Analytics has been at the forefront of the digital marketing revolution for the last two decades. Smart marketers recognize that data analytics is crucial for earning a decent ROI from their efforts. There are a number of great analytics tools that help marketers reach their goals.
Analytics is important for every marketing strategy, including blogging. It is important to have detailed data from a blog to know what types of content and outreach strategies work best.
If you are developing a blogging strategy in 2021, you need to know how data analytics comes into play.
Analytics is a Necessary Element of a Blog Marketing Strategy in 2021
Regardless of what your current marketing strategy is, you’re going to want to add blogging to it if you haven’t already. Starting a bog is easy and you can reach professional clients who search for specific keywords. Despite what you might have heard, blogging is anything but dead. In fact, smart bloggers are finding better ways to get more value out of their content with analytics. There are also a lot of AI strategies bloggers can use as well.
Out of a total of 1.7 billion sites online, there are over 500 million blogs. More than 2 million articles get posted to them every single day. While this means the future for the various blogging platforms might be bright, it also means that you really need to hone your focus to make sure that you can stand out from everything else that finds its way online. Analytics technology can help you figure out the best way to approach your blogging strategy.
Starting & Building a Blog
Before you can start creating an analytics-driven blogging strategy, you obviously need to lay down the right foundation. You need to create a blog that customers will be willing to engage with.
First, you’ll want to throw out any preconceived notions that you might have about establishing a readership. Comparatively few people check their favorite blog the way that they used to. Rather, many people search for a topic that they’re interested in and then check their preferred search engine’s news tab for updates about said issue. This is often true whether they’re looking for information on new ideas or reviews for a product that they might be interested in buying.
You’ll need to come up with a theme for your blog, which you might already have in mind depending on the industry you represent. Narrow this theme down until you have a specific set of guiding principles that will ensure you’re posting material that makes some coherent sense. There are countless blogs that are little better than spam, and these seldom generate much advertising revenue or capture a significant readership that could translate into real sponsorship.
This is an overlooked area where analytics can be very helpful. You can use analytics tools like Ahref to find niches that have not been saturated with competition. You can plug a popular website domain into the content explorer engine there and see what the most popular pages are. This can help you identify some promising keywords that don’t have a lot of competition and build a niche around them.
Once you’ve got the basic framework in place, you can start a WordPress blog by uploading the WP platform directly to your remote server. This will help you to take advantage of any custom domain name that you might have invested in. While you’ll also want to explore other avenues, you normally don’t want to try to market to a large audience using a basic social media account. If you place everything you post on someone else’s site, then you run the risk of falling afoul of their terms of service at some point in the future. You will need a social media strategy that involves the use of analytics and automation tools to streamline things.
When you run your own site that’s uploaded to a hosting service, you’re given quite a bit more leeway with what you post. Some professionals have even advocated purchasing links from an online search building operation, which can help a new blog to gain additional incoming traffic from outside resources. That being said, you will want to connect all of your social accounts to your blog.
Using AI Tools that Connect Social Media Services to a Marketing Blog
Social media integration is about much more than just posting a few icons that link back to Twitter or Facebook. You’ll want to make sure that your posts drive traffic back to your social accounts while your content, conversely, encourages people to check out your blog. While you want to incorporate a number of data technology tools that can provide insights about the kinds of people who follow you and what they’re interested in, don’t forget about the human element.
Comments sections have been much maligned in recent years, but they’re an excellent place for you to engage with potential leads. Customer journeys are often confusing for those who aren’t familiar with all of the solutions that are available to them, so they might be looking for a place to get additional information. In spite of the fact that comments sections are on their way out, many blogs still make use of them. There’s nearly 740,000 popular sites that rely on this technology, so it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Regardless of what cellular phone analytics or big data processing technology you may have invested in for your other marketing ventures, however, you don’t want to forget that content is still king as far as blogging goes. Even in 2021, people are only going to share posts if they actually answer a burning question that they can’t find information about from other outlets. Depending on your current workload and level of past experience, you may even consider hiring a professional to write content for your new marketing blog.
By regularly providing actionable advice or commentary on issues that are important to your audience, you can expect to grow naturally over time.
Analytics is Invaluable for Marketing a Blog
Analytics tools are very important for growing a blog. Marketers need to utilize data analytics technology if they want to grow a blog that will successfully reach new followers.