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The Digital Marketing Podcast
What is PR Smith’s SOSTAC® Plan and why should you be using it?
00:16:59
If you have ever studied marketing you will have come across . But what is SOSTAC® and how can you use it to improve your results in a digital world? Daniel walks us through this daddy of marketing planning systems with a specific focus on how...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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B
And I'm Daniel Rawls.
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A
And today, Daniel, we're talking about sostack for the digital world.
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B
Yes. So if you've ever studied marketing or traditional marketing, it's such a sexy term, sostack, you've probably come across sostack, and it's an acronym and it's by a chap called Paul R. Smith. So thank you very much. Paul Smith put this into the world and it works really well in a digital environment. So I want to just take you through what it is and how we apply it when we're looking at organizations. Now, we've used softack for small businesses, for massive global organizations, for consumer face businesses, retail, for B2B, for charities. It works pretty much universally and. And it's just a planning model and it's an acronym for the following. So you've got situation or situational analysis objectives. So what are we trying to do? Strategy or strategic positioning, as I'm going to talk about it today, tactics and action. So the channels and the things that we're actually doing and then control, which is measurement. So essentially these are the key things you need to think about when you're planning out what you're going to do. And we'll go through it step by step and I'll talk about how we apply this in a kind of digital world. Now, it has been pointed out to me, and I normally point this out on training courses that I run as well, that there are lots of other strategy and planning models out there, but actually all they really are is softack written out differently. Generally speaking, it's a bit of a generalization, but my point is not that people have copied Tostack, which they may well have done because it is a very good model, but more, these are the things you should consider. So any model worth its weight really should actually include these elements. So let's go through them one by one.
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A
So tell us about situation then, Daniel.
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B
So what we're talking about here is where are we now? Situational analysis. Now, the risk here is what you do is you go off and measure everything that you can measure and write it down. So you get all your analytics data and you write it all down somewhere and you get your email marketing data and you write it down somewhere and you get your sales data and you write it down somewhere and you just end up with huge volumes of stuff kind of logged, which Is okay. But you can go back and visit that stuff historically anyway, and we've all done it.
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A
And you feel, you know, real, real champion, real hero thing to do, right? Well, I work really hard. It's been really dull and I've got all this stuff.
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Yeah. And the reality is that actually you could have gone back and historically looked at that stuff anyway, so it hasn't really achieved anything. So I would say, yes, you need your internal data, but you also want to look at external data at this, this point, which is basically looking at what is the level of adoption of this particular social platform. How many people using smartphones, how long does it take them to make buying decisions? How many touch points are there before a buying decision? Who are our Personas at this stage? So who are the people that buy our stuff? What's their average user journey? So you're really trying to understand your target audience and how they use digital and the other kind of channels as well. So internal data, yes, that's fine. But external data, looking at your target audience a lot more as well. I would also, at this stage, go and look at your digital capability. So we did an episode very recently about your guide to digital failure, which basically talks about the different things that you need to think about when you're going for a kind of transformation process or the things that are going to slow you down and cause you problems. When you're doing digital, you want to look at those in your situation analysis as well. Have we got leadership buying for these kind of things? Can we measure things properly? All those kind of things? So if you haven't listened to that episode, it's worth a listen as well. So situation analysis, internal data, external data, some capability, kind of marking where our challenges are going to be. Around this as well. You might do some skills benchmarking at this stage as well, to go through and say, actually, where are we as a team? Do we know what we need to know and how do we need to improve our skills? Because it's setting the bedrock for where you're going to go moving forwards.
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A
So that situation, the next one is objectives. How do we go about objectives? Because they're, they're simple things, but you can slip up on them, I think.
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B
Yeah, I try and simplify them massively. So what we would talk about this stage is your primary objectives and your business objectives. And this ties in with a measurement framework that I use quite a lot. And again, in the show notes targetinternet.com podcasts, we will go through and put the link into the measurement framework as well. But your primary objective is the nearest thing I can get you to do online to my end. Business objective. So only really three types of businesses in my opinion. One is E commerce, where my primary objective is my business objective. It's the same thing. I just want you to make a purchase online. Okay. So that's relatively straightforward. The next is your kind of lead generation. Most B2B, some charities fall into this, where I want you to fill in a form, I want you to come to my website, and I want you to fill in a kind of contact form to say, yes, I'd like to do something with you. The third and trickier type of business is a brand of some form where we're trying to do brand building. So my primary objective is you engaging with something online, some content perhaps, but then two weeks later, you might walk into my shop. So that's a little bit more complicated. But it doesn't matter because we've still identified what our primary objective is. And that primary objective is you doing something with my website or with my social media or engaging with content in some way. And I define what that looks like. Is that you staying on the website more than five minutes and looking at five pages, Is it you reading an article? Is it you staying to the end of a video? It doesn't matter. But essentially I'm setting this primary objective of what I think is going to look like success. So E commerce, you can measure it directly with lead generation, you can measure it directly with brand. You need some sort of proxy that you say, I think doing this will lead to you doing this. And then you set that as a goal in your analytics. So you set up maybe a destination goal which says when someone gets to this page, that's success. Or you set up an event goal, which is when someone maybe scrolls to the bottom of a page or plays a video to the end or something similar to that as well. A destination goal could be someone to say thank you for buying or thank you for filling in the form as well. So objectives is very much about saying, what's the thing I want you to do? You might have a number of these objectives, but you set them as analytics goals, and then you're able to kind of measure backwards afterwards.
