Caspian Litvak

The purpose of marketing campaign planning is to identify relevant, integrated, marketing activities and channels to reach campaign objectives as well as influence customers. An effective campaign plan has an engaging, shareable, campaign concept that utilizes both online and offline marketing communications tools and digital media channels.

A campaign plan is a short-term integrated communications plan to generate leads or sales. Its purpose is to engage audiences, it typically has a content marketing focus and an integrated media schedule.

A solid marketing campaign plan has:

Luckily, there are a number of templates out there to guide marketers in planning and structuring their campaigns. Our free digital marketing plan template follows a simpe 5-step structure integrated across our RACE Framework:

You can read more about the RACE Framework and other campaign planning tools below.

Smart Insights Business Members can use our ready-made marketing plan campaign template to build, track, and present their campaign plans.

Your marketing campaign plan should be used in order to maximize the reach of online campaigns and acquire new customers. Retention campaigns are used in larger organizations. Campaigns should be used and designed with specific goals in mind, such as:

The stages of marketing campaigns and key issues that need to be included in your campaign plan are:

A campaign plan template typically includes defining the following:

We recommend applying our RACE Framework to inform your campaign strategy. RACE is a practical strategic framework to help manage and improve results from your digital marketing.

If you're still establishing the scope of digital marketing within your organiziation, you can read our definitions of digital marketing, and 18 recommended digital marketing techniques, in Dr. Dave Chaffey's free blog 'what is digital marketing?'.

Ultimately, our RACE Framework using best practices across digital marketing techniques to get more commercial value from investments in digital marketing. It's used by large corporations, individual founders, marketing managers, consultants, and everybody inbetween.

So, if you think your campaigns would benefit from a RACE strategy approach, download our free digital marketing plan template now to discover how you, too, can optimize and manage your marketing strategy across an integrated RACE funnel.

Free digital marketing plan template Our popular marketing planning template is structured across the Smart Insights RACE Framework. Join Smart Insights as a Free Member to download our digital marketing plan template today Access the Free digital marketing plan template

The RACE Framework covers the full customer lifecycle or marketing funnel from acquisition to retention as shown in this infographic showing the goals for each part of RACE and how you can measure them.

You can use our RACE lifecycle diagram to track your marketing activities integrated across the reach, act, convert and engage stages of your customer's journeys from discovery, to purchase and loyalty. As show below.

The RACE Framework will help simplify your approach to reviewing the performance of your marketing campaigns and taking actions to improve their effectiveness:

Find out more about the RACE Framework, with our dedicated marketing training and templates. Our marketing solutions guide you through the step-by-step process of planning, managing, and optimizing both your marketing campaigns and your marketing business as usual.

The RACE Framework is proven to drive growth. Find out how Smart Insights membership can boost your marketing performance across the board.

Free digital marketing plan template Our popular marketing planning template is structured across the Smart Insights RACE Framework. Join Smart Insights as a Free Member to download our digital marketing plan template today Access the Free digital marketing plan template

To make sure your marketing campaign plan has all the essential features, I recommend also applying the SOSTAC® structure developed by PR Smith—Dave Chaffey’s co-author of the printed book Digital Marketing Excellence.

SOSTAC® is a great framework for structuring business, marketing or digital marketing plans since it’s relatively simple and logical, so it’s easy to remember and to explain to colleagues or agencies. SOSTAC® is a strategic planning process framework that gives you a clear structure to work through to create and manage your plan.

Situation analysis means ‘Where are we now?’ For marketing campaign planners, questions include:

Objectives mean ‘Where do we want to be?’

We recommend you create a conversion-based campaign forecasting model for your campaign so you can be more confident that it will reach the audience needed to give the required levels of business outcomes, i.e. leads and sales.

Strategy means ‘How do we get there?’ Strategy summarizes how to fulfil the objectives. It is the shortest part of the plan, but arguably, the most important, as it gives direction to all the subsequent tactics. It answers questions including:

Tactics are the details of the strategy. They highlight on a marketing campaign plan exactly which tactics occur when. Your chosen tactics should support and adhere to your customer’s journey. Questions include:

To drive reach online to achieve your campaign goals I recommend you consider these 6 channels defined in this diagram.

Action is the detailed planning of tactics.

Control identifies what you need to measure when and what happens. The Control section of the plan ensures you know if you are succeeding or failing – and you can make adjustments– before it is too late.  How you measure the success of your marketing campaign activities will be based upon the overall marketing objectives detailed in your marketing plan.

Marketing campaign planning isn’t just for big marketing departments. Organizations of any size, type and at any stage of existence can utilize a marketing campaign plan in order to achieve an effective campaign. Today, with the wide use of content marketing by businesses, a campaign plan to launch your content makes campaign planning more relevant to all businesses.

A marketing campaign plan does not need to be lengthy or complicated. Creating a simple campaign plan with clear actions can ensure that both small and larger organizations are focusing on their goals and the overall success of the business.

A marketing campaign plan is one small piece of your marketing plan; actions designed to achieve a particular objective. It is not produced regularly as part of an annual cycle, it is project or situation-specific.

In contrast to a business plan, marketing plan, digital marketing plan and multichannel marketing plan, a campaign plan tends to have a limited duration to achieve defined objectives. It should integrate with, for example, your overall marketing plan, digital marketing plan and multichannel marketing plan to ensure full alignment.

Free digital marketing plan template Our popular marketing planning template is structured across the Smart Insights RACE Framework. Join Smart Insights as a Free Member to download our digital marketing plan template today Access the Free digital marketing plan template

FMGs' take Joint Secretary of FMGPA (Foreign Medical Graduates Parents Association), Mohammad Sageer, says, "We are happy but are waiting for further details. We feel FMGs will be exempt from the discrimination of being treated differently when compared to Indian Medical Graduates (IMGs)."

By being treated differently, the Joint Secretary refers to the FMGE exam, for which, answer keys are not released, students are not allowed to discuss the contents of the exam plus, the exam fee (Rs 7,080) is much higher than the rest of the exams.

Additionally, Gaurav Kumar, a FMG who pursued his MD Physician course from Asian Medical Institute, Kyrgyzstan, is in favour NEXT because with one culminating exam for IMGs and FMGs, namely NEXT, it might finally bring the two on the same page.

A different take The first point to note, as the National President of the Federation of All India Medical Association (FAIMA) Dr Rohan Krishnan says, is that NEET PG is an entrance exam and FMGE is a screening test. So, can they really be combined? The reasons behind conducting both the exams are not the same and the syllabi too are vastly different.

In this context, Dr Krishnan questions, "Issues faced by FMGs are different from that of other doctors who are graduating from India. Therefore, the new NEXT exam might not entirely stand to be of benefit to FMGs."

Further, Rohan questioned, "How can someone who pursued their education from Russia and someone who pursued their education from AIIMS Delhi attempt the same qualifying exam?"

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Notorious “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli made a sob-filled plea for leniency but ended up getting sentenced Friday to seven years in prison for