SOSTAC Model for Digital Marketing

SOSTAC Model for Digital Marketing – Zengvotech

SOSTAC model for digital marketing was developed by PR Smith in the 1990s, by using this model you will have a clear structure that makes your quicker and easier to create the plan strategies or campaigns. Zengvotech also follow this model for marketing and business planning

SOSTAC stands for:

• S stands for Situation Analysis – which means where are we now?
• O stands for Objectives which means where do we want to go?
• S stands for Strategy which summarizes how we are going to get there.
• T stands for Tactics which are the details of strategy.
• A stands for Action or implementation – putting the plan to work.
• C stands for Control which means measurement, monitoring, reviewing, updating and modifying.

Situation analysis

Take 20% of your time to analyze the situation to see where you are now. This first stage is all about looking at your current situation. Some questions to consider include:

• Who are your digital customers right now?
• Which digital channels are they using?
• Who are your competitors and what are their key differentiation?
• How are we performing?
• How effective is our marketing mix?

Objectives analysis

Take 5% of your time to understand where you want to get to, different stages should have different objectives for of the online customer lifecycle. Questions to consider include:

• What’s my business mission and vision?
• What’s my business, marketing and communication objectives?
• Use the SMART framework to qualify objectives (Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Bound)

Strategy analysis

Take the bulk of your time, around 45%, to consider what you need to do to reach your objectives. Strategies involve in analyzing the information & determine how you’ll meet the ‘objectives’. Questions worth answering include:

• Which segments are you going to target?
• Which segments of the markets do we want to focus on? (Targeting)
• How do we want to be perceived in each of the different target segments? (Positioning)
• What is your online value proposition? In other words, how are you going to differentiate yourself online?

Tactics analysis

Use 30% of your time to plan how you will implement your strategy. Just think which digital tools are right for your target audience and how you are going to use them. However, without the foundation of the earlier stages, you stand a very good chance of wasting time and money here. Some questions include:

• How will your choice of tools allow you to target the intended audience?
• How will you convey your online value proposition?
• What content do you need to develop (emails, posts, ads, landing pages, etc.)
• Do we have the necessary resources and budget?

Action analysis

Only now is it time to precede and take action. You will need to understand:

• Who is going to do what?
• When are they going to do it?
• What are the resource allocations for the actions?
• How is performance going to be recorded?

Control analysis

The last stage is to plan how you are going to monitor and measure whether you’re meeting your strategy’s ‘objectives’. What are the KPI’s and which monitoring and reporting tools will you use? You need to be able to control your digital marketing strategy and keep track of your progress. You need to know:

• Do the KPIs relate to your business, marketing and communication objectives?
• Who is responsible for measurement?
• What resources are allocated for measurement?
• How do we review our measurements?
• What actions do we take on variance?

So over all we can say that SOSTAC Model for Digital Marketing is very useful strategy for any marketing because this model identifies needs and wants of consumers, new product areas, new and/or potential customers, competitors and analyzes your product’s or firm’s competitive advantage, determines demand for a product etc.