Here’s the thing: you’re using Claude Code like it’s ChatGPT with a code editor attached.
It’s not.
And that misunderstanding is costing you hours every week — hours you could spend building your business instead of wrestling with AI tools that should be making your life easier.
I’ve coached more than 300 founders, CEOs, and marketers on how to use Claude Code to actually grow their businesses. And the pattern I see over and over is this: people grab the tool, start using it like every other AI assistant they’ve tried, and then wonder why it’s not living up to the hype.
The truth? Claude Code is the most powerful agentic AI tool on the market today. But only if you use it right.
I learned these 12 lessons the hard way — through trial, error, and way too many late nights trying to figure out why my prompts weren’t working. If you adopt even a few of these, you’ll be lightyears ahead of your competition.
Let me show you what actually works.
The biggest unlock in Claude Code isn’t the AI model. It’s not the coding ability. It’s the context system.
Most people throw together a single “about my business” document and call it good. That’s like giving a new employee a one-page company overview and expecting them to write your marketing copy.
It doesn’t work.
When I open up the SEO Machine project (a free, open-source tool I built at seomachine.io), you’ll see we have an entire folder dedicated to context. Not one file. A dozen.
Here’s what’s in there:
Brand voice — How we talk, what we sound like, what we don’t say
Competitor analysis — Who we’re up against and why we’re different
CRO best practices — Our rules for conversion optimization
Feature set — Everything our product does, explained clearly
SEO guidelines — How we approach search, what we optimize for
Style guide — Writing rules, tone principles, formatting standards
Target keywords — The terms that matter to our business
Writing examples — Actual content we’ve published with notes on why we like it
This is where you should spend 75% of your setup time.
Because here’s what most people miss: Claude Code is only as good as the context you give it. I’ve built the rest of the scaffolding for you in SEO Machine. The prompts, the workflows, the automation — it’s all there, ready to use.
But only you can fill in who you are, what your brand stands for, and how you’re different in your market.
Don’t skip this step. It’s the difference between generic AI output and content that actually sounds like you.
Once you have context nailed down, you need a way to use it without typing a 500-word prompt every time you want to do something.
That’s where slash commands and skills come in.
Think of them like SOPs for your marketing. If you were hiring a marketer, you’d want to give them a playbook: “Here’s how we audit landing pages. Here’s how we write social content. Here’s how we approach email sequences.”
Slash commands are that playbook, codified.
Inside the Claude folder of your project, you’ll see a /skills and /commands directory. (These concepts are merging in Claude Code, so you’ll see me use them interchangeably.)
Here’s an example: We have a /landing-audit command that walks through our entire conversion rate optimization checklist. Instead of typing out “Analyze this landing page for CRO issues, check the headline, evaluate the CTA placement...” I just run:
/landing-audit castos.com
And it does the whole thing.
Same with email sequences, competitor research, content creation. You define the process once, and then you just point the tool at the thing you want it to work on.
Even better: I’ve included a full set of marketing skills from Corey Haines (an expert-level marketer) in the SEO Machine project. Things like:
Copy editing
Copywriting frameworks
Email sequence design
Free tool strategy (how to build lead magnets that actually convert)
You can call these with /free-tool-strategy and give it a description of what you’re building, and it walks you through the whole process — ideation, build plan, lead capture, monetization.
This is how you turn Claude Code from “better ChatGPT” into “junior marketer who knows my business.”
Now here’s where people get it backwards.
They think: “I’ve set up all this context and these commands, so now I can just send lazy prompts and it’ll handle everything.”
Wrong.
Context and commands give Claude Code the framework. But your prompt is still the input — and garbage in, garbage out.
Let me show you the difference.
Bad prompt:
“Create an email sequence for a webinar.”
Good prompt:
“We’re creating an email campaign for a webinar series. Please help me create a webinar email nurture sequence after someone opts in. This will get them ready and excited about it and make sure they show up, because there’s going to be a lot of value there. I imagine this email sequence being between 3 and 5 emails. They will have already signed up in an email that we sent to them, so this is a post-sign-up nurture sequence. The topic of the webinar is on how you can win on YouTube with our new tool called Outlier.”
