Claude skills for content creation. What to install, and what to write.

The most useful Claude skills for content creation fall into three groups: skills that produce finished files, skills that structure the work, and a skill you write yourself to hold your brand voice. Installing the first two takes minutes. The third is what stops the output from sounding like everyone else's.

If skills are new to you, start with what Claude Skills are. This guide assumes you know the basics and want to know what to use.

01What exists right now

Built into Claude. Anthropic's Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and Excel skills work on Claude with no setup. They turn a draft into a real document, deck, or spreadsheet, so you rarely need to install anything for output formats.

Anthropic's marketing plugin. Part of the open-source knowledge-work-plugins repository, built for Claude Cowork and also usable in Claude Code. It includes content-creation, draft-content, brand-review, campaign-plan, competitive-brief, email-sequence, performance-report, and seo-audit. This is the strongest free starting point. In Cowork, install it from claude.com/plugins. In Claude Code:

claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins
claude plugin install marketing@knowledge-work-plugins

Anthropic's example skills. The anthropics/skills repository holds several that creative teams will want: canvas-design for visual pieces, theme-factory for styling, doc-coauthoring for long documents, internal-comms for company updates, and skill-creator for building your own. One caution: brand-guidelines applies Anthropic's own brand, so treat it as a template to adapt. Anthropic also labels these repository skills as demonstrations, so test them before relying on them.

Independent and studio skills. These go narrower, usually one platform or one deliverable. Community catalogs are uneven, so read every file before you install. We sell a set ourselves, listed below, and you should hold our recommendation to the same standard.

02Pick by job, not by catalog

A long list of installed skills does not make better content. Each one adds to what Claude has to choose from, so install only what you will use this month.

03Build your voice skill

This is the part no catalog can sell you. A voice skill works best as a short set of instructions pointing to reference files, because Claude opens those files only when it is writing. Set up the folder like this:

writing-in-our-voice/
  SKILL.md
  references/
    voice.md        # tone, words we use, words we ban
    examples.md     # 5 to 10 pieces we are proud of
    checklist.md    # what every draft must pass

Then the instructions. Copy this and replace nothing yet, since the specifics belong in the reference files:

---
name: writing-in-our-voice
description: Drafts and edits marketing content in the brand voice. Use for posts, newsletters, landing page copy, or captions, or when asked to match the brand voice.
---

# Writing in our voice

## Before drafting
1. Read references/voice.md.
2. Read references/examples.md and pick the two closest to this format.
3. If the audience or goal is missing, ask one question.

## While drafting
- Open with the specific point, not a general statement.
- Use the vocabulary in voice.md. Avoid its banned list.
- Never invent numbers, quotes, or client names.

## Before returning
1. Review the draft against references/checklist.md.
2. Fix every failure, then review again.
3. Return the draft and a one-line note on what you changed.

Three parts of this do most of the work:

• Real examples beat adjectives. "Warm but direct" means little to anyone. Five pieces you are proud of show it.
• The review loop catches drift. Anthropic's authoring guide recommends this pattern: draft, check against a reference file, fix, repeat.
• The ban on invented facts protects you. Put it in writing, because a plausible made-up statistic is the most expensive kind of error in published content.

Zip the folder and upload it under Customize → Skills, or copy it into ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code. The install steps are here.

04Test it before you trust it

Anthropic's advice is to measure against Claude with no skill at all, and to use at least three realistic scenarios. For content, that takes about twenty minutes:

• Pick three real briefs from your last month, in different formats.
• Run each twice, with the skill on and with it off.
• Read the pairs side by side. If you cannot tell them apart, your reference files are too vague.
• Fix the skill, not the draft. When you correct something by hand, add that correction to voice.md so it stays fixed.

If the skill does not fire when it should, the description needs the words you actually type, such as "caption" or "newsletter".

05What skills will not do