Claude is all the rage right now across the financial advisory industry, and for good reason. In this episode of Craft on Tap, Stephen Beach and Faustin Weber go beyond the basics and share three specific, practical ways advisory firms can use Claude to sharpen their marketing, save time, and create better content.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss using Claude.
Craft on Tap Ep 32 Podcast Takeaways & Summary
Key Takeaways:
- Claude Projects Is the Upgrade Most Advisors Haven't Made Yet: Load your firm's website, brand voice, and past transcripts into a Project once, and Claude already knows the context every time you sit down to work.
- Skills Let You Encode Your Standards Once and Apply Them Everywhere: Stop giving Claude the same instructions repeatedly. Build a Skill, and your guidelines apply automatically across every chat and project.
- Claude Code Unlocks a Different League of Marketing Automation: It connects directly to the APIs behind tools like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Canva. Powerful capabilities, but plan for real setup time before you get there.
- Content Distribution Is Half the Battle: Creating good video or podcast content is 50% of the work. The other 50% is making sure it gets seen. That's where a lot of firms are leaving results on the table.
- AI Produces Drafts. Humans Produce Finished Work: AI output still needs a human pass before it goes to a client or gets published. The goal is a better first draft, faster.
Podcast Summary: 3 Claude Marketing Best Practices
The Messy Reality of Financial Advisory Firm Contact Lists
A Quick Breakdown of the Claude Ecosystem
Before getting into the three tactics, Faustin walks through the different Claude tools and what each one is, because the terminology can get confusing quickly.
Claude Chat is the starting point. It's the back-and-forth conversation interface most people are familiar with, similar to how you'd use ChatGPT. The Pro account at $20 a month is worth it from day one.
Claude Projects is the 2024 upgrade that changes the game. Projects let you create a persistent context layer, a reference point that Claude already knows before you type a single word. Your website pages, messaging guides, brand voice documentation, and past episode transcripts all live there, ready to go.
Claude Cowork is the desktop app that takes Projects further. Instead of going back and forth in chat, Cowork lets you queue up multi-step processes in one session. It can create and write files directly on your computer or shared Google Drive, which means less downloading and reformatting and more actually getting things done.
Claude Code is the most advanced tier, a command-line tool that connects Claude to the backend APIs of external platforms. More on that in Way #3.
Claude Skill #1: Build Your Context Layer Once, Use It Forever
If you're still starting every Claude session from scratch, you're leaving a lot of efficiency on the table. Projects solve that.
Before you ask Claude to write anything, give it everything it needs to know about your firm. Copy and paste your website pages. Upload your messaging guides. Drop in past podcast transcripts. Include any brand voice documentation, tone preferences, or audience descriptions you've developed. Claude doesn't have to learn any of this in conversation (it already knows).
Craft Impact uses this across their own team and with every client they onboard. When Stephen has preliminary conversations with a new client prospect, including multiple calls, email threads, and informal notes, he uploads all of it into one Project. By the time it goes to the client service team, the full context is already there, with zero drop-off in what was learned along the way.
For advisors who have been podcasting for a while, this is particularly powerful. Upload all your episode transcripts, and Claude already knows how you talk, what topics you've covered, and what your key messaging points are. It can even help you identify which angles you've addressed before and where there's room to go deeper.
Cowork extends what Projects can do. Instead of producing a single deliverable, you can give Cowork a full content brief and have it work through a multi-step campaign. For example, your campaign can include an episode outline, a blog article, social posts, and a new website page all in one session, written into files on your desktop.
Getting started: Create a Project in Claude, paste in your website pages and any existing brand or messaging documentation, and start your next content session from there instead of from zero.
Claude Skill #2: Encode Your Standards So You Stop Repeating Yourself
Skills are one of the most underused features in Claude, and once you understand them, you'll wonder how you worked without them.
The problem they solve: if you're consistently giving Claude the same instructions, you're wasting time and getting inconsistent results. A Skill packages all of that into a reusable set of instructions that applies across all your chats and projects automatically.
Faustin's most-used Skill is what he calls an anti-AI writing skill. The irony is intentional. When you use AI to draft content, it falls into predictable patterns: overused phrases, certain cadences, and structural tics that signal to readers immediately that a machine wrote it. His Skill explicitly labels every word, phrase, and pattern to avoid, so the output starts much closer to something a human would write.