See the difference?
The second one gives scenario, user journey, desired outcome, context, and constraints. It’s not prompt engineering or putting things in JSON. It’s just being clear about what you want.
I use Super Whisper on my Mac to dictate prompts like this. It’s faster than typing, and it forces me to think through the full request before I hit enter.
The amount of additional context you provide by just talking clearly about what you need will 10x your results.
Claude Code is smart. But it’s not psychic.
If you want it to make informed decisions about your business, you need to feed it your actual data.
In SEO Machine, we’re pulling in data from three sources:
Google Analytics — Traffic patterns, page performance, user behavior
Google Search Console — Rankings, clicks, impressions, keyword data
DataForSEO API — Competitive analysis, search volumes, backlink profiles (think of this like a surrogate for Ahrefs)
We have scripts that pull this data in, and then we run analysis on top of it. Things like:
“Which pages are declining in traffic this month vs. last?”
“What keywords am I ranking for that I didn’t know about?”
“What’s my competitor doing that’s working?”
You could extend this to AdWords data, product analytics (Amplitude, Mixpanel), onboarding metrics — whatever matters to your business.
The key is: Claude Code makes better recommendations when it has real numbers to work with, not just hypotheticals.
When you’re working on something complex, don’t just throw a prompt at Claude Code and hope it figures it out.
Use Plan Mode.
Here’s how it works: Instead of hitting Enter on your prompt, hold Shift and hit Tab twice. You’ll see a green indicator at the bottom — you’re now in Plan Mode.
Now when you submit your prompt, Claude Code will:
Think about what you’re asking
Research and gather context from your project
Maybe search the web for additional info
Come back and ask clarifying questions
It’s like having a conversation with a smart assistant who wants to make sure they understand the job before diving in.
Example: When I gave it that webinar email sequence prompt in Plan Mode, it came back with:
“How many days before the webinar will people typically sign up?”
“What does Outlier do specifically?”
“Will there be a replay available?”
“What’s the main hook or promise of attending?”
I answered those questions, and then it went away and built the full email sequence — with all the copy, CTAs, headlines, everything.
Plan Mode is the difference between getting generic output and getting work that’s actually tailored to your specific situation.
Here’s where it gets really interesting: you can schedule Claude Code to run automatically.
Let’s say you want a weekly opportunities report every Monday morning before your 10am marketing meeting. You don’t want to remember to run it. You just want it waiting for you when you sit down.
You can do that with cron (a fancy computer term for “scheduled tasks”).
Set up a cron job that runs your opportunities report script every Monday at 9am. It pulls your latest data, analyzes trends, surfaces what’s working and what’s not, and drops a report in your project folder.
You walk into the office, and it’s already done.
No thinking. No remembering. No last-minute scrambling to pull numbers together.
This works for:
Weekly traffic reports
Monthly content performance audits
Competitor monitoring
Lead qualification summaries
Whatever recurring task is eating your time
The beautiful thing? You set it up once, and then you forget about it. The computer handles the rest.
Your business doesn’t live in a vacuum. Neither should your AI workflows.
Claude Code is powerful, but you can make it exponentially more powerful by connecting it to external research tools.
Things like:
Perplexity for news monitoring and trend research
Apify for web scraping and data collection
Reddit/Twitter scrapers for audience research and opportunity spotting
Let’s say you want to stay on top of what’s happening in your industry. You could manually check news sites, Reddit threads, Twitter — or you could set up an automated workflow that:
Monitors specific subreddits, hashtags, and news sources
Pulls relevant discussions and articles
Summarizes what’s trending and why it matters
Surfaces opportunities for content or product features
Delivers a weekly digest to your inbox
You’re not manually sifting through noise. The AI does the work, and you just review the highlights.
This is the kind of unfair advantage that separates CEOs who are drowning in information from CEOs who have the right information at the right time.
Okay, slight detour from Claude Code — but this is too good not to share.
