Using SOSTAC® For Your SaaS Start-Up Marketing Strategy

What if there was a SaaS marketing strategy 101? From choosing the right structure through to picking tactics and a way to track your KPIs, here's what I wish I knew when it came to creating my first software marketing strategy.

Getting started on building a marketing strategy for a software start-up is daunting.

On the one hand, you feel that you've got to get leads in ASAP, on the other hand you've got to think about the long-term, sustainable future of the business. 

At the start of my career, I fell into the trap of building a marketing plan (at best,) but in reality I built a marketing campaign plan, not a strategy. 

Building a marketing strategy is a foundational step to take once you've understood your universe, built your ideal customer profile, and visualized the personas within.

Here's what I wish I knew about building my first SaaS marketing strategy.

Marketing Strategy v Marketing Plan

The place to begin is where a lot of people go wrong. A SaaS marketing strategy is different from a SaaS marketing plan:

A SaaS marketing strategy is a two-three year view of "why" you need to get from A-Z, addressing a set of themes, such as growing leads, reducing churn, or building a channel proposition, using the marketing mix to achieve the goals set out.

It sets the guardrails for the function and how it will operate at a more granular level (i.e. marketing plans, content, social media etc.) 

The marketing mix, also known as the 7Ps of marketing, are the elements you will consider as you build out your marketing strategy. The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines these as: 

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion
• People
• Process
• Physical Evidence

The SaaS marketing strategy sets out the broad strokes that the marketing plan fills in.

A SaaS marketing plan is the "how" of your strategy. It covers what needs to be done in the next 6-12 months to complete a phase of the marketing strategy.

Within the marketing plan you'll cover off what needs to be achieved in the time period, typically shaped around the themes identified in your strategy.

This will lead to projects, timelines, and outputs (i.e. content, emails, social posts, podcasts, leads) that your success is measured against.

Choosing A Marketing Planning Process

While there are plenty of marketing planning frameworks you can use, including OKRs, marketing traditionally follows the SOSTAC model.

This framework contains everything to give structure to your marketing function.

Using this model, you'll walk through:

1. Understanding your today - your customers, your prospects, your team and more
2. Where do you want to be - what do you want to achieve?
3. How do you get there - who will you target and what is needed, top line?
4. What do you need to do - more detail on what will be done to get there
5. Who's doing what and when - what resource you'll need to get this done
6. How do you keep momentum - how will we measure and keep up performance?
   
   

Researching The Environment

This is about understanding your business, essentially. 

You'll want to think through your business in a couple of ways:

1. How you're performing today - if you're already operating, look at your profit margins, how you're growing, where you're losing out to competitors or apathy, and how you've done against your expectations.
   
   
2. What's influencing your business - this is a PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental) analysis that will help you to note down what's happening outside of your business that'll impact your ability to achieve your goals.
   
   
3. What your customers / MVPs think - if you already have customers, or even MVP users, look at running CSAT or NPS surveys and speak directly with them over Teams or coffee to understand what they love about you and what they'd like to see more of.
   
   
4. Who your competitors are - your competition matters (whether you want to admit it or not,) and you can use review sites like G2 or Trustpilot, or Gartner Quadrants and Forrester Waves to get a sense of what's going on in your space to fuel ideas for your strategy. You'll want to look at customers through these questions:
   
   - What are their unique selling points
   - How do they market their products (including pricing), and
   - What channels do they use
   
   
5. Your internal skills and opportunities - this is an analysis using VRIO which gets you to think critically about your team and technologies to see if you have something that your competitors don't.

You should bring it together using a SWOT analysis. This will ensure you can see clearly where you could be winning and feed that into stage two - goals and objectives.

Setting Goals And Objectives

Now that you know your current position, it's time to think about what you'd like to focus on with that information to hand. 

A lot of vendors focus on growth (customer acquisition,) but sometimes the issue isn't getting more people to buy / try your software. 

