How to Plan a Marketing Communication Mix Using the SOSTAC Framework

Most marketing campaigns don’t fail because of bad creative or poor media buying. They fail because no one asked the right questions before launching. Where are we now? Where do we need to go? How exactly will we get there? These questions sit at the heart of effective marketing communication planning – and they’re precisely what the SOSTAC® framework is designed to answer. Developed by UK marketer PR Smith in the 1990s and later formalized in his 1998 book Marketing Communications, SOSTAC has since been voted among the top three business models worldwide by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Its six stages – Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action, and Control – give marketers a clear, repeatable structure for building a marketing communication mix that actually works.

What makes SOSTAC different from other planning models? 🔗

Many planning models focus only on strategy or only on execution. SOSTAC does both. As Wikipedia’s entry on the model explains, its logic builds on an in-depth situation analysis that informs all subsequent decisions about strategy and tactics – and crucially, it also covers implementation. That’s the gap most plans leave open. SOSTAC closes it by treating action and control as first-class planning stages, not afterthoughts. The result is a framework that is equally useful for a small business planning a product launch and a multinational building an integrated global campaign.

Situation analysis: where are we now? 🔗

Every good plan starts with an honest look at reality. The situation analysis stage of SOSTAC is the most detailed section – and rightly so. According to PR Smith’s own explanation of the framework, it covers customer analysis (who buys from you and why), competitor analysis (including new entrants and substitutes), company analysis (what’s working and what isn’t), and an external environmental analysis using PEST or PESTEL factors – Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal.

The primary tool used in this stage is a SWOT analysis – an assessment of internal Strengths and Weaknesses, and external Opportunities and Threats. As Asana’s guide to SWOT analysis points out, the framework works best when it connects internal factors to real-world external conditions rather than treating each in isolation. For a marketing communication mix specifically, the situation analysis tells you which channels are currently performing, which audiences are underserved, and what competitors are doing that you aren’t.

A practical rule of thumb: half of your SOSTAC plan should be devoted to situation analysis, because the quality of every subsequent decision depends on how well you understand your starting point.

What a situation analysis should uncover 🔗

A thorough situation analysis goes beyond data collection. It should surface the key insights that will shape your strategy. This means understanding not just who your customers are, but why they choose you – or don’t. It means knowing where your brand sits in the competitive landscape, what gaps exist in the market, and what external forces (regulatory changes, shifting consumer behaviour, emerging technology) could affect your campaign. As Smartsheet’s guide to marketing SWOT analysis advises, back up your findings with data wherever possible. If your brand awareness has grown, explain why and how you know. If pricing is losing you customers, show the numbers. Analysis grounded in evidence leads to far better strategic decisions.

Setting objectives: where are we going? 🔗

Once you know your current position, you can set meaningful objectives. In SOSTAC, objectives answer a deceptively simple question: where do we want to be? The range of objectives in a marketing communication plan is wide. They can be sales-driven (increase revenue, grow market share, improve conversion rates), financial (improve return on investment, reduce cost per acquisition), or communication-focused – what PR Smith calls “marcomms objectives” – which relate to the state of mind of your target audience: awareness, preference, consideration, and purchase intent.

The classic model for marcomms objectives is AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. A campaign might aim to move a segment of the audience from unawareness to consideration, or from consideration to purchase. Short-term objectives might focus on immediate sales volume or event attendance. Longer-term objectives might centre on brand equity, share price perception, or customer loyalty.

Whatever the objectives, PR Smith is clear that they must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Vague objectives like “increase awareness” are not useful. A SMART version would be: “increase unaided brand awareness among 25-34-year-olds in the target market from 18% to 30% within six months.”

Developing strategy: how do we get there? 🔗

Strategy is where many plans go wrong – not because it’s complicated, but because it’s often confused with tactics. Strategy is the big picture of how you’ll achieve your objectives. It doesn’t say “we’ll run Facebook ads.” It says “we’ll target first-time buyers aged 28-40 through digital channels, using a value-led message that addresses price sensitivity, and we’ll prioritise brand consideration over immediate conversion in the first two months.”

As PR Smith explains, strategy is the shortest part of the plan, yet the most important – because if you get the strategy wrong, all the tactics that follow will also be wrong. No amount of flawless execution recovers a fundamentally misdirected strategy. The framework he uses to define strategy is the TOPPP SEED acronym: Target markets, Objectives, Positioning, Partnerships, Processes, Stages/Sequence, Engagement, Experience, and Data.

In the context of marketing communications specifically, the strategy stage must clarify three things: who you are targeting, what position or message you want to occupy in their minds, and how the budget and time frame will be distributed across the campaign. These decisions constrain and guide everything that follows.

Detailing tactics: what is the detail of the strategy? 🔗

If strategy is the what and why, tactics are the how. This is the stage where the marketing communication mix is actually defined – the specific tools, channels, and formats that will carry the campaign’s message to the target audience.

