Digital marketing teams often plan by channel — "our SEO plan," "our email plan," "our paid plan" — which creates silos and blind spots at the handoffs between them. The RACE framework, developed by Dr Dave Chaffey and Smart Insights, flips this around: it organises all marketing activity around the stages a customer moves through, ensuring every channel and tactic connects to a specific moment in the buying journey. The result is a plan that is both comprehensive and coherent.
What is the RACE framework?
RACE stands for Reach, Act, Convert, Engage. These four stages describe the customer lifecycle from initial awareness to post-purchase loyalty. Smart Insights later added a fifth stage, Plan, at the front of the model — making the full framework Plan > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage — to emphasise that disciplined planning underpins all four customer-facing stages.
The framework was designed specifically for digital marketing but applies equally well to integrated campaigns that span offline and online channels. If you are building a marketing plan and want a structure that keeps the customer journey at the centre, RACE provides it. For a more general planning structure that covers strategy development before execution, see the SOSTAC framework.
The five stages of RACE
| Stage | Customer question answered | Typical activities | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | — | Audience research, competitor analysis, objective-setting, resource allocation | Market share targets, budget, team capacity |
| Reach | How do I find out about this brand? | SEO, paid search, display, social media, PR, influencer, events | Impressions, unique visitors, share of voice, CPM/CPC |
| Act | Is this relevant to me? | Landing pages, blog content, gated assets, product pages, email nurture | Pages per session, time on site, lead form completions, email open rate |
| Convert | Should I buy / sign up now? | Demos, free trials, retargeting, checkout optimisation, sales enablement | Conversion rate, cost per acquisition, pipeline velocity, revenue |
| Engage | Should I stay and come back? | Onboarding sequences, loyalty programmes, community, NPS surveys, upsell campaigns | Retention rate, NPS, LTV, repeat purchase rate, referral rate |
Stage-by-stage breakdown
Plan — the strategic foundation
The Plan stage is not a customer-facing activity; it is the internal preparation that makes the other four stages coherent. It covers setting SMART objectives for each RACE stage, defining target audiences and segments, auditing current performance, allocating budget across channels, and establishing the KPIs and review cadence that will govern the programme. Teams that skip Plan typically end up with strong Reach numbers but weak Act and Convert performance because the targeting and messaging were never properly aligned.
Reach — building awareness at scale
Reach covers everything you do to bring qualified audiences into contact with your brand for the first time. The emphasis in B2B is on quality over quantity: reaching 10,000 senior procurement managers at manufacturing companies is more valuable than reaching 500,000 general business professionals. Effective Reach strategies combine owned (SEO, organic social), earned (PR, analyst coverage, word of mouth) and paid (PPC, sponsored content, LinkedIn ads) channels, and measure share of voice as well as raw traffic volume.
Act — generating interaction and intent
Act is the stage most often neglected in planning. Once a prospect lands on your site or engages with your content, the question shifts from "did they see us?" to "did they do something meaningful?" This might be reading three or more pages in a session, downloading a guide, completing a self-assessment tool, or subscribing to a newsletter. Act metrics reveal whether your content is genuinely engaging your target audience or simply attracting browsers who bounce. Optimising Act typically means improving content relevance, internal linking, and lead magnet quality.
Convert — turning intent into revenue
Convert maps to the commercial decision point: the prospect becomes a customer, a trial user, or a qualified opportunity passed to sales. In B2B, Convert is rarely a single moment; it involves multiple touchpoints including demos, proposal reviews, procurement sign-off, and legal review. Marketing's role in Convert is to accelerate the process — through retargeting, case study content, ROI calculators, and sales enablement assets — and to ensure that the handoff to sales is clean and well-timed.
Engage — retention and lifetime value
Engage is the most commercially powerful stage and the most underinvested. Research consistently shows that retaining an existing customer costs less than acquiring a new one, and that satisfied customers generate referrals that feed back into Reach. Engage activities include structured onboarding, regular value-reinforcing communication (newsletters, product updates, educational content), community building, loyalty incentives, and systematic NPS measurement with closed-loop follow-up. In a subscription business, Engage directly determines churn rate and therefore revenue predictability.