From the external analysis, you'll likely have these broad strategic themes to go after:

• Growing new business - e.g. we'll acquire 15% of the market in three years
  
• Increasing product usage - e.g. we'll increase product activation by 10% in two years
  
• Reducing customer churn - e.g. we'll reduce churn from 60% to 49% in three years
  
• Creating a channel route - e.g. we'll establish channel as a GTM route by 2026
  
• Reducing wasted spend - e.g. we'll set a return of $10 for every $5 spent on a lead
  
• Entering new markets - e.g. we'll enter the North American SMB market by 2027
  
• Launching new products - e.g. we'll launch two new products within three years
  
  

These goals need to be SMART. Make sure they're specific. Introduce metrics to measure your performance (e.g. from x% to y%.) Introduce a time element to form a a deadline. And when it's all said and done, align these to the wider business strategy.

What you choose here will dictate the rest of your strategy.

Getting There

You've got your goals, but how will you realize them? 

This stage of SOSTAC is about giving the strategy something to target before you execute the work. 

If you've yet to go through the process of visualizing your ideal customers and the buyers inside those companies, you have to do that first.

Then, think about how you want to position. That's how you'll speak to those people, and then the pricing you'll use.

You cannot skip these two fundamental steps. While it's fun to move onto the systems side of the process, without these basics you'll be stumbling around in the dark.

Finally, look towards how you'll funnel interest. That might be through an inbound marketing model, demand generation, ABM, or a mix. 

Bottom line, you need a plan.

Marketing Channels

This is the tactical part of the strategy, and where a lot of people jump to. Don't.

Now you're here, you need to think about how you're going to get things moving.

That begins with your marketing channels. What levers will you pull? That's the 7/8Ps of marketing, and while it's tempting to lean straight into driving demand through LinkedIn or your network, pause and think about the wider picture.

Perhaps your market lives and breathes Reddit. Using Facebook and X to run ads wouldn't be smart.

Could it be that you're offering a Microsoft Excel add in? You'll want to shape your website differently by being informational and pointing traffic to the AppSource store.

Are influencers the key to winning based on your market? 

All these answers come from doing your research in the first three stages of SOSTAC.

But there are some consistencies, regardless of the channels:

• Internal communication - you'll need to find a way to communicate what you're doing to other team members, which could be a scorecard or roadshow 
• Content plan - you cannot market in 2025 without content (blogs, emails, videos, website - that's all content)
• Contact plan - who will you reach with your strategy? Do you need to take to a platform like Apollo to find these people? Will you use your network? 
  
  

Executing The Strategy

This is where the marketing plans come into play.

Good, solid project management basics help here. From a project charter to a timeline of milestones, it pays to give structure to your marketing efforts. 

Use a RACI matrix to tell your team who is responsible for what and where they can help.

Next up, what do you need to get this done? 

You'll want to build out a list of marketing tech that's fit for your needs. Think about a CRM, an automation system like HubSpot that covers blogs, website, and email, and social outreach like Expandi.

This should all factor into a well thought out budget.

Reporting

Marketers dread reporting. I used to fit into that bracket, until I cut down reporting time using a scorecard.

The introduction of a reporting scorecard will open you up to having daily alerts and weekly reviews of how your strategy is performing. The point is to use your KPIs to trigger action. That's known as "countermeasures."

Countermeasures are standard ways to look at performance slipping and putting in place steps to counter that dip. By documenting this, you can then use these in similar situations in the future and become more efficient at analyzing your performance.

Wrap it all up in a monthly reporting pack, and you'll see the benefits and ROI from your strategy. You can use this template to cut out the guess work of what to include:

Wrapping Up

Finding the SOSTAC model was a real game-changer for me. Making that shift from tactical to strategic is going to give you the ability to step back and know that you don't have to switch what you're doing every week. 

Marketing is a commitment. You cannot keep changing tactics and find success easily. You need to embrace a direction and give it the effort and resources needed. 

This marketing strategy 101 gives you the starting point. But, if you need help, you can talk to me anytime for advice - no strings attached - here.