A blog writer has many jobs besides writing a blog. A blog writer needs skills in researching, networking, and many others to be successful. Does it help if bloggers also have marketing skills?
While a blogger can write blogs and post them without being a marketing expert, they will need to learn marketing skills to be successful at monetizing and having thousands of subscribers. A marketer monitors trends and anticipates upcoming changes, and targets the audience based on data.
Marketing skills can give a blog writer an advantage that helps them to find success. We’ll explain why a blog writer needs marketing skills.
Marketing Skills Every Blogger Needs
Blog writers need marketing skills to know what interests their readers. Marketers try to stay on the latest trends. They know what readers are searching for online and the words they are using in those searches.
By watching trending topics, marketers know what readers want to know and what they do not. One way they do this is by using tools like:
- ScreenShot
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
BuzzSumo tracks social shares and helps marketers analyze content to identify trending content for specific search terms or URLs. Marketers look at the:
- Categories
- Language
- Keywords
- social platforms
Knowing these things is extremely useful to blog writers.
Trends Indicate Market
A trend is the direction of a market. Sometimes trends are going up, and other times trends are going down. Trends sometimes last days or even weeks or months. A key component to studying trends is the premise history repeats itself. Marketers look at primary trends, which is an ascending or a succession of higher highs and higher lows.
Tools that Marketers Use to Study and Identify Trends
Marketers have many tools to choose from to help them study the trends. Some of the most popular ones include:
- Feedly
- Trend Watching
- Social Pilot
- Buzzfeed
- Medium
- Ahrefs Content Explorer
- Content Gems
- SmartBrief
- Trend Hunter
- Quora
- Google Trends
- Social Media
- TrendSpottr
- NewsWhip’s Spike
- Content Studio
- Sprout Social
- Sitechecker
- Keyhole
- Agorapulse
- Forums
- Events
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Leading Publications in an Industry
- Social Mention
- YouTube Trends
Each of these tools tells marketers valuable information about what is trending and where they are headed.
Blog Writers Anticipate Changes
Marketers use the information they learn from the tools above and what they have learned from the past to help them anticipate where they are headed or what trends are coming next.
Bloggers can take this kind of information and gear their blog posts to where trends are running. This knowledge allows them to stay ahead of the competition and to be able to provide valuable information for their reader.
Blog Marketing Create Advertising Campaigns
You may be wondering what this one has to do with blog post writing? If writers know how to create advertising campaigns, they can write a selection of blogs that help readers move along the sales buying funnels.
There are four areas in a funnel where buyers or potential buyers are. They are the following:
- The research phase
- The compare stage
- The Buyers stage
- The retention stage
In the research stage, business bloggers will want to provide their readers content that drives awareness, engages, and provides leads for the business. Content marketers do this by providing a variety of materials for their readers, including blog posts. Bloggers who write content for company blogs need to understand how sales funnels work and how the content they write fits in.
They may be part of a bigger team that writes these other types of content for the research phase, including:
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Videos
- Web pages
- Social media posts
- Free reports
- White papers
- Cheatsheets
- Mind maps
- Templates
- Swipe files
- Tools
- Email newsletters
- Ads for free or gated content.
In the compare stage of the funnel, blogs are not used as much. Instead, content marketing writers concentrate on the following:
- Product descriptions
- FAQ pages
- Support pages
- Comparison pages
- Case studies
Then the reader moves into the buying stage. In this phase, the content needs to drive direct sales and includes the following types of content:
- Sales letters
- Video sales letters
- Product pages
- Ads to an offer
The final stage is the retention phase, and blog posts reemerge again along with:
- Support pages
- FAQ pages
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Email Newsletters
As you can see, blog posts play an essential role in the entire process. Blog writers who understand marketing will be ahead of others by knowing what to write for their audience.
Understanding this information is critical to monetizing your blog if you are a blogger who writes only for yourself. Often bloggers monetize their blog by writing blogs about products or services that they get paid for promoting by a percentage of sales or getting readers to click on ads or visit websites. Bloggers often offer their products on their blogs too. Knowing this information will help to promote those too.
Figuring Out Pricing Strategies
Bloggers who promote products they make will find they need to do this to sell their products. It would also be invaluable for bloggers who work for companies with blogs on their websites.
Posts can be written that explains why the product or service is worth paying a specific price for it. Even if the blogger never quotes a fee, they can explain the product’s benefits and help readers see why it is worth the price.
Targeting Demographics Data
Bloggers who understand their audience have a huge advantage. Content can be written to engage and draw the right people to read the posts.
If you are writing about a product that targets people with a certain income threshold, you will want to know that it is directed at that demographic. So, for instance, if you write about yachts for the very rich, you probably would not gear the post to lower-income individuals.
To Conclude
A blogger who has marketing skills will sell to potential readers why they should read the blog better than someone who doesn’t know how to sell. Understanding trends and anticipating new ones helps you choose the best topics to excite and interest your audience.
Marketing skills add value and help you write better blogs for your readers. But, perhaps most importantly, you will gain insight as to who your target audience is. If you do not know your audience and their needs, you will likely miss the mark and not attract the traffic, no matter how awesome your posts are.
If you need to learn how to create content for social media, check out our post here!
