What this is about
This article is part of our Strategy & Frameworks topic cluster — an overview of all articles on frameworks, models, and cognitive biases in digital business.
Most marketing plans in Swiss SMEs are either too long and academic or too short and arbitrary. Neither version is much use in execution. What's missing is a structure that's disciplined on one side and survives the reality of an SME day-to-day on the other — where marketing leads are often also handling sales, HR, and sometimes IT.
British marketing strategist PR Smith developed a framework in the late 1980s that fills exactly that gap: SOSTAC. Six letters, six phases, sketchable on a napkin in 30 seconds — and deep enough that KPMG, LinkedIn EMEA, and countless consulting engagements have used it as a standard structure for decades. In Swiss consulting practice it's also our default frame the moment an SME wants to work seriously on its marketing. Which isn't the same as "we copy the textbook" — it's "we adapt the six phases to what's realistic to deliver in an SME's day-to-day".
In this article we walk through the six phases honestly and with concrete SME examples. You get a view of where SOSTAC really helps and where you can pragmatically shortcut it. Anyone looking for the full consulting frame can find it in our Strategy & Transformation programs.
The six phases at a glance
SOSTAC stands for Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action, Control. Three phases up front: where are we, where do we want to go, how do we get there? Three phases after: what do we do concretely, who does what when, and how do we measure? Plus an implicit seventh part: the 3Ms — Men and Women (people), Money (budget), Minutes (time). Without clear resource allocation, every plan stays theory.
PR Smith himself recommends devoting about half a plan to the situation analysis. In SME practice we deviate from that — most SMEs have six weeks for the whole planning effort, not six weeks just for the audit part. Pragmatism beats completeness. Which doesn't mean situation analysis gets shortchanged — it means we deliberately decide which parts to go deep on.
Situation Analysis (S) — where do we really stand?
This is where most marketing plans fail. Not because the phase is too difficult, but because it's uncomfortable. An honest situation analysis means: look where it hurts. Which channels actually deliver no ROI? Which customers are unprofitable? Which competitors have overtaken us in the past two years? What didn't we know about our own market that's now obvious?
PR Smith structures the situation analysis into six components: customers, competition, partners and intermediaries, own competences, performance results from the previous period, and market trends. In SME practice we prioritise the first three — customers, competition, own competences — and pick up the others opportunistically where data already exists.
Customer analysis: "Who, why, how?" is Smith's pivot point. Who are our best customers really (demographics, industry, pain profile)? Why do they buy from us (the honest answer, not the marketing-brochure answer)? How do they buy (which path, which channels, which triggers)? For most SMEs these three questions alone are gold-mine enough — anyone who can't answer them hasn't understood their market, regardless of how many persona templates they've filled out.
SME consulting example: A Berne-based fiduciary firm comes to us with "we want more new clients". In the situation audit it turns out: 70% of revenue comes from 15 long-standing clients with an average of seven years tenure. New-client acquisition doesn't solve the problem — existing-client deepening does. SOSTAC's first phase prevents the SME from charging into the wrong question.
5Ms in the situation audit: PR Smith expands the classic 3Ms with two more — Materials (which marketing assets do we already have?) and Methods (which processes already run?). For SMEs this turns out to be surprisingly helpful. You'll notice you have more material than you thought (old blog posts, case studies, white papers that never made it to distribution) and fewer methods than you need (an ad-hoc-oriented marketing practice with no reproducible processes).
Objectives (O) — where do we want to go?
The second phase is the one that produces the most blank stares in consulting workshops. Not because goals are hard to formulate, but because they're supposed to become concrete. "We want to grow" isn't a goal, it's a wish. "We want to grow revenue in the Industrial Customer segment by 18% by Q4 2026 with a marketing budget of CHF 180k" is a goal.
PR Smith establishes two helper structures here that we deploy regularly in SME practice: the classic SMART schema (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) and the 5Ss.
The 5Ss structure marketing objectives along five dimensions: Sell (revenue and conversion), Serve (customer service and satisfaction), Save (efficiency and cost reduction), Speak (conversations and engagement), Sizzle (digital differentiation that the offline world simply can't replicate). The last one — Sizzle — is often the most underrated. It forces the question: What do we do online that you couldn't have offline?
Example: A Swiss jewellery brand introduces an online configurator letting customers design engagement rings with live 3D preview, save function, and the option to send the result to a partner for joint sign-off. That's Sizzle. It doesn't replace the in-store visit, but it brings an experience element that simply can't exist offline — and differentiates the brand against competition.
Useful cross-ref: The Smart Insights / RACE logic from Dave Chaffey and Fiona Ellis-Chadwick translates SOSTAC objectives cleanly into funnel KPIs: Reach (how many do we reach?), Act (how many engage?), Convert (how many buy?), Engage (how many stay loyal?). For SMEs with a clearly e-commerce-affine business model, RACE is often the faster helper structure than the 5Ss. More on this in our STDC model blog, where we put STDC and RACE side by side as sister models.
