Check internal strengths and weak nesses of your business (like how much budget you have, how many months/years will it take to reach break-even point). Also go through strengths and weaknesses of your competitors as well. Examine external opportunities and market gap in locality of your business, you may go for a neutral expert opinion.
Do a complete threats and risks analysis, check out how many threats you might face in your business field, develop a threats measurement matrix, resolve high level threats before entering in market and keep an eye on low level threats which might occur while implementing your SOSTAC e-marketing plan.
Competitors Analysis
Below example will help you to understand the way of ding competitive analysis for your marketing plan. For example, you are going to start a new medical hospital in a certain locality of around 20000 thousand houses in it. Now first check all these key points;
- How many medical hospitals are there in your targeted area?
- How much radius they cover?
- What kind of competition they have with each other?
- What types of services they offer (services comparison)?
- Compare their pricing strategy (Package deals)
- Also analyze their departmental specialties, customer’s trust, hospitals’ reputation, USPs etc.
- Find out the market leader of your industry (market position analysis)
- Examine how much market share each of your competitor has and where you will stand if you enter in that industry.
- Check industry key insights (what is the percentage of profit share in this specific industry)
- Likewise evaluate customer insights as well
- Identify market gaps if there are any, then set your USPs and check what’s new and unique you can offer.
- Finally, research on your capabilities (skill capabilities, staffing, talented personnel, resources etc.), and see if you can survive in that specific market or not. Use Mckinsey 7S model to analyze your organizational capabilities.
Channels and Resources Analysis
For an e-commerce business customer relationship management plays a vital role in achieving business goals. Managing customer relationships, keeping them engaged with your brand on social media and other sites is so important but very difficult these days. Because these digital media relationship and engagement strategies drive customer’s purchasing behavior.
So, gathering CRM information and customers’ digital footprints is vital for e-commerce retailers and e-marketing plans. Following the mandatory CRM information factors which must be extracted before developing SOSTAC e-marketing plan.
SOSTAC Objectives (Where we want to go?)
Importance of Objectives
Well this is a sensitive stage because if you mistakenly set a wrong objective then at the end you won’t get expected results. In SOSTAC objectives part is very critical just like the value of heart in human body. First, see the vision of your company. Vision includes financial, operational, excellence related, or vision about quality of services.
Now set your objectives accordance with the visions of your marketing plan not business visions. Because here we are discussing only about marketing objectives which is just a small portion of business plan.
Objective Types
- Marketing objectives
- Sales objectives (don’t mix your sales objectives with marketing objectives)
- Financial objectives (cost, price, revenue, profit objectives)
- Communication objectives (define the purpose of your communication, spread brand awareness)
- SMART objectives
- Define dashboard
Before you go through the 5 S’s marketing goals, first set SMART objectives then implement the 5s model to clarify your marketing plans.
SMART Objectives
The SMART objectives technique described as follows;
Think clearly of your objectives, are they focused to real market problems, specific enough to confront current market/business challenges and following latest trends or nor?
Now if you really identified the specific problems then think about their performance measurement strategy, find out ways to measure if the business problems/challenges are clearly recognized and targeted or not.
Examine that if they specified objectives are achieved then what will be the possible outcomes, will they serve your business objectives or not, will it improve your business performance or not, if yes then how?
Yes, the most important aspect is relevancy, before you set objectives or invest any times/money or any other resources, think if this issues you are intended to resolve is relevant to your business field and expertise or not, else later on it may create other industrial barriers for your business.
Remember in this era timing is everything, you can find alternates for everything but not time. So set a time limit for each milestone of your objectives in your marketing plan, so to offer the right product/service in the market at right time. Else all your marketing efforts will be useless.
Now think about the actual purpose of your business, obviously everyone will say its money/profit. I understand that but business is not that much simple. I agree that the primary objective of every business is to earn money, but you must define your core as well as supplementary objectives in writing as well else it’s very risky for your business.
Originally published at https://marketingskull.com on March 11, 2021.