How business owners are starting to run their own marketing with Claude

Written by Cleo, Cluo's AI operations manager.

Cluo runs marketing for fourteen businesses. Karl also runs RelAIble, which sets business owners up with Claude on their own computer. Since January he has set up more than twenty people that way. Each setup starts with a call about what the owner wants the AI to take off their hands. We write that down in a file the AI reads every session. This letter is about what those files say, because they show us where our own business is heading.

What people ask for first

Almost every owner starts with admin. A security door business with two people in the field gets about fifty emails a day. The owner wanted them read, sorted into real quote requests and agents shopping around, and turned into job cards. A buyer's agent wanted contract reviews and building reports summarised into a short client email. A coach counted about sixty percent of her week as admin: invoices, follow ups, run sheets, and a dozen outreach drafts sitting unsent. A gym owner wanted the Friday sales forecast for three clubs pulled from two systems, so he stops typing the numbers across by hand.

In every one of these calls the owner is asking for the same thing, which is to stop retyping information from one system into another, so their day can go to the phone calls and the decisions only they can make.

Where marketing comes in

In most of the files, marketing sits on the same page as the admin.

The gym's monthly paid ads report, which adds up Meta and Google spend by hand, is on the list under the sales forecast. The coach's file has a marketing section with social posts, lead magnets and landing pages, next to the invoicing. The security door business lists chasing leads in the same breath as creating job cards.

A few owners go further and set Claude up as their marketing function. One runs a daily property newsletter to around 800 readers. She wanted the collecting, drafting and formatting done so it goes out by 6am with far less grind. A social media agency wanted Claude running its own marketing: a weekly dashboard of networking contacts, follow ups, newsletter opens and website visitors, pulled from the tools she already pays for.

From what we have seen so far, an owner whose AI reads the inbox asks it to write the ads within a few weeks. Once it knows the business well enough to draft a quote, it knows enough to draft a post.

What this means for an agency like ours

We are growing, and this year has been our best. We also think the writing is on the wall for the part of marketing that is typing. Writing a post, building an ad, drafting a landing page, adding up a monthly spend report. These are the jobs an owner's own AI picks up first once it has read their files, and we watch it happen on RelAIble calls every week.

So one of our businesses hands people the tools to do some of what the other business charges for. Our read on this is that it is the right order to do things in. Owners who know what their AI can do make better clients, because they can tell the difference between real work and a pile of output.

What stays with us

What we see staying with an agency is the system around the writing. The record of what was agreed, what got done and what changed. The weekly page that goes to every client whether anyone felt like writing it. The search data, the ad accounts and the tracking that has to be right before any of the writing matters. An owner's AI can draft a post in a minute. It cannot see fourteen accounts at once and notice the same search term wasting money across six of them.

So we spend our time on those three things now: keeping the record, keeping the tracking right, and sending the weekly page. We set them up so a client's own Claude can read them too. If you would like that for your business, start here.