SOSTAC Planning guide for Marketing Strategy

An Introduction to the SOSTAC Model - “To fail to plan is to plan to fail”

Ask any consultant, business adviser or successful business owner what you need when starting or developing a business? The answer will invariably include “A Good Marketing Plan”.

It is certainly the case that if you want to successfully build a business, a plan of where you are going is essential.

But it can be little help if this plan is simply an overview of objectives and marketing strategy. It is important that the plan is a practical document, actively used in the ongoing management of the business, rather than a nice report that sits on a shelf gathering dust.

Over many years working with clients in developing effective marketing strategy and plans, we have found that the SOSTAC Model developed in the 1990’s by PR Smith is difficult to beat. It is a straightforward model that goes systematically through the steps to build a marketing plan, and helps to ensure that all relevant factors are considered, without the need to go into excessive and expensive detail.

The model then continues to look at the practical issues of putting the plan into practice.

SOSTAC is an Acronym for the 6 basic elements of the Marketing Plan:

• Situation Where are we now?
• Objectives Where do we want to get to?
• Strategy How are we going to get there? – The Big Picture
• Tactics How are we going to get there? – The Detail
• Actions Who is going to do what and when?
• Control How can we control, measure and develop the process?

Each element relates to a key step in the process. Simply work through the Pro-Forma (which is available to download here) step by step and fill in the gaps to suit your business and your goals.

One thing you need to be aware of: Often people deal with the SOS of SOSTAC as a wish-list of achievements and then fail to develop and implement a detailed, controllable & measurable action plan (the TAC). This leads to a statement of great goals with no clear idea of how – or even if you can achieve them.

You can download a full pro forma for the SOSTAC model here. Hopefully you will find it useful.