Is your marketing team all TAC and no SOS?
The campaign calendar is full. Social posts are going out, events are being organised, emails are being written and someone has asked for “a quick update” to the website.
Your marketing team is busy. But is everyone clear about why they are doing it?
I sometimes see teams spending nearly all their time on the TAC part of SOSTAC®: Tactics, Action and Control. They are choosing activities, getting them delivered and reporting on the results. What is missing is enough time for the SOS: Situation, Objectives and Strategy.
That is when marketing can start to feel like an endless list of requests.
What do SOS and TAC mean?
SOSTAC® is a planning framework that takes you through six questions:
Stage | The question it answers |
Situation | Where are we now? |
Objectives | Where do we want to get to? |
Strategy | How will we get there? |
Tactics | What will we do? |
Action | Who will do it, and when? |
Control | How will we know whether it is working? |
Every stage matters. A good strategy still needs people to deliver it, and activity needs to be measured. The difficulty comes when a team is expected to start at tactics without agreement on the first three questions.
The signs you might be all TAC
It often starts with reasonable requests. A colleague wants to attend an exhibition. A director suggests a new social media channel. A competitor launches a campaign, and suddenly your team is asked to do something similar.
None of these ideas is necessarily wrong. But if every request goes straight onto the task list, your team may find itself:
producing content without a clear target audience;
running campaigns without an agreed business objective;
reporting on activity without knowing what success should look like;
changing priorities whenever a new idea comes along; and
struggling to explain why some requests should take priority over others.
The team works hard, but the work does not always add up to progress.
Start with the situation
Before deciding what to do next, look at what is happening in the business and its market.
Who are your most valuable customers? What are they trying to achieve? Where do your best enquiries come from? What do your sales colleagues hear in customer conversations? Which activities have produced results, and which have simply kept people busy?
You do not need months of research to answer every question perfectly. You do need an honest picture of where you are starting.
Agree what marketing needs to achieve
“Do more marketing” is not an objective. Neither is “post more often”.
Marketing objectives should connect to what the business is trying to accomplish. That might mean generating more qualified enquiries from a particular sector, increasing sales from existing customers or supporting the launch of a new service.
Clear objectives give the team a way to judge new requests. If an activity does not support a priority, you can question whether it deserves time and budget right now.
Decide how you will get there
Strategy is where you make choices. Which customers will you focus on? What do they need to understand about your business? How will you position your offer? Where can you make the greatest impact with the resources you have?
Once these choices are clear, tactics become easier to select. An event, email campaign or website update has a purpose within the wider plan. You can also explain why you are not pursuing every available opportunity.
Then put TAC to work
Tactics, Action and Control are where the plan becomes real. Choose the activities most likely to help you reach your objectives. Give people clear responsibilities, timescales and budgets. Decide what you will measure and when you will review it.
If the results are not what you expected, use what you learn to adjust the plan. Control is more than a report at the end of the month; it is an opportunity to make better decisions.
Give your team room to think
If your marketing team is permanently in delivery mode, asking them to “be more strategic” will not create the space to do it. They may need time with business leaders to understand priorities, access to customer and sales insight, and permission to challenge requests that do not fit the plan.
Sometimes an independent perspective helps bring those conversations together and turn them into a practical direction for the team.
So, if marketing feels busy but unfocused, pause before adding another task. Ask yourselves: Have we agreed our SOS before asking the team to deliver the TAC?
At LMC Associates, we help business owners and marketing teams work through all six stages of SOSTAC® and turn their thinking into plans they can deliver and measure. We also provide SOSTAC® training for teams who want to strengthen their planning skills. If this sounds familiar, get in touch.
