Marketing skills: the best ones to install, and how to write your own

“Marketing skills” used to mean the things you listed on a CV. It now has a second meaning, and it is the one changing how marketing work gets done: a marketing skill is a packaged set of instructions that teaches an AI agent how your team does a job.

Install a marketing skill and your AI stops being a generalist. It runs an SEO audit the way a specialist would, writes copy against a conversion framework, or formats a weekly report the same way every Monday. This guide covers what marketing skills are, the best ones to install today, and how to write your own.

What marketing skills are

A marketing skill is a folder of instructions, scripts and reference files that an AI agent loads when it needs to do a specific marketing job. The core of every skill is a SKILL.md file: plain-English instructions with a name and a description at the top. The agent reads the descriptions of every installed skill, and loads the full instructions only when your request matches one.

You will also see them called agent skills or Claude skills. They are the same thing. Anthropic launched Agent Skills on 16 October 2025 and published the format as an open standard two months later, so a skill you write once works across Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and any other tool that supports the Agent Skills standard. A marketing skill is an agent skill written for marketing work.

“Skills are conceptually extremely simple: a skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something, optionally accompanied by extra documents and pre-written scripts that the model can run to help it accomplish the tasks described by the skill.”

Simon Willison, co-creator of Django, Simon Willison’s Weblog

Skills sit between a prompt and an integration:

Skills tell the agent how to do the work. MCP servers give it something to work on. Most teams need both, and our guide to MCPs, CLIs and skills covers when to reach for each.

Why marketing skills matter

If you have ever given an AI the same instructions twice (“follow our brand voice”, “use this SEO checklist”, “format the report like this”), a skill solves that problem.

Marketing consultant Cynthia McGillis had 39 meetings in one week and an end-of-day ritual of typing the same long prompt to summarise notes, group action items and flag anything urgent. She turned it into a /daily-digest skill. The saving in typing was not the point:

“When I typed a custom prompt every day, the output was different every day. Sometimes action items were bullet points, sometimes a table. Sometimes it flagged urgency, sometimes it didn’t.”

Cynthia McGillis, marketing consultant, From prompt to skill

Her conclusion: “A skill is a system.”

That is the case for marketing skills in four parts:

• Consistency. The same process and the same output format on every run, whoever asks.
• Less repetition. Write the instructions once and the agent loads them on its own.
• Specialist output. A general-purpose agent follows a specialist’s checklist instead of guessing at one.
• Shared knowledge. How your best marketer does the job becomes something the whole team, and every agent, can use.

Skills are also cheap to run. Only the name and description of each skill sit in the agent’s context. The full instructions load when triggered, and any extra files load only when the instructions call for them, so you can install dozens without slowing anything down.

The best marketing skills to install

The best-known open-source collection is Corey Haines’s marketingskills repository: 50 skills covering CRO, copywriting, SEO, analytics and growth engineering, with more than 50,000 GitHub stars at the time of writing. Seven of the 10 skills below come from it. The rest are from Anthropic, Remotion and Vercel.

1. SEO audit

seo-audit reviews crawlability, technical foundations, on-page optimisation, content quality and authority, then returns a prioritised plan: critical fixes, high-impact improvements and quick wins.

npx skills add https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill seo-audit

2. AI SEO

ai-seo covers the newer job of getting cited in AI-generated answers, the work variously called AEO, GEO and LLMO.

npx skills add https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill ai-seo

3. Copywriting

copywriting is a conversion copywriting framework for homepages, landing pages, pricing pages and product pages. It favours clarity over cleverness, benefits over features, and customer language over company jargon.

npx skills add https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill copywriting

4. CRO

cro reviews any marketing page or form for conversion problems, including lead capture and contact forms.

npx skills add https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill cro

5. Analytics

analytics helps set up, improve and audit tracking: conversion events, UTM parameters, tag manager configuration and measurement plans.

npx skills add https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill analytics

6. Content strategy

content-strategy works through what to write about, how topics cluster, and what to publish next.

npx skills add https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill content-strategy

7. Competitor profiling

competitor-profiling researches and profiles competitors starting from nothing more than their URLs.

npx skills add https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill competitor-profiling

8. Brand guidelines

brand-guidelines is Anthropic’s own example of a brand skill. It applies Anthropic’s colours and typography, so treat it as a template: swap in your palette, fonts and rules, and every deck, document and page your agent produces starts on brand.

npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill brand-guidelines

9. Remotion best practices

remotion-best-practices gives the agent the domain knowledge to create videos in code with Remotion. Useful for teams producing video at volume.

npx skills add https://github.com/remotion-dev/skills --skill remotion-best-practices

10. Find skills

find-skills searches the ecosystem and installs what it finds.

npx skills add https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills --skill find-skills

Where to find more marketing skills

• Anthropic’s official repository. Anthropic-maintained skills, including document creation (Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel), internal comms and the skill-creator.
• Skills.sh. The largest community directory, built by Vercel. It tracks popularity, which makes discovery easier.
• Awesome Claude Skills. A curated list of community skills on GitHub.

You can also search from the command line:

npx skills find [query]

Prefer official sources first. Treat community skills like open-source code, and audit them before use.

