SOSTAC Digital Marketing Planning Template
New SOSTAC Digital Marketing Plan Template: Do This or Watch Your Marketing Fail!
The Challenge of SOSTAC Digital Marketing Planning
Do you have a digital marketing planning template? If you don’t, you’re not alone because more than 89 % of marketing team struggle with strategic marketing planning. The problem is expounded because marketing Technology, Search engines, social medial platforms are always changing and it’s difficult to keep up to date with the pace of that change.
The traditional digital marketing planning framework like SOSTAC, which was developed in the early 90s by an individual called PR Smith, is very academic. When I was doing my master’s in marketing, I actually read his SOSTAC marketing planning model and even tried to apply the principles in my marketing consulting gigs. Back in 2018, I reached out to PR Smith and expressed some concerns about his SOSTAC marketing planning framework and he sent me a signed copy of his book after our conversation.The problem with SOSTAC model that, it’s very academic and outdated because it was designed for the marketing landscape that existing in the 1990’s plus the fact that it does not apply to realities of real world marketing planning and execution workflows. SOSTAC marketing framework is not very Agile, but offers a good foundation base to create an effective marketing plan.
So I’m going to be walking you through SOSTAC marketing planning framework and i will then layer it with practical approaches you use to create your own marketing planning framework in order to make SOSTAC Agile. So what does SOSTAC mean? SOSTAC stands for Situation Analysis, Objective, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control. To implement SOSTAC marketing model i suggest you create an excel document, input each section of SOSTAC into separate tabs of the excel sheet. Tab 1 for Situation Analysis, tab 2 for Objectives and 3 for Strategy ans so on and so forth. This will help guide you thinking and mindset about how to create an effective marketing plan.
Situation Analysis: Audits and SWOT
What exactly is situation analysis? Situation analysis in most marketing team is what we now refer to as audits. Everything you do starts with an audit. At the start of any engagement, most marketing leaders request for SEO, Google Ads, Content, Analytics audits from in-house marketing teams or digital agency partners. The problem with most marketing planning process is that all the aforementioned audits are done in silos which creates a disjointed marketing strategy planning and execution.
As a business leader or ecommerce store owner trying to create and effective marketing planning template, i recommend starting with a holistic digital marketing audit as opposed to a siloed individual channel audits. This marketing audit will be the top level where every other audit will then sit in and you have a uniform audit. So what I’m trying to say is that all this audits will then sit side by side to help you understand dependencies and synergies between channels. How does your audits map to your customer journey and how does it help identified weakness and threats in your existing marketing activities. How does your audit help you identify the strength of your marketing and opportunities available to you.
I recommend hiring a T-shaped growth marketing strategist like Femi Olajiga to help you conduct an end-to-end marketing audit. You need a T-shaped marketing leader that has the understanding and experience across SEO, Google Ads, Content, CRO, Analytics and CX to then help you do a thorough your digital marketing audit. I’m sure your teams are already doing siloed audits, but the problem when you’re creating a marketing plan is your audit does not need to be at a tactical level. It needs to be an integrated marketing audit. So when you’re thinking about your marketing audit, you also need to look at your SWOT analysis. People that have done marketing from an academic perspective will understand what SWOT means. SWOT basically means the strength, the weakness, the opportunity and the threat.
The audit and the situation analysis will help you understand the what, who, what, and why about your customers. Why do new customers buy from you and why the fail to become repeat customers. When you understand these three things, then you then you are able to glean information from your integrated marketing audit.
Real-World Example of Situation Analysis
I’ll give you a good example. I was talking to an organisation recently and the problem the organisation had was well documented during COVID because they lost most of their customers based due to lifestyle and behaviours changes due to lockdown and the ripple effect remains almost 5 years afterwards. This resulted in the organisation going into administration and subsequent acquisition by venture capitalist firm. So when we were having the conversation, I didn’t ask them the question, who is your ideal customer and how do you position yourself to your customers? And the response I got was they’re relying on the data to help them understand who their target customers is.
