n8n + Claude/OpenAI content ops for a marketing agency
An end-to-end content production pipeline for a 12-person marketing agency. Briefs in Notion trigger AI-assisted drafts, route through human review, and publish across destinations — all orchestrated in n8n with Claude and OpenAI doing the heavy lifting.
What was breaking.
The agency was producing roughly 80 pieces of content a month across 14 client accounts. The bottleneck wasn't writing per se — it was everything around writing: turning loose briefs into outlines, applying each client's tone of voice, moving drafts through review, formatting for different channels and tracking what shipped where. Writers were spending more time on logistics than writing, and senior editors were rubber-stamping work just to keep the pipeline moving.
How I built it.
- Codified each client's voice as a structured "voice card" — tone, banned phrases, preferred sentence shapes, examples. Stored in Notion, fed into prompts.
- Built the n8n workflow: Notion brief → outline generation (Claude) → first draft (Claude or OpenAI based on content type) → tone-of-voice pass → human-review queue in Slack.
- Reviewer accepts/rejects/edits in Slack threads; n8n watches for the accept reaction and moves to the publish stage.
- Publish stage routes the final piece based on type: blog → CMS API, email → ESP, social → schedulers, internal → Google Drive.
- Built fallback logic: if any AI step times out or returns low-confidence output, the brief routes to a human writer with the partial draft attached.
What makes it tick.
- Voice cards make AI output feel like the agency's writers wrote it, not like generic ChatGPT.
- Cost-aware model routing: short formats use cheaper or faster models, long-form uses Claude with more context.
- Every piece carries provenance metadata — which model, which prompt version, which reviewer approved.
- Slack-native review interface means writers and editors don't have to learn another tool.
What changed.
Output capacity roughly tripled without hiring (~80 → 240 pieces per month). Writer time shifted from logistics back to actual editorial judgment. Quality stayed steady or improved in client review because voice cards held tone. The agency stopped pitching "we'll write 10 pieces a month" and started pitching content velocity as a service.
Tools used.
- n8n
- Anthropic API (Claude)
- OpenAI API
- Notion API
- Slack API
- Google Drive API
- Webhooks
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