For any small or medium business in the UK, social marketing planning is a key part of the overall strategy. For too long SMM professionals have talked about quantity, but seldom about quality. However, quantity is certainly no guarantee of success and too many businesses have failed simply because they did not have the right approach to their marketing. Too many organisations simply throw up a social networking site and hope that users will come flocking. This is not a sustainable marketing practice and ultimately fails to attract the right target audience or promote brand awareness at an acceptable scale.

The first stage of the SEO Consultant planning process is to determine research needs. The initial research question to consider is what audience are you trying to attract, and how much should your target audience to be exposed to your content? A good SMM strategy should consider this. If your target audience is students, then you would not want to promote a cooking show on a university website. Likewise, if your target market is mothers, then your content would not be appropriate if you were trying to sell chocolates.

The next stage in the social marketing planning process is to perform some simple demographic analysis. You need to identify who you will be targeting with your content, and for how long. You also need to determine what type of content will appeal to these individuals. Some of the major areas to explore here are: demographics, health behavior, mass communication, social marketing examples, and usage of mass communication tools.

After determining these goals, the next stage in the social marketing planning process is to identify activities that meet the defined goals. There are a number of steps that should be taken here to ensure that the SMM strategy being developed is a successful one. A key SMM goal is to establish goals and to measure them over time. In addition, setting SMM goals will help you evaluate the success of the SMM strategy as it develops.

Another critical aspect of the social marketing planning process is to identify a research question and an appropriate research methodology. For this part of the strategy, the primary goal is to define the desired behavior change. For example, the research question may be, “How have members of your target audience responded when you offered this product or service?” Other relevant questions could include, “What percentage of your customers prefer this product compared to other similar products?” and “Do members of your target audience have any questions or concerns?”

These are just some of the social marketing examples used in the SMM planning process. The focus of this article is to provide a broad overview of the process and the reasons why these specific strategies are important. Every business, regardless of size, can benefit from having a solid social marketing plan in place. SMM provides a flexible platform for businesses to reach out to and develop relationships with their target audience while simultaneously increasing sales. The key is to begin the process early and be consistent in your approach to social marketing implementation.