I was blown away because the problem is all over the internet, basically have customers through different narratives online expressing why they chose not to patronise that organisation anymore. In actual fact, this organisation was impacted heavily by COVID. The change in people’s behaviour impacted the need for the product this organisation was selling. Rather than evolving and looking at a thorough SWOT analysis, this organisation kept on doing exactly the same thing they were doing post-COVID and they’re still struggling. to get that customer base. So if you’re creating a marketing plan without doing a SWOT analysis, you are just going to be reacting to what the tools and the tactics tell you is happening because the SWOT analysis will give you the strength that you have to understand your customer, what makes you better compared to your competitors. And then the SWOT analysis would help you then narrow down
What are the weaknesses that you have? The weaknesses that you have is going to be linked to the problems you have with your customers. What I mean by this is how do your customers buy from you? If they have problems buying from you, either through your communication, either through your offer, either through your website, either through the channel that you’re approaching them with, that is a weakness
Opportunities and Threats in Situation Analysis
In your marketing plan, you need to identify what are your customers looking for and what are your customers not looking for and how does that then align with your strategy. Then when it comes to opportunities, most organisations make the mistake of focusing on vanity metrics. What I mean by this is people buying from you should be a start of the journey. And I see most organisation, the KPIs is just focused on those transactional interaction, which is important. But what happens? What are the future needs of your customers? If you do not look at that, then that becomes a problem. And then let’s talk about treads. Treads are not just things that come from your competition alone. Treads are actually anything that would distract your customer from buying from you. A perfect example is technological changes. In recent times search engine optimisation has been going through a transformative phase where the traditional search engine is slowly evolving into an answer engine. People do not have that patience anymore and people do not rely only on Google when they’re searching. For traditional business, it’s a threat to your business model because most e-commerce and most organisations business model is based on using paid advertising to get people with high intent to buy. That becomes a problem if people’s information search is then changing. It becomes a threat to you that how do we then adapt to that changing? That becomes a good problem and a bad problem. If you know how to navigate it, it becomes a good problem. If you do not, and you’re not innovative in your marketing approach, it becomes a problem. So for your audits, general audits, the first stage of your marketing plan is the situation analysis.
Making Situation Analysis Agile
So now let’s talk about how do you then make that situation analysis agile? I mentioned earlier on that the Sustak model is not very agile because it’s academic. How do you then make the SOSTAC model agile from a situation analysis perspective? It all starts by the frequency of which you do your audits. By default, marketing teams in some instances do not even have an audit every year. Audit should not be a bad word. It should not be like, we want to find out what’s the problem is audits by default makes people fear that okay we’re going to audit to find a problem and you’re going to be in trouble that is not what a situation analysis or audit is it’s basically let’s find out where we’re good at where we’re weak at where the opportunities lie and where there is potential threat so when you’re looking at your marketing audit as a whole, you don’t even sometimes need to create a SWOT document. You just need to look at it like what is our strength? What is our weakness? What are the opportunities that we’re failing to see that we can capitalise on? And what are we vulnerable to? So what I’m trying to say is you need to do this as frequently as possible. Your marketing audit needs to be at least quarterly. you need to constantly review because there are different things that are happening. Your new competition will come into the market, closed substitute products might try and steal your market share. So your audits, marketing audits should be constantly done in a quarterly fashion. The traditional marketing would do a marketing audit every 12 months, sometimes before they discuss the marketing budget, but that is too slow. So you want to make sure that at least quarterly you do your audits. And as I mentioned earlier on, all your audits should be in one single umbrella. Your SEO audits, your PPC audits, even if things are going well, all these audits should be in a single document where every stakeholder involved in those channels have visibility of those other audits and they can see the interaction and the synergies between those audits.
