You've just had what you believe to be a brilliant idea for expanding your company. You collaborate to form a small but powerful team and put your ideas into action. You present your idea with enthusiasm, assurance, and a plan to win over early adopters. You launch your product in a test market so as to verify/validate your product/services and make necessary improvements if required. You hope that, following initial success, you will be able to construct data-driven pitches that will convince investors to provide respectable funding.
But after a while, you realize that your strategy didn't work since the outcome wasn't what you had anticipated.
Your product does not address customers' latent needs, the market is a "red ocean" due to competition, or industry priorities have shifted due to macroeconomic factors, making it impossible to attract enough customers. Then you start questioning the soundness of your business model, product roadmap, and the scalability of your value proposition. Although each startup failure is distinct, there are certain common mistakes. Here are a few reasons why firms fail, according to CB Insights after examining 101 company failures. a) No market need. b) Ran out of cash. c) Choosing the Wrong Team d) Price and Cost Concerns e) User Unfriendly Product f) Poorly planned marketing.
What should you do? Should you go back to the drawing board or modify your approach by shifting gears and hitting the accelerator?
To succeed and create intended value, however, you need a solid business model and a dynamic plan that offer a strategy for scaling, marketing, distribution, monetization, partnerships, adaptability, and more.
Use a Strategy Model to pivot your approach.
You should pivot your approach towards strategy in search of a viable solution.
The PR Smiths' SOSTAC Model offers a solid foundation for building a comprehensive approach for situation appraisals, implementation tactics, and monitoring measures that can be constantly evolved and improved over time to help you deliver on your desired business outcomes.
To put the SOSTAC process into practice, follow this step-by-step guide and you'll be well on your way to using it as a fundamental component of your strategic planning before a product launch or Go-To-Market campaign.
Situation Analysis:
Where are we now?
This is the first stage of the model where the situation of the company, its position in the market, the competition in the market, and the overall market situation are analyzed in this stage.
This section should be an AS-IS picture of your organization.
Objective setting: What do we want to be? Where do we want to get to? What are our goals?
The objectives of the organization and its goals are the second important element of the plan. Create objectives that can be both measurable and realistic, focusing on the 5 S’s i.e, Sell, Serve, Speak, Save, and Sizzle. This makes each objective smart depending on the value we want to drive out of it.
Now let's assume you want to increase the company's profit. If that is the case, then your objectives would be something like this: how do we want to be? We want to increase profit by 100% in a year or a maximum of 2 years. If you want to develop a competitive edge, you must set a goal that will allow you to evaluate your competitors and asses the needs of your stakeholders before better addressing those needs.
The organization should understand the impact of various factors that affect its ability to achieve the objectives in order to formulate strategies for achieving them.
Strategy: Where do we want to go? What is the business trying to accomplish? How are we going to get there?
The Big Picture thinking is different from “blue-sky” or "strategic" planning because it requires understanding of business opportunities and challenges in a larger context. Having a big picture understanding requires using both a top-down (systems perspective) and bottom-up (industry analysis) approach in identifying the major trends that are affecting the industry and company.
The strategy is the actual plan for the organization in the SOSTAC model, where the company formulates the actual plan of how to communicate the objectives to the target market. The target market comprises customers who value the service provided and the quality of the communication or information being communicated. The strategy section should also identify which segments of the market you aim to target with your plan.
Tactics: How are we going to get there? When and where do you plan to deploy the product or service? --The Detail
Your tactics refer to the specific activities that you intend to undertake in order to fulfill your mission and realize your vision.
If your vision is to have a range of easy-to-adopt low-cost solutions, then you need to have tactics to develop products that are simple and inexpensive to adopt and operate on a self service model.
From a marketing plan perspective, tactics correspond to the actual method of deploying the strategy in the target market (i.e., the methods of advertising or communicating the objectives through a different medium). The message that is going to be conveyed should be of high quality and consistent, and there should be an emphasis on clear and concise communication.
A perfect business plan for any company will include a long-term strategy and short-term tactics that can be implemented immediately.
Action: What specific actions are going to be taken, by whom, and when? What are the financial requirements that need to be met in order to get things done?
Within the context of the marketing plan, the action plan details key role players. There is an explanation of both the role and the responsibilities. The demographics of the intended users have been established. Goals have been defined. The money for the project has been set aside.
Control: How can we control, measure, and develop the process? Are metrics and key performance indicators being defined? Are we tracking progress toward goals?
Control in the SOSTAC model is the final element that is achieved by defining key performance areas (KPA) that are used to control the use of resources, the effectiveness of tactics deployed, and the efficient realization of planned results.
For instance, if a SAAS product is launched on the website, the following questions should be asked: what is the traffic through campaigns; what is the number of demos; what is the number of downloads; what is the number of queries; what is the number of marketing qualified leads to purchase? What is the cost per acquisition (CPA)? Have we met our goals? etc. In general, if your SAAS product is not marketed through the website, the marketing will be separated into components – social media presence, ad campaigns with blogs and other Internet media, contests and promotions in cooperation with partners and lead generation. If we don't use KPIs we will make irrational decisions and go on spending money, time and effort on a product that has no future.
The controls are utilised to determine how successfully the marketing communication plan has executed the strategies that it has developed and the tactics that it has put into action.
Conclusion
To win the game with 100% certainty, you must obtain all of the marbles or all of the market share, which is unattainable for a small or mid-sized business.
The best way to get that is by using the six step SOSTAC model of strategic planning discussed earlier
The marketing communication plan formulated using the SOSTAC model has proved that the model can be deployed with ease for organizations of varying sizes, irrespective of the nature of the business. Each element relates to a key step in the process. Simply work through the Pro-Forma on the following step-by-step and fill in the gaps to suit your business and your goals.
If you want to improve your marketing decisions and use the SOSTAC model but aren't sure how to do so, contact us for a complimentary session.