Digital transformation is a challenging process. Which is why to envision and create real value for our partners, all our business solution are moulded by a unified framework –PR Smith’s SOSTAC®.
The SOSTAC® approach is the core of all our strategies and technological innovations. Be it Agile focused web development, process automation or even growing our client’s business, all adopt SOSTAC® to bring about remarkable transformation.
What is SOSTAC®?
SOSTAC®, created by PR Smith is considered as an authoritative Planning and strategy framework amongst businesses of varying sizes, be it a startup or a global organisation. The framework allows us to ask the right questions that are crucial while planning, strategising or executing any project.
Let’s see some of the intuitive questions we can ask with SOSTAC® framework:
Situation Analysis – Where are we now? Understanding the current landscape, bench-marking
Objective Setting – Where do we want to be? Setting useful, actionable objectives
Strategy – How are we going to achieve these goals? Setting a meaningful strategy
Tactics – What are the details of the strategy?
Actions – Roles and responsibilities. Who does what?
Control – By what time frame to make it happen?
How we make use of SOSTAC®?
We are going to segregate S-O-S-T-A-C and discuss how we apply these stages to bring value for our partners.
Stage 1. Situation Analysis
While setting out the analysis this stage should provide an overview of your organization – who you are, what you do and how do you interact and addressing internal and external factors impacting the business.
- To paint a clear picture of your organization we implement some of the following methods to meet the requirement of this stage:
- Identifying your digital customers (buyer’s persona) and how do they interact with the brand?
- SWOT Analysis – what are your organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Competitor analysis – who are your competitors? How do they operate? e.g. price, product, reputation, what are their key differentiators?
- Digital channels landscape – listing out all the digital channels for your organisation and analysing whether they are performing well or not?
- Technical Architecture – Developing your digital framework to meet the current market standards and enable seamless consumer’s journey.
Stage 2. Objectives
Once the above requirements are met its time to focus on the Objectives using the 5S strategy (Sell, Serve, Speak, Save and Sizzle).
Although we’ll be thoroughly discussing the objectives in our OKR process, however, to touch base with stage 2, let’s discuss how we make sure to categorise within these 5S’s.
1S – Sell – Regarding the transactions that lead to sales & revenue.
2S – Speak – Objectives related to how your business communicates with the customer.
3S – Serve – About adding value to the customer, mostly related to customer service.
4S – Save – Related to cost savings and reducing process time.
5S- Sizzle – It is about building brands repute online.
Once the objectives are defined by 5S’s it’s important to make them measurable and to make them into SMART objectives,
Stage 3. Strategy
Strategy refers to the plan to fulfil the terms that have been set in the objectives. At this stage should we identify all segments of the market to target?
The effectiveness of the selected strategy is greatly dependent on how aligned it is on the above two stages as well as the field (digital, Marketing, automation) the SOSTAC® is created.
By identifying all the channels most suited to your business need to craft customised strategies for your business
Stage 4. Tactics
The strategy gets further segmented into Tactics that cover the specific tools of the plan’s digital mix to use and realise the objectives of your digital plan.
To get a clearer idea of the framework till now let’s take a situational example:
Upon Situational analysis of Australian Sports Camps, it was determined that there was a lot of drop-off traffic from the website. To achieve an overall objective of increasing top-line by 20% in one year, we recommended an inbound strategy to increase the number of lead entry points on the website. The actual tactics included defining the exact nature of those lead entry points.
Usually, a digital transformation strategy involves CRM consulting & development and marketing tactics.
Stage 5. Action
Stage 5 of your digital Transformation planning framework focused on how to bring the plan to life, to make actionable measures.
The action-section covers what needs to be achieved for each of the tactics listed in the previous section of the SOSTAC® framework to realise the objectives of your digital marketing plan.
Stage 6. Control
The final stage is to lay out the ways on how to monitor and measure performance based on the objectives set at stage 2. Once the tactics have been considered then the control section provides the dashboards tailored for each tactic.
All these stages must be in sync with one another to successfully execute a customised SOSTAC® for our partner.
What is the output?
The output is a well-defined and documented roadmap with effective control measures.