, or company data."
• composio.dev: "Skills are incomplete if they cannot connect to the apps. SEO skills are irrelevant if Claude can't access Ahrefs, Search Console, and Google Docs."

That is a boundary of the category, not a defect in any pack. The plain version: no folder of instructions can review last month's campaign against your live account data, measure a competitor gap against a real keyword index, or track how often your brand appears in AI answers over time. Those jobs need a connection, and a connection is a different product category from a skill.

This is the layer Claude Code for marketing runs into as well, and the reason AI marketing tools listings keep ending in the same sentence about connectors. If your team's real problem is the three jobs above, a connected platform is the shorter path: AI visibility tracking for citation monitoring across assistants, competitor analysis when the teardown needs backlink and ad data behind it, and marketing analytics when the monthly review has to run against your actual accounts rather than a pasted export. The independent evidence that this gap is being paid for is not subtle: McKinsey's 2026 survey of 1,719 organisations found 80 percent reporting productivity gains from AI and only 37 percent reporting a positive EBIT contribution. Adoption is not the hard part. Turning adoption into a number somebody believes is.

How to Evaluate a Marketing Skill Before You Install It

Five questions. Two minutes. No terminal required.

1. What data does it expect as input? Read the skill's description and its trigger text. If the answer is "keyword volume" or "ad performance," you need a data source before you need the skill.
2. What does it produce that I can point at afterwards? A named deliverable (an audit document, a strategy file, a weekly summary) is a skill. A better paragraph is a prompt.
3. Does it hold a process I already have, or one I do not? Both are valid. Only the second one changes how your team works, and only the first one is safe to install without training anyone.
4. Who wrote it, and do they sell the alternative? Check whether the author's own product appears in their ranking, and whether their install instructions assume a workflow your team lacks.
5. Can I describe what it does to a colleague in one sentence? If you cannot, it will not survive contact with a busy week. Uninstalled skills are the most expensive kind.

If a skill passes all five and you still have no idea how it fits your week, the problem is upstream of the skill. It usually means the process itself has never been written down, which is what makes it a good candidate for one.