One of the most important pieces of your online business is your content marketing plan. When you are trying to build a strong list of hungry buyers, it’s important to understand how everything works together. This is especially true if you’re participating in giveaways and bundle sales. You need to know what type of content you’re going to provide your new subscribers in order to keep them on your list. This is where a content marketing plan comes in handy.

Here are 12 solid reasons to develop a good content marketing plan…

Reason #1: To Keep Your Audience’s Attention

When you develop a plan for the content you’ll create and publish for your audience, it’s going to ensure they are interested enough to pay attention to it. It’s easy to get off track, but if you have a plan to look at and you know why, for example, you’re publishing today’s blog post – the point of it or the CTA for it – you will be more successful.

Reason #2: To Establish Trust with Your Audience

When you produce content that looks cohesive, it helps build trust. If you’re not planning content, you may get off track, speak with a different voice, and confuse your audience. Even if it’s subtle, it can cause a lack of trust.

Reason #3: To Build Stronger Social Media Communities

When you’re consistent with your messaging, you will build more robust and more engaging communities for your audience. When people are more engaged, they’re happy to share.

Reason #4: To Generate Higher Quality Leads

When your content is on point, the quality of the leads you generate from that content will be a lot higher. They’ll be much more likely to become prospects that buy from you and become customers.

Reason #5: To Improve Your Conversion Rate

Good content simply leads to more conversions because you have a reason for the content you publish. If you don’t know why you’re creating it, you may end up with gaps that lower your conversion rate.

Reason #6: To Enhance Your Search Engine Optimization

Content is the food that feeds search engines. When your audience types in their search query in order to find information, the search engine locates the content you have published to deliver it to them.

Reason #7: To Build Subject Matter Expertise and Authority

If you want your audience to see you as an authority on a topic, you need to publish extensively on that topic.

Reason #8: To Ensure Subject Matter Cohesiveness

The plan helps keep everything in order so that it makes sense. If your content isn’t planned, it may seem unorganized in a way that is distracting to your audience.

Reason #9: To Establish Your Brand Identity

Your brand needs a voice, a tone, a personality, and yes, an opinion about the topics you publish about. The topics you choose and how you talk about them, whether text, video, or audio, will establish your brand identity far beyond your email list and website.

Reason #10: It Keeps You Accountable

When you have developed a content marketing plan that includes information about what you will publish and when you will publish it, and who it’s for, you’re going to be more likely to accomplish your goals.

Reason #11: You’ll Get Better Data

If you try to create a content marketing plan based on your goals for your audience and your business, the truth is the data you generate will be more useful to start with.

Reason #12: Your Return on Investment Will Be Higher

If you really care about investing in the right places, creating a content marketing plan will ensure a higher and more consistent ROI.

Final Thoughts

Understanding how the content you produce, both public-facing and private, affects your audience is essential to creating the right content marketing plan for your list building efforts. When you know what your goals and match the content with those goals and the right audience, building your list with hungry customers who need and want your offers, paid and free, will become simple.