Structuring Your Marketing Planning Template
So let’s go to the next step of an effective marketing planning template. I mentioned earlier on that you create an Excel document. That Excel document should have the first tab of the Excel document. You should just name it situation analysis slash audit. And then you create another tab for objective, another tab for strategy, another tab for tactic, another tab for action. and then another tab for control. We’re following the fundamental framework of SOSTAC here, but I’m building up on it with practical experiences and practical examples. So for the objectives, for every marketing activity, you need to have something called a smart objective. I know everybody has heard this word, it’s cliche, but What exactly are your objectives and how do those objective align to your business vision, to profitability, to revenue growth and to retention? The reason why this objective is important is because I’ve seen a lot of organisations over the years have something called vanity metrics, metrics that make them feel happy, but that metric does not really align with the goal of the organisation. So my question to you under your objective for your marketing planning template is what exactly is your objective for brand awareness? Because you know, when people buy their purchase is not just linear. There’s a phase where they do not know they have a problem. and then they know that okay I have a problem I need to solve that problem and then the phase where they then solution solution aware and then they get to that phase where they then even product aware.
Setting Objectives: Brand Awareness, Acquisition, Engagement, and Retention
What I’m trying to say is what is the metric that shows that your organisation or your product or services from a brand perspective is captured in that brand awareness phase in that where people are then ready to like okay what are the potential brands that I should look at when I’m trying to buy this product to solve this problem. What is that metric and how are you measuring brand awareness metric? So you need to put that as part of your objective. Another thing you also need to look at is your customer acquisition target as an objective. So was talking to an organisation recently and the organisation was telling me that their pricing is significantly lower than all the competitors and their pricing is lower because they do not want to… Their thinking was they make more money after someone has converted and the… post-purchase experiences where they make the most of their money, but they do not need to push heavily to match their competitors pricing. I found that a little bit surprising, but the lesson I’m trying to pull here is when I asked a few questions, I quickly realised that they don’t actually have a customer acquisition target. So my question to you listening today as a business owner or marketing leader is for every quarter, for every week, every month, every year, even in situation with seasonality, your objective from a customer acquisition target, how are you clear about that? Customer acquisition target is not the number of people that convert from you. Because some of those people that convert will also churn. If they don’t like the product, they can return it. So you need to have that in your marketing planning document as well. Then your objective from a customer engagement and conversion perspective. You know, I’ve mentioned your objectives for brand awareness.
Objectives Across Channels and Retention
That objective should cut across all your marketing channels. and see how every channel can chip in to make sure that they all contribute in together. Your customer acquisition target as well should be across marketing channels. You should allocate different portions of customer acquisition to different channels. This becomes a little bit tricky because each marketing channel, some of them are not actually customer acquisition channels, some of them will be more powerful from a brand awareness standpoint. So this is where it’s important to have that integrated marketing approach. Then I also mentioned about customer engagement and conversion targets. You need to have that clearly specified in your document. And then one thing that I see people not really pay attention to is because people don’t pay attention to the objectives when it comes to retention targets. What percentage of your customers are you planning to retain? This is very, very important because if you front load all your marketing efforts towards acquisition and you do not allocate any activity or budget towards retention targets, then it becomes something called like a hamster wheel. You’re just going round and round and round the circle and it’s a marketing problem because everything is front loaded on customer acquisition and the retention targets is sometimes completely ignored. So that’s the second part of the soft stack marketing planning template. Then you go to your strategy. Your strategy from a soft stack model is more about the customer, right? But what I see here is your strategy is your approach to offer development. What I mean by your approach to offer development is how are you developing your value proposition?