The marketing communication mix typically spans advertising (paid media, digital display, broadcast), public relations, direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, digital and social media, and content marketing. The tactics stage decides which of these tools will be used, in what combination, in what sequence, and with what budget allocated to each.

Sequence matters. A campaign might lead with awareness-building advertising in the first month, shift to retargeting and content in months two and three, then close with direct offers and conversion-focused messaging. As a detailed SOSTAC application analysis notes, the tactics section specifies the marketing communications mix in detail – including when each element must roll out. Budget allocation at this stage is not a rough estimate; it’s a committed plan tied to specific activities and expected outcomes.

Choosing the right mix of communication tools 🔗

Not every tool suits every campaign or audience. The situation analysis and strategy stages should already have narrowed the field. A B2B campaign targeting procurement managers will weight personal selling, thought leadership content, and industry PR very differently from a consumer campaign for a fast-moving consumer goods brand that relies on mass advertising and in-store promotion. The tactics stage also needs to account for the customer journey – which touchpoints exist at each stage (awareness, consideration, purchase, retention) and which communication tools are most effective at each.

Taking action: what steps are required? 🔗

A well-designed plan achieves nothing if it isn’t executed. The action stage is where SOSTAC moves from planning to doing – and it’s more than simply pressing “go.” This stage answers four questions: who does what, when, how, and with what resources?

As PR Smith emphasises, action includes what he calls “internal marketing” – the work of motivating, communicating with, and training your team (and any external agencies) to execute the tactics with genuine commitment. Each tactical tool in the communications mix is, in effect, a mini-project: a social media campaign, a press release series, an email sequence, a paid search campaign. Each has its own timeline, dependencies, skill requirements, and budget. The action stage maps all of this out.

PR Smith cites management thinker Peter Drucker’s observation that “everything degenerates into work” – a reminder that even the most elegant plan will only succeed if the execution is managed carefully. This includes decisions about whether to handle activities in-house or through external agencies, what technology and processes need to be in place, and whether the team has the skills required to deliver.

Implementing control: are we getting there? 🔗

The final stage of SOSTAC is what separates a living plan from a document that gets filed away after launch. Control is the system of checks and balances that monitors campaign performance in real time and enables adjustments before small problems become large ones.

Control requires defining key performance indicators (KPIs) at the objectives stage – because you can only measure progress against targets you’ve already set. These KPIs might include reach and frequency metrics, website traffic, lead generation rates, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, social media engagement, or customer satisfaction scores. As the SOSTAC application analysis notes, tools used for control can include web analytics platforms, site visitor profiles, frequency reporting, and usability tests.

Importantly, SOSTAC is designed as a circular process, not a linear one. The data gathered in the control stage feeds directly back into the situation analysis for the next planning cycle. A campaign that underperforms on awareness but overperforms on conversion tells you something valuable about where to invest in the next round. As the tabular.email analysis of SOSTAC explains, this cyclical logic means the plan continuously improves with each iteration.

Common pitfalls in the control stage 🔗

The most common failure in the control stage is setting up measurement systems too late – after the campaign has launched, rather than before. If tracking isn’t in place from day one, early data is lost and course corrections are delayed. A second pitfall is measuring outputs (how many posts went out, how many emails were sent) rather than outcomes (how many people moved from awareness to consideration, how many converted). Good control focuses relentlessly on outcomes tied to the objectives set at the beginning of the SOSTAC process.

SOSTAC as a continuous planning cycle 🔗

What makes SOSTAC genuinely useful – beyond its simplicity – is that it treats marketing communication planning as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time event. Each completed campaign cycle produces insights that sharpen the next situation analysis. Objectives become more calibrated. Strategy becomes more precise. Tactics become more targeted. The framework rewards consistency: teams that apply SOSTAC repeatedly get better at it, and their campaigns get stronger as a result.

Whether you’re planning a product launch, a brand awareness push, a customer retention campaign, or an integrated multichannel effort, the six stages of SOSTAC give you a structure that covers every critical decision – from the initial audit of where you stand to the measurement systems that tell you whether you’ve arrived where you intended to go.

What do you think? When you look at campaigns that have failed around you – brand, political, or social – which stage of the SOSTAC process do you think was most likely skipped or poorly executed? And if you were building a marketing communication plan for a product you know well, which stage do you think would be the hardest to get right?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSTAC
2. https://prsmith.org/sostac/
3. https://asana.com/resources/swot-analysis
4. https://www.smartsheet.com/content/marketing-swot-analysis
5. https://studycorgi.com/marketing-planning-with-situation-objectives-strategy-tactics-actions-and-control-sostac/
6. https://tabular.email/blog/sostac-marketing-model-with-plan-example