Strategy (St) — how do we get there?
The shortest but most important phase in SOSTAC. Strategy isn't the execution plan — strategy is the answer to "How do we get from current state to target state, given our available resources?" A strategy can be formulated in three sentences and still be enough. Longer strategies are often worse strategies — they cover indecision with word volume.
PR Smith offers nine building blocks here that a strategy should contain: Target Markets (which segments?), Objectives (what specifically should be achieved?), Positioning (how do we want to be perceived?), Processes (which workflows do we need?), Partnerships (who do we work with?), Sequence (which phases in which order?), Integration (how do we connect channels?), Tactical Tools (which tools?), Engagement (how do we tie audiences in?). The acronym TOPPP SITE sticks after two days of working with it — not before.
In SME practice we typically focus on four of the nine: Target Markets, Positioning, Sequence, and Tactical Tools. The other five do get mentioned in the strategy but are rarely the differentiating factor. If an SME doesn't have the first four clear, the other five don't help anyway.
Sample SME strategy: A DACH-region software company repositions itself as a compliance specialist for mid-market insurers (Target Market: German-speaking insurers, 200–2000 employees; Positioning: "Compliance software that doesn't look like compliance software"; Sequence: first build case studies, then webinars, then outbound). Three sentences. Clear strategy.
What strategy isn't: a tool list ("we're doing more LinkedIn now"), a wishlist ("we want to become a premium brand"), or channel allocation without goal anchor ("70% paid, 30% owned"). Those are tactical-tool decisions that without strategy have no effect.
Tactics (T) — what do we do concretely?
Tactics is the detail layer underneath Strategy. If the strategy reads "we build case studies first, then webinars, then outbound", the tactics phase describes: which case studies (three, from clients X, Y, Z), which format (each 2500 words + video), which distribution (industry media + LinkedIn + newsletter), which timeline (Q1 all three cases, Q2 webinar series based on the cases).
PR Smith catalogues ten tactical tools here (advertising, PR, sponsorship, sales force, events, direct mail, retail/website, word-of-mouth, sales promotion, merchandising) — all with online equivalents. The list is easily modernised today: content marketing (replacing classic sales promotion), social media (replacing classic PR alone), marketing automation (its own category), search (paid + organic), email (its own discipline).
Important in the tactics phase: channel choice follows audience behaviour, not the other way around. If your industrial customers don't use LinkedIn professionally, then LinkedIn ads isn't a tactical-tool choice — it's an expensive workout. If they're on industry portals every day, content needs to go there — regardless of how "less modern" that seems.
Cross-ref to 4C/7C: The tactics phase benefits massively when the 4C/7C customer-centricity framework is already anchored in the strategy block. Customer-centric means: which channels enable the lowest-friction path for customers, not which channels are easiest for us to operate. More on that in our 4C/7C model blog.
Action (A) — who does what when?
The fifth phase is the one where most marketing plans disappear into the drawer. A strategy and a tactics list aren't action. Action means: people, dates, responsibilities, handoffs, escalation paths. A Gantt chart if needed. At minimum a list of "who does what by when".
PR Smith structures Action into five sub-topics: Systems (which software/tools do we need?), Processes (which workflows?), Guidelines (which rules?), Checklists (which routine paths?), and Internal Marketing (how do we communicate this internally?). The last one — Internal Marketing — gets almost always underestimated in SME practice. Marketing plans known only to the marketing team get ignored by the sales team, smiled at by the product team, and cut by leadership at the first quarterly pressure point.
Resource allocation as Action core: Who makes the content (in-house or agency)? Who runs the ads (in-house or performance agency)? Who monitors the metrics? Who decides in crises (e.g. negative reviews)? Those four questions resolve most SME marketing mishaps before they happen.
Sample action list (abbreviated): Content production → in-house (marketing manager), one blog post per week; performance ads → external agency, monthly review meeting; SEO monitoring → tool-based (Ahrefs), weekly dashboard review by marketing manager; crisis communication → CEO escalation within 2 hours; quarterly review of the whole strategy → first Wednesday of each quarter.
Control (C) — how do we measure?
The sixth phase is the point at which a one-shot plan becomes a living system. Control means: define KPIs, set a measurement rhythm, agree response paths to deviations. Without Control even the best strategy is theatre after three months.
PR Smith establishes a metrics pyramid here: at the top Primary Objectives (revenue, market share, ROI), beneath that Secondary Objectives (conversion rates, cost-per-lead, cost-per-customer-acquired), at the bottom User-Level KPIs (page views, engagement, A/B tests). For SME boards five to seven top-level KPIs in a quarterly dashboard usually suffice. More dilutes the signal.
