How PR Smith’s SOSTAC framework helps marketing managers and business owners stop guessing and start building plans that actually get used

Here’s something we hear a lot in our training sessions.

‘We don’t really have a marketing plan. We know what we want to do, but it’s never written down properly. We just… get on with it.’

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. A significant chunk of businesses, including those with smart, experienced marketers, are running on instinct rather than a plan. They’re reactive rather than proactive, they’re busy but not always strategic, and when something doesn’t work, it’s hard to know why because it was never part of a joined-up picture in the first place.

The good news is there’s a framework that fixes this, and it’s simpler than you might think.

Meet SOSTAC — the planning framework that sticks

SOSTAC was developed by UK marketer and author PR Smith in the 1990s. It stands for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control, and it was voted one of the top three business planning models in the world by the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

What makes it different from other frameworks is that it actually gets used. It’s logical, it’s memorable, and it covers everything a marketing plan needs without requiring a 40-page document that nobody reads again after the kick-off meeting.

LinkedIn, KPMG and Greenpeace use it. So do startups, SMEs, and solo marketers who need clarity fast. We use it as the backbone of our SOSTAC programme here at Frances & Kevin, because in our experience, it’s the framework that makes the biggest practical difference, fastest.

Let’s walk through each stage.

S – Situation: Where are you right now?

Before you can plan where you’re going, you need an honest picture of where you are. That means looking at your customers (who they really are, not the idealised version), your competitors, your own performance data, and the external factors affecting your market.

This is where SWOT and PESTLE sit. Not as box-ticking exercises, but as tools for surfacing the things you might otherwise miss. What’s working in your marketing right now? What isn’t? What do your analytics actually say, versus what you assumed?

O – Objectives: Where do you want to be?

SMART objectives. You’ve heard it before. But there’s a difference between knowing what SMART means and actually writing objectives that are specific enough to be useful.

‘Grow our social media presence’ is not an objective. ‘Increase LinkedIn follower count by 25% and generate 20 qualified leads from LinkedIn content in the next six months’ is.

PR Smith’s 5S model is a good sense-check here. Are you thinking about all five dimensions — Sell (revenue and market share), Serve (customer value), Sizzle (brand and experience), Speak (two-way communication) and Save (efficiency)? Most plans focus only on the first one and wonder why the brand feels flat.

S – Strategy: The big picture of how

Strategy is the most misunderstood part of any plan. It’s not your channels. It’s not your campaigns. It’s the thinking that sits above all of that — who you’re targeting, how you’re positioning what you offer, and what the overall logic is that connects your objectives to your activity.

If you’ve ever felt like your marketing is a collection of things happening at the same time rather than a coherent effort pulling in one direction, a weak or missing strategy is usually why.

T – Tactics: The detail of how

Once your strategy is clear, tactics are where you get specific. Which channels? What content? What campaigns, partnerships, paid activity, email cadence, events? This is the marketing mix brought to life.

For marketing managers, this is often the stage you’re most comfortable with. The SOSTAC discipline is simply making sure your tactics are tied back to objectives and strategy, rather than chosen because they’re familiar or because a competitor is doing them.

A – Action: Who does what, by when?

A plan without owners and timelines is just intentions. The action stage is where you turn strategy into a project; assigning responsibility, setting deadlines, identifying what tools and skills you need, and making sure the people delivering the work actually understand what they’re being asked to do and why.

This is also where internal marketing comes in. If your team isn’t bought into the plan, it won’t land. Communication, training and getting people genuinely invested in the direction matter as much as the plan itself.

C – Control: How do you know it’s working?

The final stage is the one that makes the whole thing honest. You define your KPIs, set up your reporting, agree on a review cadence, and decide in advance what you’ll do if things aren’t tracking as expected.

The beauty of control is that it feeds back into the situation. Your performance data from this quarter becomes the starting point for next quarter’s plan. It’s not a one-off process; it’s a loop, and that’s what makes marketing improve over time rather than just repeat itself.

Why we built a programme around SOSTAC

At Frances & Kevin, we’ve trained hundreds of marketers across the UK. One thing we see consistently is that the gap between a good marketer and a great one is rarely about skills; it’s about structure. Give someone a clear framework for their thinking and their planning, and everything else clicks into place faster.

That’s why we’ve built a practical SOSTAC programme for marketing managers and business owners who want to get serious about their planning. It’s not a lecture. It’s a working session built around your business, your challenges and your team.

By the end, you’ll have a real plan in progress, not a template with your name on it, but something you’ve actually built and can use straight away.

Interested in the SOSTAC programme? Find out more here