The best planning framework for Marketing: SOSTAC

Systematically approaching the planning of your marketing strategy creates stability in an otherwise erratic process. The SOSTAC framework brings together the 6 fundamental tenets of marketing and helps you optimize your efforts for increased success!

Back in the 1990s, I was still figuring out my ABCs. But at the same time, PR Smith created the SOSTAC model for marketing strategy. The flexibility in its application meant that it stays valid to this day. Used extensively for the planning and implementation of any marketing strategy. In this blog, I discuss what SOSTAC is, and provide clarity to each step of the framework. Later in the blog, we also discuss a few key points regarding the SOSTAC marketing planning model.

Why use the SOSTAC marketing planning model?

First, Let’s look at a few statistics from CoSchedule on how the SOSTAC marketing planning model can actually help:

1. Top marketers set goals. Goal-setting marketers are 376% more likely to report success. Also, 70% of the most organized marketers achieve their goals most of the time. While an elite 10% of organized marketers always achieve their goals.
   
2. The best marketers document their strategy. Marketers with a documented strategy are 313% more likely to report success. 
   
3. Successful marketers proactively plan projects and campaigns. Marketers who proactively plan projects are 356% more likely to report success. 
   

The benefits of having an objective-led documented strategy are clear. So let’s look at what the SOSTAC acronym stands for:

Situational Analysis

You essentially want to answer the question: Where are we now?

You can’t chart a course of action without knowing where you stand currently. So, the situational analysis helps you do just that. By conducting an in-depth marketing environment analysis, you can understand external and internal forces. These consequently affect your organization currently or have the potential to affect you shortly.

So, in this step, you will undertake extensive research. You will run audits, conduct surveys and interviews to gain both qualitative and quantitative insights that answer the question! If you’re looking for more details on how to conduct a marketing environment analysis, you can check out this blog post for guidance!

Furthermore, you can even use a SWOT analysis to prioritize the wealth of information from your research findings. It will filter things into a general direction that will help you set up well for the next step. You can check out how to conduct a SWOT analysis in this EM blog post.

Objectives

You need to be able to answer: Where do we want to end up?

First, you understand where you currently stand. Then, you want to set the objectives that you aim to achieve. Here’s what you want to establish. :

• Outline your vision/mission statements
  
• Be clear on brand and financial goals
  
• Set marketing goals with a clear framework
  
• Decide what KPIs and dashboards to use, so your goals can be measured consistently and clearly.

I highly recommend checking out this EM blog post on setting SMARTER goals to help you do this. Setting clear goals is going to improve your chances of success, as a result. So be sure to take your time and find alignment between your goals and capabilities

Strategy

Now it’s time to plan your actions: How?

After establishing where you are trying to end up, you also need to figure out how you’re going to reach those goals. Your marketing strategy provides the path(s) that leads to your goals. You can segment your audience or create customer personas. Additionally, you could choose your marketing funnel and model your marketing mix to position your brand and its offerings uniquely You also have to factor in channel selection, for which you can find great direction in this EM blog post about selecting digital marketing channels.

Your marketing strategy can include sub-strategies for content, engagement, customer experience, digital optimization, or conversions. Obviously, based on your goals. You can choose to organize the strategy by a goal or by channel to improve your workflow and processes as a result.

And we are already halfway through the SOSTAC marketing planning loop:

Tactics & Action

If strategy looks at how broadly, tactics can be translated to “how exactly do you do this?”

Every strategy is a collection of tactics. One of the most proven methods to derive tactics that match strategy is by using the 7P marketing mix. It is specifying in more detail how you achieve your goals and objectives. You have to:

• allocate resources to take action
  
• create content or media calendars
  
• outline the consumer journey and related digital roadmaps
  
• divide your approach into stages and time-bound mini plans (weekly, monthly, quarterly)

Your actions will include the specific tasks you assign yourself and to the team. In order to meet the calendar requirements of your tactics, the actions can be sort of a to-do list for your marketing plans. You might also want to consider outsourcing elements of your plan to external agencies or freelancers. Lastly, you have to consider the Systems required and the establishment of processes to act on the plans outlined at the previous stage. 

The 7S framework by McKinsey is a great model to help you categorically draft actions that fulfill your goals in line with your strategy and associated tactics.

Control

Lastly, you want to answer the question: How do we know we are making progress?

This last stage of “control” has become so much easier in the age of data. There’s Google Analytics, SEO tools, your KPIs, social media metrics, a variety of app, and web dashboards, all giving you accurate information about the actions you and your customers take. By tracking them and turning that data into actionable insights you will be able to gauge performance and progress. 

Remember that not all feedback is quantitative. Running surveys tracking Net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), or other qualitative responses go a long way in understanding the overall picture of your performance.

SOSTAC marketing planning model in digital marketing

With digital marketing, there has been a merging of strategy and tactics as most marketing plans are objective-oriented. So more often than not, it’s completely fine to use the strategy portion to set broad, goal-based tactical initiatives that are specified in further detail with a set of tactics and implemented with actions that have measurement and control measures and processes in place.

As control measures include metrics that gauge the success of any marketing plan, it is good to have these addressed in the objectives section itself. This way you’ve already outlined measurement from the get-go.

The mixing and merging of steps in SOSTAC for digital marketing have led to the rise of simpler planning frameworks such as Dave Chaffey’s RACE model. If you are working purely on digital channels, it is definitely worth a read!

Conclusion

Using marketing frameworks and models has always been a method of controlling the chaos that usually comes with planning marketing strategy. The SOSTAC framework covers all major tenets of fundamental marketing and provides the necessary structure needed to easily plan and implement your marketing actions to meet your defined goals!

The flexibility of the SOSTAC framework makes it easy to adapt to any kind of initiative and it helps you build and grow your brand with focused marketing plans! It’s a safe start for any level of marketer. And is effective regardless of the channels you choose, the goals you have, and the product or service you provide!