How to build marketing agents with Claude and Merge

Most of what fills a marketer's day isn't marketing.

It's the retrieval around it. Finding the post worth replying to. Checking whether anyone here has spoken to this person before. Pulling last week's sends into a shape you can argue with. Those answers sit in eight different tools, so getting them means eight tabs and a doc you assemble by hand, every week, in the same order.

Claude can do that retrieval, as long as it can reach the tools your work lives in. This covers what Merge Agent Handler reaches, how to connect it, and how to scope an agent so its output is worth reading.

How it works

Merge Agent Handler sits between Claude and the APIs behind your marketing tools.

You install the Merge CLI, authenticate once, and register the connection with a single command:

pipx install merge-apimerge loginmerge setup claude-code

The first time an agent calls a tool, a Magic Link appears to authenticate that connector. Merge manages the credentials and handles each vendor's rate limits on your behalf, so you don't register an OAuth app per tool, store client secrets locally, or write token refresh logic.

Related: The connectors your agents can actually reach

Prerequisites

Before getting started, you'll need the following:

• A Merge Agent Handler account
• Claude Code installed (run claude --version to confirm)
• pipx installed (run pipx --version to confirm, or install via pip install pipx)
• One context document your agents can read, covering your audience, your topics, your tone, two examples of your own writing, and the things you never say

If you want to connect Merge Agent Handler with internal or customer-facing agentic products, you can follow the steps in our docs.

What a marketing team can reach

Agent Handler covers hundreds of connectors, and gives Claude authenticated access to the systems a GTM team already runs. The relevant ones group like this:

• CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Attio, Dynamics 365 Sales, Zoho CRM
• Enrichment and research: Apollo, Clay, ZoomInfo, Crustdata, LinkedIn, Exa, Firecrawl
• Email and campaigns: HubSpot, Klaviyo, SendGrid, ActiveCampaign, Bitly for link tracking
• CMS: Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, Wix, ReadMe for developer docs
• Calls and customer voice: Gong, Fireflies, Granola, Plaud, Intercom, Pylon, Zendesk
• Analytics: PostHog, Amplitude, Pendo, Statsig, Looker, Metabase, Hex, Peec AI, Ahrefs
• Comms and docs: Slack, Gmail, Outlook, Notion, Confluence, Guru, Google Docs and Sheets
• Social and amplification: LinkedIn, X, TikTok, YouTube, plus Ordinal for coordinating what your team posts and Sprout Social for scheduling
• Events and creative: Luma and Goldcast for registrations, Canva, Gamma, and Figma for the assets, Straker when something needs translating
• Project tracking: Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, Calendly

Pick any two of those groups and there's a workflow between them you currently do by hand.

Related: Agent connectors: what you need to know

How to scope an agent

Once Claude can reach your tools, what's left is a scoping decision rather than a technical one.

Give each agent one job you can describe in a paragraph. An agent that finds posts worth replying to is useful, while an agent that "handles marketing" produces work you end up redoing, because a broad job can only ever get broad instructions.

Give it only the connectors that job needs, and decide in advance what it can do without asking you. A research agent with send access will eventually send something. Reading, sorting, drafting, and staging are usually safe to automate, and anything you can't undo belongs on your side of that line.

Then point every agent at the same context document, which is what keeps five agents sounding like one team.

Five agents a marketing team can build

Each of these is one job, scoped to a few connectors.

A scout agent reads Exa, LinkedIn, and X, then returns ten things worth your attention today, ranked, with a line on why each matters. Tell it to favor working demos over announcements.

A producer agent turns that list into a content plan in Notion: format, hook, outline, and the example that makes the idea land. It plans, and you write.

A researcher agent profiles a person before you contact them using Apollo, Clay, and LinkedIn, printing the source next to every field.

An outreach agent drafts the message through Gmail and books the call through your calendar, staying under 100 words.

A lead agent reads the other four and posts one Slack brief each morning: the best finds, the strongest idea, who's ready for outreach, and what needs your decision.

Other jobs that run on the same setup

Once the connection exists, the next agent costs an afternoon. To find candidates, name a question you answer by hand each week and the two systems the answer lives in.

• Weekly campaign readout. HubSpot or Klaviyo, PostHog, Slack. Sends measured against your trailing median.
• Customer voice themes. Gong, Pylon, Notion. What prospects said, grouped, with quotes.
• AI answer visibility. Peec, Slack. Whether assistants recommend you, and which pages they cite.
• Competitor watch. Exa, Firecrawl, Slack. What changed on their site and in their content.
• Pipeline movement. Salesforce, Gong, Slack. Which deals moved, and what was said on the last call.

None of these need code. They need a clear job, two or three connectors, and a decision about what the agent may do without asking.

Where to start

Build one agent, run it for a week, then build the next.

Cut any agent whose output you check more carefully than you'd have done the work yourself. That test fails more often than the demos suggest.

Related: A RevOps guide to AI transformation The scout usually passes it, and a "write the post for me" agent usually doesn't, which is why there isn't one in the list above.

Marketing agents FAQ

What can you do once Merge Agent Handler is connected to Claude Code?

Claude can read and act across the tools you already run: search and enrich people and companies, read and write your CRM, draft and stage content in your CMS, build campaigns, pull analytics, and post to Slack. Authentication happens once per connector through a Magic Link, so adding the fifth tool costs about as much effort as the first.

Which marketing jobs should you not give an agent?

Anything you cannot take back, and anything where the output is the creative work itself.

Sending, publishing, and writing to the CRM belong behind a human, because the failure mode is public and permanent. The second category is subtler: an agent that drafts your posts produces work you rewrite, and rewriting a mediocre draft is slower than writing from an outline. Give it the research, the sorting, and the first structure. Keep the sentences.

Can I use Merge Agent Handler with my employees?

Yes. Merge for Workforce helps companies provision, secure, and govern how employees connect AI to the tools they work in.

It routes each request to a model that fits the task, which Merge measured at up to half the token bill. IT provisions access through SCIM with Okta or Microsoft Entra ID, DLP scanning runs on every tool call, and each call is logged against an employee identity, so you can see what an agent read, what it sent, and when.