Worked B2B example: professional services firm
Consider a mid-sized management consultancy expanding its digital presence to generate inbound leads from the financial services sector in the UK.
- Plan: Target: CFOs and COOs at UK financial services firms (250–5,000 employees). Objective: generate 20 inbound SQLs per month within 9 months. Budget: £180k year one. KPIs defined for each RACE stage with monthly review cadence.
- Reach: Publish 12 long-form thought leadership articles targeting high-intent keywords (e.g., "operational risk framework financial services"). Sponsor one sector conference. Activate LinkedIn sponsored content targeting by job title and industry.
- Act: Gate two detailed benchmarking reports behind email capture forms. Create an interactive self-assessment tool ("Is your finance function operationally resilient?"). Target: 150 form completions per month from qualified roles.
- Convert: Nurture leads with a 4-email sequence referencing the self-assessment result and offering a 30-minute expert call. Retarget non-converting site visitors with LinkedIn ads featuring client case studies. Target: 20% of leads convert to discovery call.
- Engage: Monthly insight newsletter to all clients and warm prospects. Annual client satisfaction survey (NPS). Structured 90-day onboarding for new clients. Target: NPS above 45, 80% of year-one clients retain into year two.
RACE vs. SOSTAC: how they complement each other
RACE and SOSTAC are designed for different jobs. SOSTAC is a planning sequence — it helps you work through Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control in the right order before you begin executing. RACE is a customer journey model — it helps you organise your tactics and KPIs around the stages a buyer actually moves through. Many experienced marketing teams use SOSTAC to build their overall plan and RACE to structure the execution section of that plan. The two models are entirely compatible and frequently used together.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Optimising Reach while ignoring Act. Traffic growth that does not translate into engagement is a vanity metric. Review Act KPIs in the same breath as Reach KPIs every reporting cycle.
- Treating Convert as sales' problem alone. Marketing owns the journey up to and including the point of conversion. If pipeline stalls between demo and close, marketing should investigate whether better sales enablement content would help — not simply hand the problem to the sales team.
- Underfunding Engage. Businesses that invest heavily in Reach and Convert but neglect Engage suffer high churn and cannot build compounding referral loops. Allocate a meaningful share of budget to retention and loyalty from the start.
- Setting objectives only at the Reach level. Every RACE stage needs its own objective and KPI. A plan that measures only impressions and website sessions cannot tell you whether the programme is generating commercial value.
Frequently asked questions
Is RACE only for digital marketing?
No. While RACE was designed with digital marketing in mind, it describes customer behaviour that applies across channels. A prospect might first hear about you at a trade show (Reach), engage with your white paper (Act), attend a product demo (Convert), and become a loyal repeat buyer (Engage) — entirely offline. The framework is channel-agnostic; the stages describe the journey, not the medium.
What is the difference between Act and Convert?
Act is about generating meaningful engagement and intent — the prospect does something that signals interest (downloads content, fills in a form, spends significant time on key pages). Convert is about closing the commercial transaction — the prospect becomes a customer, subscriber, or sales-qualified opportunity. The distinction matters because different tactics and metrics apply at each stage, and conflating them leads to poor funnel analysis.
How does RACE relate to OKRs?
OKRs and RACE work well together. You can set one Objective for each RACE stage and then define two or three Key Results that measure progress through that stage. For example, the Reach Objective might be "Build qualified brand awareness among UK financial services decision-makers," with Key Results covering organic traffic growth, share of voice, and branded search volume. See our OKR for marketing guide for more detail.
How often should I review RACE metrics?
Reach and Act metrics benefit from weekly review because they respond quickly to tactical changes (a new article, a campaign adjustment). Convert metrics typically need a monthly cadence because sales cycles extend over weeks. Engage metrics — NPS, retention, LTV — are best reviewed quarterly, though early warning signals like email unsubscribe rate and support ticket volume are worth tracking weekly.
Plan your RACE strategy in Hatch
The Hatch free plan tool lets you set objectives and KPIs for each RACE stage, assign channel budgets, and build a review dashboard — all in one shareable document.
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