Multi-touch attribution as a Control discipline: In the Control phase you often see the SME marketing sitting in the attribution trap — assigning success to the wrong channels. If you measure only last-touch, you systematically overestimate performance ads and underestimate brand and content investment. If you measure only first-touch, you make the opposite mistake. The honest answer almost always lies in a data-driven or W-shaped model. More on that in our multi-touch attribution blog.
Control rhythm: weekly mini-reviews at the operational level (what works, what doesn't, what to adjust?), monthly state-of-play reviews with aggregated view, quarterly strategy reviews with leadership. Anyone running the strategy review only annually reacts too late to market shifts.
SOSTAC × RACE — how they work together
SOSTAC is a planning framework. RACE — Reach, Act, Convert, Engage — is an activity framework along the customer journey. Both come from the British marketing consulting space, both are regularly described as complementary by Dave Chaffey (Smart Insights). In practice we often recommend SMEs use the combination: SOSTAC as the annual planning structure (six phases, walked through once a year), RACE as the quarterly activity frame (which measures in which funnel phase?).
In the SOSTAC "Objectives" block the RACE phases can be used directly as KPI clusters: Reach goals (e.g. brand awareness, new website visitors), Act goals (e.g. engagement metrics, lead-magnet downloads), Convert goals (e.g. enquiries, purchases), Engage goals (e.g. repurchase rate, NPS). In the SOSTAC "Tactics" block the RACE phases become channel-allocation helpers: which tactical tools for Reach, which for Act, which for Convert, which for Engage?
Our own service-page methodology follows this double-layer approach: SOSTAC as the consulting frame for the annual plan, RACE as the operations frame for quarterly steering. Both complement each other, both still need a clear strategy understanding behind them — otherwise they become PowerPoint appendices.
SOSTAC for SMEs — pragmatic adaptation
The original SOSTAC was written for large marketing departments with sub-teams per phase. For a 12-person SME with a marketing manager who also runs the CRM on the side, the full depth is often overkill. Three pragmatic adaptations we regularly recommend:
First, shorten the situation analysis. Don't work all six components. Three are enough: customers (who, why, how?), competition (two to four concrete competitor observations), own competences (what are we really good at?). Market trends and performance results come opportunistically where data already exists.
Second, make objectives binary. Set a maximum of three primary objectives. "Grow revenue by X" plus "lift conversion rate to Y" plus "push NPS to Z". Three. If you need five, you haven't prioritised.
Third, keep the strategy short. A strategy block should fit on one A4 page. If it's longer, it isn't a strategy any more, it's a wishlist. If you don't know how to condense a strategy onto one page, you're not done with the phase yet.
These three adaptations break the original — and that's the point. SOSTAC is a tool, not a law. PR Smith himself writes in the original: "Use SOSTAC anyway you want." That's especially true for SMEs.
Q&A — the most common questions
Do we need SOSTAC or is a simple marketing plan enough? For SMEs with fewer than 10 employees a one-page marketing plan with clear goals, three to five measures, and a quarterly review rhythm is often enough. SOSTAC becomes recommendable once you have a marketing function with more than one person and a budget above CHF 100k per year — that's when structured planning starts delivering efficiency gains.
How does SOSTAC differ from a classic business plan? SOSTAC focuses exclusively on marketing planning. Business plans additionally cover finance, operations, HR, and risk. For the marketing section of a business plan SOSTAC is a good structure — as a complete business plan it isn't enough.
Can we really use SOSTAC and RACE in parallel? Yes, and it's even recommendable. SOSTAC as the annual frame, RACE as the quarterly steering. The two frameworks don't contradict each other, they operate at different time scales.
What if our strategy changes mid-year? Then you walk through SOSTAC again — abbreviated. Situation Analysis: what's changed? Objectives: do we need to recalibrate? Strategy: which new hypothesis? Tactics: what do we adjust? Action: what do we implement? Control: how do we measure the change? The Control phase was never just backwards-looking — it's also the early-warning system for strategy pivots.
Does SOSTAC cover digital-only business models? Yes. SOSTAC is channel-agnostic. Whether you're primarily offline (e.g. local retailer) or primarily online (e.g. SaaS vendor) — the six phases work the same way. What changes is the tactical tools and the control KPIs in phases 4 and 6.
Sources and further reading
- Smith, P. R. (2011). SOSTAC Planning Framework — A Practical Approach to Digital Marketing Planning. PR Smith Marketing Success Blog / Smart Insights.
- Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2022). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, 8th Edition. Pearson Education Limited.
- Chaffey, D., Hemphill, T. & Edmundson-Bird, D. (2019). Digital Business and E-Commerce Management, 7th Edition. Pearson Education Limited.
The cited works are part of the standard repertoire of marketing and digital strategy teaching. Links deliberately omitted — please source via your library, the publisher, or Dave Chaffey's Smart Insights hub.