Developing Your Strategy and Customer Profile
You know, earlier on I talked about the customer doing the audits, looking at the strength, the weakness and everything. But how have you developed your Customer profile. I was talking to a client recently, potential client recently, and they were just telling me about their business and we’re having conversations. And I asked the question, what is the split of people that buy from you, male, female, what are the demographic data? And they were like, we’ve never really looked at that information. And then I asked the next question, so do you have an idea of your customers profile? What motivates them? What value proposition resonates to them? They didn’t have that answer. And then I asked, okay, so what exactly is the profile of your high value customers? The value of your one time purchase customers, the profile of your customers that are motivated by price. the profile of the customers that are aligned with your ethos and your brand positioning or your corporate social responsibility and things like that, your brand value. So these are questions that as a business owner you need to ask yourself because a lot of websites have and a lot of businesses have a bulk section of their customer profile that is giving them 80 % of their revenue. And if you don’t have that clearly stated or clearly defined, you have that tendency of just creating a marketing plan and execution that is focused on that 20 % that is not even helping your bottom line. And you’re pumping your marketing budget into those tiny 20 % that are not your high value customers and you’re abandoning those customer profiles. previous organisation where I’ve worked, we’ve had sessions where we define the customer profile. We know the customers that bring the bulk of the revenue and the bulk of the profits to the organisation. And then we then tailor all marketing activities and channels to us targeting those customers. It goes as far as even your website, your communication.
Focusing on High Value Customer Segments
You’re not targeting everybody. You’re targeting those percentage that gives you 80 % of your revenue and your profits. Some people like to call it the 80-20 rule. But the point is it might not be 80-20. It might be like 30, 30, 40 different customer segments. So once you have that understanding of those segments, you then target them with the right value proposition. That is my approach to the SOSTAC model when it comes to strategy. So now let’s talk about tactic. Once you’ve done all these things I’ve mentioned earlier on, remember you’re creating an Excel document with the SOSTAC in each tab. Situation analysis slash audit. The next one is then the objective, then strategy and now tactic. Most marketing plans. are tactical plans. basically you go into an organisation and what they basically have is a paid advertising tactic. And that is what they feel a marketing plan template is. Because everything is just based on paid search. Every other activity is ignored because paid search gets the instance revenue an instant result and it’s a pay to play. But from a SOSTAC model perspective, you then break out all the tactics. You look at all tactical tools, tactical channels. You look at answer engines. That’s the new word for Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO. Because people sometimes are not looking to search, they’re looking for answers. And once they get that answer, they leave. So in some instances, you have your brand terms show up as having a high impression, but you’re not getting a click through rate. That is a problem. You then look at different tactics. People often ignore offline marketing, direct mail. They ignore all these tactics because the focus is on one single tactic.
Considering All Tactics and Channels
So what this will help you do when you’re creating a marketing plan is to look at all marketing channels and tactics and how that contributes to your business. Once you start looking at your marketing plan from this perspective, you start realising that hang on a minute, all our activities, all our efforts, everything we do is just on paid advertising alone. Don’t get me wrong, paid advertising is good, but when you were looking at tactics from a holistic perspective, you then start asking the question, how can email marketing help our customers across the awareness, consideration, purchase and post purchase journey? You ask that question, how and what does social media do to a customer purchase journey? Pre-purchase and post-purchase. What does events? direct marketing, radio advertising, video advertising on video platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram and other video platform. This approach of your marketing planning, looking at the tactics across the board will then trigger that reasoning that, okay, what can we do to then get more channels involved rather than relying on one single channel?So let’s look at the action plan according to SOSTAC. This part is where a lot of problem happens in marketing. So if you have a marketing plan and you don’t have a clear execution framework, then you have a problem. The SOSTAC model, according to Pierre Smith, talks about change management. When you’ve done all your marketing strategy, planning, channels and everything, the execution phase suffers a lot. And this is because marketing by default operates in a very siloed environment.
