How to Build a Marketing Automation Campaign Using the RACE Planning Framework

Marketing automation is not a new concept. However, even with decades of research and development, companies are still trying to figure out how they can use this strategy best so that they’re focused on the right customer at the right time. Here’s a top tip for building successful marketing automation campaigns.

The RACE digital marketing planning framework was developed by Dr Dave Chaffey to help digital marketing professionals manage the multichannel marketing activities required for successful digital marketing campaigns.

The RACE mnemonic summarises these activities and will help you keep track of the entire customer lifecycle or marketing funnel, from initial planning to ongoing engagement. Technically, the mnemonic is PRACE, but we refer to it as RACE to make it easier to remember.

There are five critical steps to a successful digital marketing strategy, according to the (P)RACE mnemonic:

1. Planning: make sure you know your goals and target audience.
2.  Reach: use the proper channels to get your message out there.
3. Act: create compelling content that encourages people to take action.
4. Convert: turn website visitors into customers.
5. Engage: keep customers engaged and coming back for more.

Multichannel marketing automation is a powerful way to maximise your results when implementing a digital strategy using the RACE planning framework. You need to reach your audience through the channels they use most and take action on your website based on their interactions. Marketing automation tools help you to accomplish this.

Marketing automation software, such as VBOUT, provides marketers with the tools to manage comprehensive multichannel marketing campaigns. Marketers can publish landing pages, manage social media accounts, create custom audiences for social media advertising, send browser notifications and SMS messages, and integrate e-commerce transactions, all of which bring data into one central database.

With so many tools integrated into one system, marketing automation platforms like VBOUT present an excellent opportunity to manage and optimise multiple customer touchpoints throughout a customer journey. They are the ideal tool to manage sophisticated digital marketing strategies using the RACE planning framework.

Reach is all about getting your brand in front of as many people as possible, using various methods. This can include building awareness on other websites and offline media and driving visits to your different web presences, like your main site, microsites or social media pages.

VBOUT marketing automation can help you target potential customers using social media advertising and retargeting on Google Ads. Using your existing contact database, you can push contact data to Facebook Ads and Adwords, where you can then create custom audiences that can be used for ad campaigns targeting look-a-like audiences.

VBOUT lets you control all your social media channels from one place without the need to manage them separately. You can also organise your social media profiles into groups, making it easy to handle multiple brands or assign them to different team members.

Through your social media posting, both organic and paid advertising, you can direct people to your website and owned media channels, where you can move onto the Act stage.

The act stage is vital for online marketers, as it’s where they encourage interactions on websites and in social media to generate leads. It can be a challenge to persuade site visitors or prospects to take the next step, but it’s essential to move them further down the funnel.

With VBOUT, you can create personalised, conversion-optimised landing pages to capture the contact information of potential sales leads. By dynamically changing your landing page content based on your visitor data, you can ensure that you are always relevant to your leads. This will help you to enhance your conversions.

There are many ways to generate leads on your website – one of which is through the use of pop-up forms. Adding these forms is a quick and easy way to grab your visitor’s attention and can be done without editing your website’s existing page templates.

Since RACE is a multichannel or omnichannel marketing framework, the convert stage is aimed at conversion to sale through online or offline channels. It involves getting your audience to take that vital next step which turns them into paying customers, whether the payment is handled through online e-commerce transactions or offline channels.

VBOUT can help you nurture leads with email marketing. VBOUT marketing automation software makes it easy to create multi-step sequences that will engage sales leads via email as well as other channels such as SMS and push notifications.

You can focus on your most valuable leads and get better results with lead scoring. Set up your parameters and labels to categorise your leads based on their progress through your funnel and likelihood to convert.

We want to focus on developing a long-term relationship with first-time buyers in order to boost customer loyalty and increase repeat purchases. This can be done by communicating with them on your site, social media, and email. In order to measure the success of this strategy, we need to look at repeat actions such as repeat sales and sharing content on social media. We can also use other systems to measure customer satisfaction and recommendations.

Once a customer has received the product or service from your company, make sure you request an online review. This is a great way to get feedback from customers and to show them that you appreciate their business. VBOUT has a templated automation for requesting a review post-purchase, so make sure you utilise that in your campaigns. Read the VBOUT blog for details on how to automate getting customer reviews.

Martin Broadhurst is a British digital strategist, marketing expert and AI evangelist, who has been providing digital marketing consultancy services to organisations in the UK and internationally for over 10 years.