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A
And I guess more broadly speaking, if you're not necessarily going for that engagement online, you find other things that you could measure.
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Yeah, absolutely. Just deciding, what is my proxy for success? What do I want you to do? And then I set it as an analytics goal. Now, I might be wrong. I Might find out that proxy for success doesn't actually lead to what I want. But then I can iterate and go backwards. But until I set some sort of measurement, then it's hard to know what I'm achieving.
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Yeah. And you have to look at analytics quite broadly. So if you're in retail then footfall counts, right? That you know, it's an analytical measurement.
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Yeah. So what we would normally do then it says my primary online objective is some form of engagement with content or certain number of people seeing my ads or whatever it may be. And then I try and say is there a connection between that and football? And I can, I can measure the two things. So my primary objective, my business objective, I'm trying to make the connection. So that situation, where are we now objectives? Where do we want to be next?
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One is strategy or strategic positioning.
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Yeah. So the way I use this model, we now talk about strategic positioning which is kind of what do we stand for?
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Why? Because when we were discussing about that, you were very specific on this. Oh no, it's more strategic. What's the difference?
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Because otherwise if we're trying to use this as a strategy model and one of the bullet points in the strategy model is strategy, it all gets a little bit confusing. So my key thing with this is when we talk about strategy, it's like it's the big how are we going to do this? What do we kind of stand for? And I think strategic positioning simplifies it a little bit.
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I love that model you've just given. So what is your strategy? Our model. Our strategy is strategy.
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Yeah, exactly. I see your point and it does get a bit confusing. So strategic positioning is very simple. It's like brand positioning or value proposition is what we stand for. So for a lot of B2B's it's we are the thought leaders in the market. We are going to demonstrate our expertise through our kind of excellent content. If you are a sports brand, it might be we bring out the athlete in everyone and it's not about, that's a strap line. What it's about is what value do we deliver with our digital activity. So for target Internet it's not we make the best digital marketing elearning, although we do clearly, but it's very much more straightforward and hands on, practical digital marketing advice. That's our kind of positioning. So the content we then create is about giving that hands on advice that builds trust, it builds the brand over a period of time and then people come to us when they want that particular thing. So it's just understanding what you stand for. And if you don't know what you stand for, it's very hard to do any form of content, content marketing. It's hard to know where you focus your campaigns. It's hard to go, does this work for us?
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A
It brings me back to my favorite line in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland where Alice is saying, I think she says to the Mad Hatter, no, it's not. It's the Cheshire Cat. Get this right. Oh, it's such a good story, but I've ruined it. So she speaks to the Cheshire, Catch. Excuse me, but can you tell me where I need to go? And he says, well, that would very much depend on where you want to end up. And she said, well, I don't know. And he smiles at her and says, well, doesn't really matter then, does it?
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There you go. Exactly.
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See, it was relevant.
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It was a very good anecdote eventually. Exactly. And this is it. We need to understand what we stand for. And I think there's lots of examples of brands that haven't really clarified this internally. And therefore it's very hard to make decisions if this is the right thing to do or not. So situation analysis. Where are we now? Objectives? What are we trying to do? Strategic positioning, how are we really going to kind of position ourselves and go about it?
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The next one is tactics.
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Yeah, the next two tactics and action I tend to put together. So this is basically which channels, when and with what resources. So you're going through and saying, right, based on my situation analysis, we think these are the most appropriate channels for us to be using. This is the way in which we're going to use them. And these are resources and the time planning. So here, things like your content calendar, incoming, what channels are we using and when, what are we publishing and when. But thinking about how the channels interact with one another as well at this.
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A
Stage, I can feel it coming together. It's like a well actioned plan, isn't it? I can almost go back visually to a 1950s post war movie with the major with the pointy stick and the moustache and saying, we're going to be attacking here, here and here.
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B
That's very much about it. You are on fire with your analogies today.
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No, but I love it. It's all coming together. It's a beautiful story.
