Most marketing teams in West Michigan have the same Monday. Someone pulls numbers from four tools, pastes them into a deck, writes a few lines about what changed, and sends it to a manager who skims it. It takes most of a morning. It is also one of the best first jobs to hand to Claude.

This post walks through that one workflow, step by step. It is the kind of task we use in our training because it is real, it repeats every week, and the team sees the time come back right away.

Why start with the weekly report

A good first workflow happens often and follows a pattern, and a person still checks the result before it goes out. The weekly report fits. Nobody has to trust Claude with a client email on day one. You start with something internal, where a rough draft costs nothing.

Step 1: Write down what the report already is

Before you open Claude, open last week’s report. List the sections in order. Note where each number comes from, such as Google Analytics, your email platform or the ad dashboards. Note the two or three sentences of commentary your manager actually reads.

This takes ten minutes and it is the step most people skip. Claude can only follow a pattern you can describe.

Step 2: Build a Claude Project for it

In Claude, create a Project called “Weekly marketing report.” In the Project instructions, paste:

  • The list of sections from Step 1, in order.
  • Two or three past reports as examples of tone and length.
  • A short note on your audience, for example “Written for the VP of Marketing, who wants changes and reasons, not raw totals.”

Projects keep this context in place, so you do not retype it every Monday. Everyone on the team who runs the report uses the same Project, which keeps the output consistent.

Step 3: Feed it this week’s numbers

Export the numbers the way you already do. CSV files are fine, and so are screenshots of dashboards. Drop them into a new chat inside the Project and ask:

“Here are this week’s numbers. Draft the weekly report in our usual format. Flag anything that moved more than 10 percent from last week, and say what you think might explain it.”

Claude reads the files, fills the sections and calls out the changes. The draft will not be perfect. It does not need to be.

Step 4: Check it like an editor

This is where your team’s judgment matters. Read the draft against the source numbers. Check every figure that a decision depends on. Rewrite any explanation that sounds plausible but that you know is wrong, for example a traffic dip Claude blames on the season when you know the site was down on Tuesday.

Then tell Claude what you fixed: “The Tuesday dip was a site outage. Note that in the instructions for next time.” Small corrections like this make next week’s draft better.

Step 5: Save what works as a skill

After two or three weeks, the pattern is stable. At that point, save the steps as a reusable set of instructions, which Claude calls a skill. Now anyone on the team can run the report the same way, even when the usual owner is out.

If your team is ready to go further, Claude Code can pull the exports and assemble the files on a schedule. That sounds technical, but it does not require a developer. Our Claude Code for Non-Developers workshop covers exactly this kind of step.

What changes after a month

The report is not the point. The point is that your team now has a pattern for any repeated task: describe it, give Claude context, check the output and save what works. The same steps apply to campaign recaps and client status notes.

Teams that get the most out of Claude usually pick one workflow like this, get it running, and then pick the next one. Teams that try to change everything at once tend to drift back to old habits.

Where to learn more locally

If you want to compare notes with other marketers trying the same thing, the Midwest Marketing Meetup in Grand Rapids is a good place to start. People bring what is working and what is not, and the conversations are practical.

If you want your whole team working this way, our AI Training for Marketing Teams program builds workflows like this one around your actual processes, with your team doing the work in Claude during the sessions.