SOSTAC Model for Digital Marketing

The SOSTAC model was originally devised by PR Smith in the early 1990’s. The SOSTAC model is used to strategically plan and design a digital marketing campaign. SOSTAC is a straightforward step by step plan to building a marketing campaign. The acronym stands for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action, Control.

1) Situation Analysis:

This is the first stage of the plan. It involves looking at where you currently are in terms of marketing. It will provide an overview to the company. A good place to start to determine the company’s position would be to first look towards the customers. This can be done through digital marketing communication such as online surveys, a Facebook campaign or Google Analytics. The company must find out exactly what the breakdown of customer demographic is for the various platforms and how exactly they interact with the brand?

Secondly a company must assess its competition and see where exactly they are in comparison. By looking at what their competition is doing in their digital marketing campaigns the company can improve their marketing campaign by improving on the ideas of their competitors or bringing their campaigns up to par with their competitors.

Thirdly a company must assess its capabilities with budgeting/ resources etc, in other words can the company provide what its marketing campaigns promise to provide? Can the company sustain a consistent marketing campaign? And, what would the extent of the digital marketing campaign be?

Finally, a company should perform a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis to create a comprehensive look at the company which highlights their advantages and disadvantages as a business as well as figuring out where the company is exactly.

Questions to ask and areas to analyse during this stage include:

-          Where are we now?

-          How are we performing?

-          Who are our customers right now? (Customer segmentation etc)

-          Which digital channels are they using? , Are we using the correct communication & distribution channels?

-          What are our distinctive competition advantages and what are their key differentiators?

-          How effective is our marketing mix?

-          What uncontrollable event(s) or trend(s) can impact business? (PEST Analysis - political, economic, socio-cultural and technological)

2) Objectives:

Stage two is listing and defining the objectives of the marketing campaign. ‘In order for objectives to be successful, they need to be ‘SMART:’ specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound and should include the 5 S’s objectives: Sell, Serve, Sizzle, Speak, Save.’ - https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/sostac-model/.

This stage is all about using the information from Situation Analysis to create objectives. Objectives should generally be specific, measurable, accurate, realistic and timely (SMART) rather than broad or vague so that they are easy to measure and to highlight whether or not the target goal has been reached. The objectives must be measurable. This is very important as otherwise how will the company determine if the campaign is a success or a fail. Having a strict objective (such as timeframe) to achieve also allows you to quickly figure out if the campaign is performing well or not and might require a major change of course in order for it to get back on tract. An example of a specific measurable objective: To increase online engagement through Facebook by 10%. This will be measured by the amount of new likes over the timeline of one month.

Some other general questions to look at may be:

-          Where do we want to go?

-          What is the business mission?

-          What are the business objectives?

-          What are the marketing objectives? – Business development.

-          What are the Marketing Communication Objectives?

A breakdown of the SMART objectives, a few questions to ask may include:

-          Do they fit the certain criteria? (Specific)

-          Can you monitor progress and confirm achievement? (Measurable)

-          Can you realistically do it? (Actionable)

-          Are they realistically attainable? (Relevant/ Reasonable)

-          Incorporate deadlines into the objectives. (Timed)

3) Strategy:

For stage three, Strategy, the main question is ‘How do we get there?’ This involves analysing the information gathered during stage one, Situation Analysis, in order to determine how to meet the Objectives from stage two.

The company will develop a structure for the digital marketing campaign. It comprises of a plan of action to achieve the objectives. This strategy must address the company’s objectives. The strategy is created by determining what must be done.

Firstly the company must determine Targeting. This is who exactly the company plans to target with their digital marketing campaign i.e. children, young teens or adults?

The second stage is the proposition the marketing campaign is making towards the consumer it is targeting. These propositions are composed of a ‘Marketing mix’, such as, what the product is?, the price of the product?, how much promotion the product is receiving?, and where exactly you can acquire the product?. Both the proposition and marketing mix is used in an attempt to entice the consumer to buy the product.

Next is the brand strategy, your company’s brand identifies your company’s product/ service so that it is distinct from other sellers in the market. Branding is essential in order to capture a large share of the market and instill a sense of customer loyalty and trust. A good brand image would be instantly relatable to the product/service you are trying to sell to your customers. One such example is Coke Cola. Their brand image is instantly recognizable and there can be no doubt in what exactly they are selling to their consumers

Next stage is online representation. This stage takes into account what kind of online presence you currently have in the form of a website, blog, social media and search engines optimisation and looks at what exactly it is your currently doing with these forms of online promotion. This ties into the next point of the type of online content a company puts out.