If you’re in sales or outreach, use Manus.im for deep research on leads.
It’s ridiculously good at finding prospects based on specific criteria. You can tell it: “Find me 15 insurance agents in the Midwest who sell corporate life insurance to companies with 50-200 employees.”
It’ll build you a spreadsheet with names, emails, LinkedIn profiles — everything you need to start outreach.
Manus has a generous free plan, and while I’m 100% sure you could do this in Claude Code, I haven’t needed to because Manus just works out of the box.
If sales is a big part of your business, check it out. If not, skip it and focus on the marketing side.
If you’re using Claude Code for real work — especially with a team — you need version control.
Use Git and GitHub.
Here’s why:
Collaboration — Multiple people can work on the same project without stepping on each other’s toes
History — You can roll back to previous versions if something breaks
Sharing — You can distribute templates, skills, and workflows to your team
Backup — Your work isn’t just sitting on your laptop
Think of it like Google Docs for code projects. You make changes, you push them to GitHub, your teammates pull them down, everyone’s working on the latest version.
At Castos, when I add a new module or skill to our internal marketing machine, I push it to GitHub and drop a message in Slack: “New tool available — pull the latest version and check out the /competitor-analysis command.”
No emailing files around. No version confusion. Just clean collaboration.
If you don’t know what Git is, spend 20 minutes on YouTube learning the basics. It’s worth it.
Okay, this is where you go from “using Claude Code” to “automating your entire marketing operation.”
Scripts let you chain commands together.
Example workflow:
Every time I publish a YouTube video...
Pull the transcript automatically
Send it to Claude Code with three prompts:
Create a LinkedIn post about it
Create a Substack article about it
Create a Twitter thread about it
Take the results and either:
Post them automatically (if you’re brave)
Drop them in Slack for review (safer)
Push them to a content calendar in Notion
Before scripts, that was 6 separate manual tasks. Now? It just happens.
You decide one time what the workflow should be, you tell Claude Code how to execute it, and then you never think about it again.
And here’s the kicker: you don’t have to be a developer to do this. You just describe what you want in plain language, and Claude Code builds the script for you.
It’s legitimately amazing.
Six months ago, I didn’t know any of this.
Now I’m being asked to speak internationally about using Claude Code for marketing.
That’s not because I’m smarter than you. It’s because I decided to invest time in learning this stuff, and I curated how I consume information.
Here’s my advice:
Pick 2-3 sources of truth.
Not 50 YouTube channels. Not every AI newsletter that exists. Just a few people who are deep in this world and whose perspectives you trust.
For me, it’s:
A handful of people on Twitter (I have a private list)
A few YouTube channels (including mine, hopefully)
I watch YouTube at the gym. I scroll Twitter in the morning. I actively seek out: “What’s changing? What’s new? How can I apply this?”
And I’m selective. Because there’s a lot of noise out there — hype without substance, theory without application, people selling courses on things they haven’t actually built.
Find the people who are building real things and sharing what they learn. Follow them. Ignore the rest.
If me and this channel are one of those sources for you — awesome. Like and subscribe so you don’t miss anything. If not, that’s fine too. Just make sure you’re learning from someone, because this space moves fast.
Claude Code is a tool. A powerful one, but still a tool.
It’s only as good as the context you give it, the workflows you build around it, and the clarity of what you’re asking it to do.
If you implement even half of what’s in this post, you’ll be using Claude Code better than 95% of people who have access to it.
And if you’re thinking: “This is great, but I need help actually implementing this” — I work with a select few companies on exactly this. Getting their teams up to speed, building custom workflows, and leveling up how they use AI in their businesses.
If that sounds like you, check out craighewitt.com/work-with-me for details.
Otherwise, take this framework, run with it, and let me know how it goes.
Resources Mentioned:
SEO Machine (free, open-source): https://seomachine.io
Corey Haines Marketing Skills: https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills
Manus (lead research): https://manus.im/invitation/RSNB30RXCKAA
Work with me: https://craighewitt.com/work-with-me
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