Example: one team member flags that Claude repeatedly starts sentences with "worth noting," "worth knowing," or "worth considering." A quick addition to the Skill, and the whole team benefits from it across every project going forward.
Other Skills you could build for marketing purposes include a branding and visual guidelines Skill that applies to any PowerPoint or slide deck Claude creates, a podcast outline format Skill that matches your preferred structure, or a newsletter template Skill that keeps tone and layout consistent from issue to issue.
Skills can also be shared with team members, which means your whole operation benefits from the standards you set, not just your own Claude sessions.
Getting started: Go to Settings > Customize in Claude to create a Skill. Start with your most common content type and write out every guideline you'd normally include in a prompt. Save it once, and it works everywhere.
Claude Skill #3: Advanced Marketing Automation With Claude Code
Claude Code is not for everyone, and Faustin is upfront about that. For advisors who are already comfortable with Projects and Skills and want to go to the next level, it opens up capabilities that weren't accessible before.
The short version is that Claude Code connects to the backends of external platforms through APIs. That means Claude isn't searching the web for information. Instead, it plugs directly into YouTube, LinkedIn, Canva, and other tools to pull real data.
A financial firm marketing use case is YouTube research. In the past, if you wanted to understand what YouTube content was performing well in your space, you'd manually search, copy-paste transcripts, and piece it together. With Claude Code and a YouTube API connection, you can build a reusable process that fetches transcripts automatically, synthesizes them, and gives you a research-backed starting point for your next video script. It can even analyze title formats across top-performing videos and tell you what's working.
The same logic applies after you create content. Once you have a transcript or a script, you can plug it into Claude Code and ask it to recommend a title based on how similar content has performed. The distribution half of the content equation, which Stephen points out is equally as important as the creation half, becomes something you can optimize rather than guess at.
The caveat is that Claude Code requires working in the terminal and takes time to set up. Faustin estimates five to ten hours to get up and running, and says to be generous with that estimate if you're not already comfortable with command-line tools. Shout out to Andy Baxley of Two Trails Financial Planning, whose work educating advisors on Claude Code was a direct inspiration for this episode. His BuilderFP cohort workshops would be good to check out if you want guided help.
If there's enough interest, Stephen and Faustin are open to hosting a free one-hour workshop on getting Claude Code set up from a marketing perspective. Email them directly at stephen@craftimpact.com and faustin@craftimpact.com.
Getting started: If you're not there yet, focus on Projects and Skills first. When you're ready, look into Andy Baxley's BuilderFP cohort and start with a single API integration. YouTube is a great first choice if video content is part of your marketing strategy.
A Note on Video and AI-Generated Content
One thread that runs through the whole episode is that video continues to be one of the most powerful ways for advisory firms to differentiate, and AI is not yet able to replace the production and personality that makes video work.
Claude Code can help you research, outline, title, and optimize. It can get you very close to scripts and show notes. The finished product, the actual filming, the on-camera presence, the voice and personality that makes someone want to keep watching, still has to come from a human.
The same applies to written content. Even with a well-built anti-AI writing Skill, the output still needs a human review pass before it goes to a client or gets published anywhere. Think of it as a much better first draft, not a finished piece.
Three Action Items to Take Away
If you've been nodding along, this is where to start:
1. Download the anti-AI writing Skill. Craft Impact is making it available as a free download with NO form to fill out. In fact, get your anti-AI writing skill right here.
2. Let them know if you're interested in a workshop. If Claude Code is on your radar and you want guided help getting set up from a marketing perspective, reach out. If there's enough interest, they'll host a free one-hour session.
3. If you want someone to do this for you, reach out. Craft Impact is an outsourced CMO and digital marketing team with a small roster of RIA clients they're deeply integrated with. If all of this sounds like the right direction, but you'd rather have a team execute it for your firm, start a conversation at craftimpact.com.
Shameless Plug for Craft on Tap
The firms that figure out how to use these tools well are going to have a real edge over the next few years. This episode is a starting point, not a finish line. For ongoing insights and practical marketing strategies for RIA growth, listen to Craft on Tap. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts.
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