plan-a-marketing-campaign

name	plan-a-marketing-campaign
description	Research and build a decision-ready marketing campaign plan covering the objective, audience, proposition, message, offer, channel roles, content and asset needs, timing, owners, dependencies, measurement, risks, and approval decisions. Use when a team needs an executable campaign plan before configuration, launch, or spend changes.

Plan a Marketing Campaign

Produce a campaign plan the team can approve and execute. Research what is needed to make the plan credible; do not return a template or a list of questions and call the work complete.

1. Understand the campaign decision

Clarify the business outcome, audience, offer or product, market, timing, budget range, required channels, constraints, and the decision the plan must support. Identify whether this is a launch, always-on program, event, lifecycle campaign, experiment, or another campaign shape.

Use existing goals, brand guidance, audience work, prior campaigns, channel baselines, customer evidence, and approved product material when available. Ask only about gaps that could materially change the direction.

2. Ground the strategy in evidence

Use strawberry/marketing/research-an-audience when the audience is unclear or the evidence needs proper synthesis. Use strawberry/marketing/run-competitor-analysis when competitor position or activity could change the campaign. For a lighter gap, research it directly and preserve the sources.

Distinguish current facts, team assumptions, platform estimates, prior results, and hypotheses. Check that the proposed objective can plausibly connect to the business outcome and that the team has, or can create, the required proof.

When the central proposition is genuinely unsettled, present a small number of distinct campaign directions with their evidence and tradeoffs before building the full plan. Do not manufacture options when one direction is already clear.

3. Build the campaign

Create a coherent plan that covers:

• the business outcome, campaign objective, and measurable success definition;
• the audience, situation, and evidence behind the choice;
• the proposition, message, proof, offer, and call to action;
• the role of each channel across discovery, consideration, conversion, or retention;
• content, asset, landing-page, operational, and technical needs;
• timing, sequence, owners, dependencies, approvals, and budget assumptions;
• measurement definitions, baseline, reporting cadence, and decision points; and
• risks, open questions, and what would cause the team to adjust or stop.

Make channel choices because they fit the audience, behavior, message, and goal—not because a generic campaign template includes them. Name assumptions that would change the economics or feasibility.

4. Validate the plan

Check that the audience, proposition, offer, channel roles, assets, timing, measurement, and budget tell one consistent story. Look for unsupported claims, unclear ownership, missing dependencies, conflicting dates, unmeasurable objectives, attribution gaps, and a plan that requires more content or operations than the team can realistically deliver.

Deliver the plan in the team's useful format, with an executive summary, the decisions already made, the decisions still needed, and source links beside consequential evidence. The result should be ready for approval, not artificially polished past unresolved choices.

5. Stop at the campaign boundary

This skill stops before configuring platforms, launching a campaign, publishing content, contacting people, or changing spend. Those are separate actions with their own current permissions and review points.

After the plan is accepted, use strawberry/marketing/build-a-content-plan to turn its message and channel needs into a content program, or strawberry/marketing/create-and-repurpose-marketing-content when a specific approved asset is ready to produce.

Follow Strawberry's active scoped permission for every source and action. Draft or ask when the current permission is insufficient. Stop when identity, account, destination, scope, impact, or sensitive-data handling changes, and verify completed external actions.

Preserve the accepted goals, assumptions, definitions, owners, and review points when the team wants to reuse the method. Do not automate launch decisions merely because campaign preparation recurs.