I can only apologise for being a lover of bacon and I have no wish to offend non meat eaters. You see, I was looking around for a metaphor for something multi-layered that I would enjoy writing about, hence why a great marketing action plan is worth its weight in bacon.
The S.O.S.T.A.C*. Marketing Action Plan
I love this model of a marketing plan. It has stood me in good stead working for the likes of Apple, for myself and my clients. Each element is perfect and makes a winning combination just like a bacon butty (or in my case a soft scotch roll).
Here’s S.O.S.T.A.C. broken down into the elements. The wonder of it is that anyone can grasp the idea and put an effective marketing plan into operation. My favourite element is the ‘A’ and you’ll see why further along in this piece.
O’, when looking for prompts online, pick the simplest explanation, marketers tend to complicate this marketing model and remember one thing. DO NOT follow slavishly, instead bring your business, your ideas and your ambition and make the plan your own.
- Situation (analysis)
- Objectives
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Action
- Control
Situation Analysis
This can be quite basic as you are answering a simple question ‘Where are we now?’ Ask yourself and be honest about the state of the business. For example, you can go further with this part with a SWOT (Situation Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis.
Keep it simple, in bacon terms the Situation Analysis would be ‘I’m hungry and there’s some lovely bacon in the fridge.’
Objectives
Again, this can be as simple as ‘where do we want to be?’ This can be estimations eg £X amount of sales per month, per year etc. I would stick to the most important three otherwise focus on the objectives becomes muddled.
In bacon terms, this is ‘I want to eat the best possible bacon sandwich.
Strategy
This is more of a summary, of how you are going to fulfil the objectives. This could be along the lines of ‘best possible HUMAN customer care on the market’. This can even become your OVP (Online Value Proposition), this is what you often see at the top (masthead) of the website. A unique phrase that sums you up as a business and makes you different from your competition.
Examples:
Grammarly: ‘Great writing, simplified’
Slack: ‘Slack makes it downright pleasant to work together’
When it comes to the bacon sarnie, you don’t need a strategy eh? Just eat the lovely thing.
Tactics
These are the details of your strategy. For example, in online marketing, you could take the different traffic channels and produce a tactic that fulfils the strategy. So, for organic (search) traffic the tactic would be the use of content, copy, blog posts, and videos that have a subtext (unconscious signals) showing that the business cares (testimonials).
Which tactics do you need for the perfect bacon sandwich? You don’t do you, just get the damn thing made (see, simplify your plans, know where you want to go).
Action
My favourite part of S.O.S.T.A.C. is ACTION. How to put the tactics into place. You may need a first-rate empathetic and human copywriter. The action is to hire a copywriter and the details of how you will go about that.
When I produce an Action plan I aim to put the actions into priority order.
What’s the bacon Action? Eat it!
Control
‘How do we know we are getting there?’ This element is about tracking and a few other things, like control of budget, working with people and resources you need, hardware, software and the like.
I produce a dashboard for every client. A grand word for what is a spreadsheet where I will track their business on a weekly and monthly basis. The dashboard might have sales value, sales as a percentage of targets and any other business stats that are vital for growth e.g. the number of subscribers to the email list.
My dashboards also have a website health value in terms of keyword rankings, links into the site, unique visitors and more engagement-based stats along with a percentage value for conversion to sale, lead or subscriber. Many other values can be chosen to be specific to the business.
In bacon-eating terms, there is no control.
Enjoy your eats,
About Conversion Detectives
Conversion Detectives is a full-service digital marketing agency in Hertfordshire.
We find the best quality traffic for your website and convert more of that traffic into sales or sales leads.
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