How to write your own marketing skill

Installed skills get you started. The skills worth most are the ones only your team could write: your voice, your reporting format, your launch checklist.

“Instead of building fragmented, custom-designed agents for each use case, anyone can now specialize their agents with composable capabilities by capturing and sharing their procedural knowledge.”

Barry Zhang, Keith Lazuka and Mahesh Murag, Anthropic

McGillis offers a simple test for when to write one: you type the same long prompt more than twice a week, or you care about getting the same format every time. Her first skill took about 20 minutes to set up.

Every skill needs a SKILL.md file with a name and description at the top:

---
name: your-skill-name
description: Brief description of what this skill does and when to use it
---

# Your Skill Name

## Instructions
[Clear, step-by-step guidance for the agent to follow]

## Examples
[Concrete examples of using this skill]

You do not need to write it by hand. Anthropic’s skill-creator skill builds one with you in conversation: it captures what you want the skill to do, defines when it should trigger, drafts the SKILL.md, runs test cases and iterates with you until it works.

npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill skill-creator

Once you have a first draft, our guide on how to write skills that actually work covers descriptions that trigger reliably, gotchas sections, and refining a skill against real tasks.

Skill structure

A typical skill folder looks like this:

my-skill/
├── SKILL.md          # Main instructions (required)
├── REFERENCE.md      # Additional documentation
└── scripts/
    └── validate.py   # Utility scripts

Skills load in three stages:

1. Metadata (always loaded). The name and description, so the agent knows when to use the skill.
2. Instructions (when triggered). The full SKILL.md.
3. Resources (as needed). Extra files and scripts, only when the instructions reference them.

Share skills with your team

A skill that lives on one laptop helps one person. Keep team skills somewhere every person and agent reads the same copy, and update that copy when the process changes. We do this ourselves: one team skill holds the Growth Method writing rules, and every article on this site, this one included, is edited against it, whichever AI client the work happens in.

Security considerations

A skill gives an agent new instructions and sometimes new code. A malicious one could direct the agent to call tools or run scripts in harmful ways. Anthropic recommends using skills only from trusted sources: those you wrote yourself or got from official repositories.

If you use community skills:

• Read every file before installing
• Be cautious of skills that fetch external data
• Treat installation like installing any third-party software

The human marketing skills that still matter

The older meaning of the phrase has not gone away. As agents take on more of the execution, the human skills that gain value are the ones that make AI output better: writing a precise brief, judging a draft quickly, designing a repeatable workflow, and reading your own data well enough to know when the AI is wrong. Writing a good marketing skill draws on all four, which is why generalists tend to be good at it. We cover that shift in marketing generalists and the T-shaped marketer.

The bottom line

Marketing skills turn how your team works into something an AI agent can follow. Start by installing one or two for jobs you already repeat, such as an SEO audit or a copy review. Then write your own for the work only your team knows how to do. That second set is where the advantage sits, because nobody else can install it.

About Growth Method

Marketing skills work best when the agents following them can see your campaigns and your data.

Growth Method is the agentic marketing platform for B2B teams. Agents plan, launch, and analyse campaigns from your live marketing data, and your team’s skills live in one place, so every agent, chat and connected AI client such as Claude or ChatGPT follows the same copy.

We are on-track to deliver a 43% increase in inbound leads this year. There is no doubt the adoption of Growth Method is the primary driver behind these results.

Laura Perrott, Colt Technology Services

Get started and give your marketing skills real campaigns to work on.

Frequently asked questions

What are marketing skills?

Marketing skills are reusable sets of instructions that teach an AI agent how to do a specific marketing job, such as an SEO audit, a landing page rewrite or a weekly report. Each one is a folder containing a SKILL.md file, plus optional scripts and reference documents, that the agent loads only when a task calls for it.

Are marketing skills the same as agent skills or Claude skills?

Yes. Agent Skills is the name of the open standard Anthropic published, and Claude skills is what people call them inside Claude. A marketing skill is simply an agent skill written for marketing work.

Do marketing skills only work with Claude?

No. Anthropic published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025, so the same skill folder works across tools that support it, including Claude Code, Cursor and GitHub Copilot.

What is the difference between a marketing skill and a prompt?

A prompt is typed fresh each time and gives slightly different results each time. A marketing skill is saved once, loads automatically when the task matches its description, and produces the same format on every run. If you type the same long prompt more than twice a week, it should be a skill.

Are community marketing skills safe to install?

Treat them like any third-party software. A skill can tell an agent to run code or call tools, so read every file before you install it, prefer official or well-known sources, and be careful with skills that fetch external data.

Do I need to code to write a marketing skill?

No. A skill is a Markdown file of plain-English instructions with a name and a description at the top. Scripts are optional. Anthropic’s skill-creator skill will draft one with you in conversation.

Further reading

• How to write skills that actually work: our guide to skills that agents follow
• MCPs, CLIs and skills: which AI interface fits which job
• Introducing Agent Skills: Anthropic’s announcement
• Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills: Anthropic’s engineering deep-dive
• Agent Skills documentation: official docs
• Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP: Simon Willison’s independent take
• From prompt to skill: Cynthia McGillis on building her first skill