The content a company puts out and the engagement it measures looks at what content your current forms of online media are putting out and tries to see what it can improve or do differently in order to captivate an audience. Content can be changed to be more relevant, interesting or helpful while the company’s engagement can come through forms such as YouTube or Facebook or by developing new platforms to speak from such as new popular mediums such as Twitter.

Once the content has engaged a customer the company then must devise a way to keep the customer’s attention once you have achieved it through your advertising campaign. This can be done by creating consistent high quality content that is engaging and important to the consumers wants or interests such as frequently uploading to the chosen platform ie: Facebook.

Retention of a consumer’s attention is important as it means you will not have to spend money in the future in order to regain their attention thus it is cost effective and good for your long term strategy to keep a consumers attention once it has been attained.

Questions to consider include:

-          Customer Segmentation, How will the market be divided up?

-          Market Targeting, Which segments of the market do we decide to focus on?

-          Market Position, How do we wish to be perceived in each targeted segment? How do we wish to be positioned?

4) Tactics:

Stage four, Tactics, is about how to implement the strategy from stage three. Tactics are small tasks carried out to implement the overall strategy that has been pre-planned. E- Tools are used to implement these tactics, these e-tools can be such things like developing a blog for the company that can act as an online source of information or as a newsletter allowing customers to find out what your company is doing by giving you there e-mail addresses. Social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter should also be used.

Businesses and organisations use Facebook to set up fan pages in order to spread their brand image and connect with fans cheaply while issuing statements on upcoming products or digital marketing campaigns. The above E-Tools are essential for conducting a comprehensive digital marketing campaign by using various forms of communication mediums and rich media.

The tactics, however, must be simple to follow and precise so that a level of consistency can be established by anybody overlooking the implementation of the tactics. An example of a precise tactic would be; posting content on social media twice a day, every day at 10 am and 8pm highlighting the product/ service. In comparison a vague tactic such as ‘post to Facebook everyday’ , is not optimal.

-          How do we implement the strategy?

-          Which communication tools do we wish to use?

-          How do we plan to use them?

-          What message do we wish to communicate to the target market?

-          Is there consistency across the different communication tools?

-          Is there sufficient/ necessary resources/ budget available?

5) Action:

In Stage five we look at the ‘Details of the tactics, who does what and when?’ – (Smartinsights.com). This may be the most important stage as poor actions can potentially ruin a well thought out digital marketing strategy.

The action stage involves putting into motion the tactics from stage four. Action is how these tactics are carried out. How an action is performed is essential in how well it will be received by the consumers. It is important to assign these specific actions to people within the company. This will give each person a role to play in the implementation of the action. Providing a deadline will also help keep people on track.

-          How will performance be recorded?

-          Who is going to do what?

-          When are they going to do it?

-          What are they going to do?

-          What is the allocation of resources for this? (Budget, People)

-          What are the key performance measurements for Strategy, Objectives and Tactics?

6) Control:

The final stage is to plan how we are going to monitor performance and measure whether we’re meeting the objectives. Control is the overseeing of the strategy and tactics of the digital marketing campaign. This stage is used to measure, monitor, review, update or adjust the campaign, if needed.

Control can also be used to change certain aspects of the digital marketing campaign in order to improve it if these certain aspects are not working. The campaign can be measured and monitor by using Google Analytics and Google Adwords, with this the company will be able to access customer feedback more easily such as site traffic etc.

This feedback from Google Analytics and Google Adwords can help to further refine and make improvements for future digital campaigns. For instance “Wispa” created by Cadburys was brought back after the bar received large amounts of consumer support from sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In this way a strong digital marketing campaign and strong internet presence can be essential to becoming a profitable, successful company by providing information and a large degree of control that companies that still rely on traditional marketing cannot match.

Lastly, a contingency plan can be created for the advertising campaign to fall back on if the campaign is a complete failure and needs a major restructuring in order to be successful.

-          What are the KPI’s and which monitoring and reporting tools will you use?

-          Do the action performance measurements relate to the outlined objectives?

-          Frequency of measurement?

-          Review of measurement?

-          Resources for measurement?

-          Responsibility for measurement?

-          Actions on variance?