Once your external tools are connected to StoryChief and your skills are set up, the real value kicks in: William AI can pull live data from your external platforms and follow your team's and clients' defined workflows to generate strategies, briefs and content that reflect your actual business context.

This guide shows you how to put plugins and skills into practice: from running your first data-driven strategy to applying a skill inside a brief or content piece.

When a plugin is connected, William can query it directly to inform your content strategy, pulling in keyword data, CRM signals, competitor intel, or any other live data your tool exposes.

Step 1. In the top navigation, click "Strategy", where you will see a chat panel with William AI on the middle side of the screen.

Step 2. Type your request in plain language and reference the data you want William to use. For example:

Step 3. William will call the connected plugin, retrieve the relevant data, and return a response showing what was found and how it informed the suggestion.

Step 4. Review William's output. You'll see which data sources were used. Edit, refine, or discard the suggestion; nothing is saved or applied until you confirm it.

Skills can be triggered manually in the William chat, or William may invoke them automatically when a task matches a skill's description. Here's how to use them deliberately.

Step 1. In the Strategy tab, open the William AI chat panel.

Step 2. Type the skill or $ to open your skills library.

Step 3. Select the skill you want to apply. William will run the skill's instructions against your current context (active campaign, brand data and connected plugin data), and return the output.

Step 4. Review the output carefully. William's suggestions reflect your skill's instructions and your live data, but your team makes the final call. Edit the output directly in the chat or apply it to your strategy.

Not sure where to start? Here are some real-world content marketing workflows you can set up today.

Plugin: Google Analytics | Skill: Monthly content calendar builder

Connect Google Analytics, then create a skill that instructs William to identify your top pages with high traffic but low engagement (high bounce rate, low time on page, or poor conversion) and turn them into a prioritised list of articles to refresh or expand for the next month. Instead of guessing what to fix, you're building a calendar directly from how your audience actually behaves on your site.

Try asking William: "Use @GoogleAnalytics to find our top 10 pages with high bounce rate this month, then $ContentCalendarBuilder to turn them into refresh briefs."

Plugin: HubSpot, Salesforce or any other CRM | Skill: Funnel-stage content adapter

Pull your current lead segments from your CRM and create a skill that adapts any article or campaign to a specific funnel stage (ie. awareness, consideration, or decision). William can rewrite the same core message three ways, each one tailored to where that audience is in their journey.

Try asking William: "Use @HubSpot to pull our active mid-funnel segment, then $FunnelAdapter to rewrite this brief for the consideration stage."

Plugin: Notion, HubSpot, Zoom or a transcription tool | Skill: Sales-to-content brief

Your sales team talks to prospects every day. Those calls are full of objections, questions and specific language that give you exactly what your clients need.

Connect your CRM or notes tool, build a skill that scans recent call summaries, and ask William to extract recurring themes and turn them into content briefs. The result: articles and campaigns built around what real buyers actually say, not what the marketing team assumes they care about.

Try asking William: "Use @HubSpot to pull the last 10 sales call notes for [client], then $SalesToBrief to find the top 3 content angles we should be writing about."

Skill: Multi-channel repurposing

Create a skill that takes any published article and outputs a ready-to-schedule social campaign: a LinkedIn post, an X thread, and an Instagram caption; each adapted for the platform's tone and format, and each pointing back to the original piece. One brief, five pieces of content, zero copy-paste.

Try asking William: "Use $RepurposeTool on this article and generate platform-specific posts for LinkedIn, X and Instagram."

Plugin: Asana, Notion or any project management tool | Skill: Client brief generator

If you work with multiple clients, connect your project management tool and build a skill that pulls the active campaign goals for a specific client and generates a structured editorial brief, with audience, tone, keywords, format and CTA, ready to share or assign. No more starting from a blank page for every new request.

Try asking William: "Use @Asana to pull the active goals for Client X, then $BriefGenerator to create a brief for their next blog post."

Skill: Brand voice enforcer

Create a skill that encodes your brand's tone of voice guidelines: vocabulary to use, phrases to avoid, sentence length, formality level, etc. and apply it to any draft before it goes out. Especially useful for teams with multiple writers or agencies managing content for several brands at once.

Try asking William: "Run $BrandVoice on this draft before I send it for review."

Skill: Visual brand guidelines

Build a skill that encodes your full visual identity: primary and secondary colours with HEX values, typography style, border radius, spacing, layout preferences, and the tone each visual should convey. William will apply those rules every time it generates a banner, social visual, newsletter asset, or campaign image; without you having to describe the style from scratch each time.

This is especially powerful for agencies managing multiple brands: create one skill per client, name them clearly, and switch between them with a single $ mention in the chat.

Try asking William: "Generate 3 LinkedIn banner options for our upcoming product launch using $ClientAVisualBrand."

🎉 You're done, grab a coffee, you deserve it!

Check out the next steps below for more in-depth guides or follow-up actions.