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The campaign lifecycle

Every campaign in March follows a structured four-phase lifecycle: Plan → Coordinate → Launch → Improve. This lifecycle is March’s core organizing idea — it replaces the scattered collection of docs, project boards, schedulers, and dashboards that most marketing teams use to run a single campaign, and replaces it with one system that moves with you from strategy to results.

The lifecycle maps to how good marketing actually works. It gives teams a shared vocabulary for where a campaign stands, what work is in flight, and what comes next.

Why a lifecycle model

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Marketing teams lose time not from a lack of tools, but from a lack of structure. A brief lives in Notion, tasks in Linear, content in Google Docs, publishing in Buffer, results in GA4. Nobody has a complete picture. Campaigns don’t fail at Launch — they fail in the gaps between tools.

The campaign lifecycle is March’s answer to that. It treats a campaign as a first-class object that carries its strategy, its outputs, and its results in one place — and it moves that object through a defined progression so everyone on the team always knows where things stand.

If you’ve worked in software teams, this will feel familiar. The campaign lifecycle is the marketing equivalent of the development lifecycle: the same discipline of moving work through defined stages, the same shared visibility, the same ability to look at a board and know exactly what’s shipping and when.

The four phases

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Plan

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The campaign starts as a brief. During Plan, the team defines what the campaign is trying to achieve, who it’s for, what channels it will use, and how success will be measured. Ask March can draft the brief for you — describe the objective and it generates a starting point you can edit and refine.

The brief is the single source of truth for the campaign. Everything that gets produced in Coordinate flows from it.

→ Plan in detail

Coordinate

Section titled “Coordinate”

With the brief locked, the team moves into production. During Coordinate, outputs are created — the blog posts, social posts, emails, ads, and other deliverables the campaign will ship. Each output has an owner, a target date, and a status that moves from Draft to Ready as content is written and reviewed.

Ask March assists throughout: generating first drafts from the brief, refining copy, and running brand checks against your organization’s guidelines. Outputs can be created in bulk from natural language, or generated as AI suggestions based on the brief.

→ Coordinate in detail

Launch

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When outputs are Ready, they get published. March connects directly to the platforms where your content lives — 12 social channels, GitHub, Sanity CMS, and more — so you can push content without leaving the campaign.

Outputs publish individually as they’re ready. There’s no gate between production and publishing, so teams can run rolling schedules or coordinated launch days, depending on the campaign.

→ Launch in detail

Improve

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After content is live, performance data flows back into March from Google Analytics 4 and PostHog. The Improve phase is where the team reviews what worked, compares results against the goals set in the brief, and captures what to carry forward into the next campaign.

Improve closes the loop. The brief that started the campaign is still there — now alongside the results it was designed to generate.

→ Improve in detail

Tracking progress through the lifecycle

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March tracks progress at two levels: the campaign and the individual outputs inside it.

Campaigns are either active or archived. A campaign is active while work is in progress — from the moment the brief is written through to when the last output is published and results are reviewed. Once the campaign is complete, it can be archived. Archived campaigns are hidden from the default view but remain searchable and fully accessible.

Output statuses are where granular progress lives. Every output moves through three stages:

  • Draft — content is being created
  • Ready — content is approved and queued for publishing
  • Published — content is live

A campaign can have a mix of output statuses at any point. March shows a live count of draft, ready, and published outputs on the campaign card, so the team can see how close a campaign is to completion without opening it.

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