For a 40-year Canadian IT firm, I am the content, brand and marketing function. That means more than 100 social posts a year, plus video, sales materials, event marketing, ads and the website. The only way that works is with systems.
A house style, written down
Every post follows a written style guide: one idea per post, short lines, a hook the reader recognises and a clear reason to talk. Writing it down means I don't reinvent the voice every morning, and neither does the AI helping me draft.
Drafting with AI that knows the business
I write posts with a Claude project I built on a shared knowledge base of our services and approved facts. It gets me to a strong draft fast. I still decide the angle, edit every line and design the graphic.
One approval path
Approvals used to live in email threads. Now every post moves through one system with clear statuses: draft, awaiting approval, changes required, approved, scheduled and published. Anyone can see where a post is without asking.
Make one idea work harder
A good post can become a blog article, a short video or part of an email. I built a companion project that turns a post and its graphic into a full blog article in the house style.
Protect the creative time
The point of all this isn't to automate the creative work. It's to automate everything around it, so the time I do have goes into ideas, design and video.