Execution and the Importance of Project Management
Everything is so siloed because you have subject matter experts in each tactical channel that does not really have an understanding or an appreciation of the other channels and do not really understand the synergy across channels. should be a T-shaped marketing person, someone that has an appreciation and experience in search engine, paid advertising, direct marketing, email marketing, web analytics, UX, customer experience. It’s very difficult to find a T-shaped person with also the appetite and the appreciation of project management. A good example is a large organisation where you have one agency managing search advertising, paid advertising. You have another agency managing social media. You have a different agency managing search engine optimisation. You have a different agency managing digital PR. And then all this comes together and then you have different teams within the organisation managing that as well and the only interaction and collaboration they have is reporting into their own head of department and then they then have a leadership team. What I’m trying to say is what I’ve seen in big organizations and even small organisations is that project management when it comes to marketing is a major problem and it has a direct impact on performance of marketing. So for your effective marketing planning templates, you need to have a system in place. I’ve worked in organisations where they have a software solution that helps everyone within the organisation see their activity for the quarter. And then it then leads up to what the strategic initiative and the strategic vision is. and this clear visibility of the impact and the rationale for every marketing activity and every department. So it lines up perfectly. So what I’m trying to say here is for an effective marketing plan, you also need a collaboration tool. You have different software solutions out there. I’m not going to mention names.
Visibility and Control
This is very, very important to create visibility. for planning and execution to see how marketing activities are completed, what marketing activities are seasonal. It helps give people a holistic understanding of all the marketing activities going on and how they stack up, how they link up to the top of the company’s vision from a revenue and profit standpoint. So we then talk about Control which is the end of the SOS stack model Control is more about monitoring your KPIs to see how performance is Lining up. It’s how you track your customer acquisition costs how you track your customer lifetime value But the problem again why I say the SOS stack marketing framework is academic is because control Does not happen at the endControl which is looking at KPIs is an iterative thing. It’s when you’re doing your audit as well, your situation analysis. Control happens straight away from that start. It’s not at the end that it happens. So as I mentioned earlier on, for you to have an effective marketing plan, you need to first have a holistic marketing audit.
Building Your Holistic Marketing Audit
I’ve mentioned everything about the SOSTAC model as your starting point, but if you’re going to boil it down as a business leader, the first thing you want to ask your team or whoever is you’re bringing in as a consultant or an agency or your head of marketing is a marketing audit. I encourage you to move away from we need to do an SEO audit, we need to do a PPC audit, we need to do a content audit, we need to…you need one single audit that is a marketing audit and that marketing audit should contain all channel audits in one single document and that audit should then show the contribution, the revenue contribution, the marketing contribution of every channel within that. Once you have that marketing audit in place, you then need to then look at your baseline metrics.
Setting Metrics, Growth, and Stealing Market Share
what exactly are we doing now as a baseline? And it’s from that that you then project that, okay, for the next quarter, for the next year, we are aiming for a 5 % year-on-year growth or how many percent you want to establish. But you need to understand that that year-on-year growth is not going to happen magically. It’s going to happen if you steal from your competitors. You steal market share. I use the word steal because you need to get those from somewhere. So your competitors have a customer base as well. It’s either they steal from your market share or you steal from their market share. And if the market is not saturated already, then you need to then look at how can we create demand from people that do not even know they have that problem. How can we create demand for our product and services? And how can we then nurture those people, educate them, convert them and retain them to then build on our market share for a new market? But for a saturated market, the only way you’re going to achieve this is by increasing and improving your customer experience so you can get your customers from your competitors, get from their market share. And that’s how you grow.
Conclusion: Next Steps
So basically this is a marketing planning template. If you need help creating one that is bespoke for your organisation, I’m happy to come in and work with you to do a marketing audit. I’m not talking about SEO audit or PPC audit or this kind of audit, CRO audit and stuff like that. I’m talking about a holistic unified marketing audit that is then linked to your overall baseline objective. your revenue objective, your customer acquisition objective, customer conversion objective, customer retention objective, brand objective as well. So my name is Femi Olajiga. I’m a growth marketing consultant. If you need help creating an effective marketing plan that would help you improve your bottom line, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help you. Thank you.