Most content briefs are bad because the team writes them under pressure right before the writer needs the assignment. The brief skips the audience row, the SEO target is vague, the structural rules are absent, and the writer drafts on instinct. Briefs like that produce content like that.
Brief Drafter is the Claude Skill we use internally to fix that. You give it four things and it returns a complete brief, structured to be handed to a writer without further clarification. It checks its own work against the team’s brand voice and refuses to return a brief that fails its own checks.
What it does
- Takes four inputs: the topic, the target audience row (from your content framework), the pillar, and the primary SEO query plus a few supporting queries.
- Runs a pre-check: is the primary query realistic for your domain authority, is the audience consistent with the pillar, is there a recent piece on the same topic that should be refreshed instead.
- Drafts the brief: title and meta, strategy, target audience, research starting points, SEO, structure, voice rules, hand-off. Every section required, no placeholders allowed.
- Self-checks: enforces sentence case, no em-dashes, no banned phrases, primary query present in the right places.
- Stops at the brief: does not draft the piece. The brief is the contract, the writer does the draft.
Who is this Skill for?
- Heads of content who want briefs to stop being a negotiation.
- Production leads who own the brief-to-draft handoff and want it to be predictable.
- Solo content marketers using Claude Code as a second pair of hands.
- Anyone who has ever briefed a piece in five minutes and regretted it for the next three weeks.
What’s in the bundle?
- SKILL.md (raw): the full Claude Code Skill file, ready to drop into
~/.claude/skills/brief-drafter/. - One-pager PDF: a printable summary covering what the Skill does, install steps, and the brief sections it produces.
- Google Doc (gated): a Drive-resident copy of the same Skill plus install notes. Submit your email to access; we also tag you for the Claude Skills for content operations email sequence so you hear when each of the next nine Skills lands.
- LinkedIn carousel image: the same hero card you can repost when you share it.
Install in three steps
- Save the SKILL.md file to
~/.claude/skills/brief-drafter/SKILL.mdon your machine. - Open the B2B Content Brief Template in your own Drive. The Skill references it as its output shape.
- In Claude Code, invoke
/brief-drafterand answer four questions. A filled brief lands in your Drive in about 30 seconds.
Why we built it
Relato runs a daily content-refresh loop on relato.com. The loop is opinionated about briefs because the rest of the pipeline depends on them. We extracted the brief logic into a standalone Skill so any team can install it without taking on the rest of our stack.
This is Skill 1 of 10 in the Claude Skills for content operations series.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Claude Skill?
A Claude Skill is a reusable instruction set Claude Code loads on demand. It lives as a SKILL.md file with frontmatter and a body. You install once. Claude Code finds it next time you invoke it by name.
Do I need a paid Claude plan to use this?
You need Claude Code. The Skill itself is free.
Can I edit the Skill to match my team’s voice?
Yes, and we recommend it. The Skill ships with placeholder voice rules. Open the SKILL.md, edit the “Voice and quality bar” section, and the Skill enforces your edits going forward.
Does it work without the Relato B2B Content Brief Template?
It produces a brief regardless. If you do not use our template, the Skill outputs the brief inline as a markdown block and you paste it wherever you want.
Will more Skills follow?
Yes. The next nine are SEO Refresher, FAQ Generator, Humanizer, Internal Link Auditor, Brief-to-Outline, Editor Checklist, Repurpose Pack, Content Calendar Generator, and Refresh Queue Builder. Submit your email above to be told when each one lands.
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