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B
So there's again in the show notes, we will put in our content calendar which tries to tie together your content, your search optimization, your social media, your email marketing, any advertising that you're doing kind of paid stuff and also any outreach that you're doing. So we're just trying to knit this together. And actually a content calendar helps that. You also want to think about things like your social media processes and your social policy at this stage to make sure everyone knows what they should be doing and how they should be going about it. And it's the tactical stuff in here, it's the real planning. But bear in mind one thing I always say is that we get into this habit of saying, right, I've got a 12,000 pound budget, so I'm going to spend £1,000amonth or I've got $12 million to spend, I'm going to spend a million dollars a month, ramp things up and down, think about the stages of a campaign or the stages of a product life cycle and, and work out. Actually, would you be better off doing a big push at the front and then using some different tactics as you go forwards and just playing around with how you kind of do these channels at the same time? And the reality is quite often you'll find that doing things at the same time will do more of an impact than doing things individually, but spending more. So just messing about with the mix of marketing, basically.
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A
Yeah. So I'm going to go back to my analogy now. So very often in these war movies they have those little toy representations of the different campaigns. Why haven't they moved them around?
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So little tanks.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to play with your toys, right? You got to, you know, adjust things, play around with different scenarios. I think that's kind of what you're saying.
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B
Yeah, it is. And I think that you think about, when we talk about a culture of learning and a culture of innovation within this tactics and action, we need to think about mixing the channels differently. And I am asked a lot about what's the right marketing mix for this type of organization. How much should we spend on paid search? How much should be display advertising? How much of it should be SEO? There is no answer, there's no default answer. You can kind of be sensible and go, well, if your target audience is searching in Google a lot, organic search is going to be important. And I know that they hang out in these places, so display will be good. So you can start with some assumptions from your situational analysis, but then you need to experiment and go, what happens if I turn this up? What happens if I turn that down? And unless you've got a decent measurement framework in place, it's quite hard to do that. But also Measurement frameworks are not the solution to everything. So we've got an upcoming episode about that as well. But effectively experimentation at this stage. So situation analysis, where are we now? Objectives? What are we trying to do? Strategic positioning, how are we going to kind of do that? Tactics and action tactically, what are the channels to deliver it?
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A
Now we need to put the C into soft stack.
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We do. So control is the final one and control is just measurement. Now, if you've followed the advice so far and you have set up your objectives as analytics goals and we've called those primary objectives, you are then tracking your primary objectives. How many people are doing the things I want them to do. And then you go in and you go, okay, I've got a fact here that this has happened from my analytics data. Something's gone up, something's gone down. I'm going to come up with a hypothesis. I reckon if we get more traffic from Twitter, for example, I, I think that would improve things. So you go off and you run a little experiment and you do something to try and improve your Twitter traffic and then you go, right, did that drive my primary objective? So you're going back to what you define as your primary objective and you're looking for experiment opportunities.
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A
And I want to remind you all of something really important with this because very often people try stuff and it doesn't work and they think, oh, I failed. No, you didn't, you learned and you can discount that and move on to something else. So actually it's great, it's win, win.
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It is. And I'd also say the other thing is make sure when you do something as an experiment, you have done all the variables. So my example is that people, a new social channel might arrive. This happened a lot with Twitter and people got Twitter at the beginning and said, brilliant, we're going to do Twitter, let's do some tweeting. So they'd go off and they'd tweet some stuff and they'd lose a bit of it and they all need to tweet again. They'd go back to it and do some more tweets. And then at the end of like a three month period, they go, did it work? And they went, well, we got a few followers and some retweets, but not really the reason being. They didn't experiment with all the variables. They didn't look at the frequency of tweeting, they didn't look at the particular content they were tweeting, they didn't look at the audience, they didn't look at time of day. So you've got to make sure you've tested all of the variables and actually you might find it didn't work this time. Let's come back to it again later. Let's try another variable test. Let's try a different frequency, different content to try and drive more engagement, whatever it may be. But don't dismiss a channel because you've done an experiment and it didn't work unless you're absolutely sure you've tried all the different variables and it's not an easy thing to to do. So yes, maybe come back to it later, but iterate through that process. So this is an iterative model because then what you do is you go back and say, okay, we've seen this measure. When we change this, we're now going to change our tactics and action. Or you might say, do you know what we need to change our strategic positioning? This isn't working. Or you might even say our objectives are wrong. And then you are going to need to go back and look at actually has the situation changed? So you keep working through this. So I absolutely love Softack and I thank Paul R. Smith for kind of coming up with it. We'll put the link in the show notes through to his website and his content as well. He has done a little book on Softack in a digital world and he's done some other great books as well. So we'll link through to that. But it's just a good model because it makes you think about the things you need to think about. So you can use any number of different strategy models. But I think this is a great one because it's very practical. And as I said, we've tried and tested this in a lot of different places and it does work.
- [15:57]
A
So have great fun with it. And remember, the fake moustache and the pointy stick are optional.
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B
Thank you very much for that final point there, Kieran. As ever, thank you very much for listening and we'll see you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.
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A
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to.