Publishing Frequency: How Often Should a Business Publish New Content?

Any seasoned marketing pro will tell you how important it is to build awareness by publishing content for your brand. But that leaves you with one important question:

How much content should you publish?

Publishing frequency can have almost as big of an impact on your inbound metrics as content quality. You don't have unlimited resources to create a massive mound of content every day (and, no, posting a bunch of AI-generated content is not the answer, either).

So, how can you dial in the right schedule and build your audience without breaking the bank? 

Let's explore the ideal publishing frequencies for all the most critical content types and mediums you might explore this year and beyond. 

The Best Content Publishing Frequency: Why It Matters

If you are hoping to maximize your content marketing budget from day one, we've compiled some research on optimal publishing frequency. The best marketers use real data to shape their strategy and continually iterate their approach to improve.

But we know not every brand has the budget, time, or resources to get their strategy wrong three times before they get it right. Don't worry, we're here to help. 

In this blog, you'll learn the optimal frequency for publishing blogs, sending emails, publishing offers, and scheduling social media posts. We'll also dive into the best ways to get the most from your content marketing in the current era - the age of AI. We'll discuss automation, scaling, and content repurposing, giving you everything you need to build a rock-solid content marketing calendar. 

Blogs

Experts typically recommend that bloggers post between 1-7 posts per week. It can be extremely difficult to build an audience if you're publishing less than once weekly, particularly if your posts are published at irregular intervals. HubSpot's research indicates that the more often you blog, the more leads you'll acquire:

image source: HubSpot

However, blogging seven times each week isn't realistic for most brands. It might not even be optimal for others. Factors that can affect optimal frequency of posting for your company can include:

• Your Buyer Personas
• Budget and Talent
• Your Bandwidth for Great Content Production
• Promotion Budget and Strategy
• SEO Climate & Competition

For most brands, the right publishing frequency is "as often as you can produce exceptionally great blogs." Ultimately, it's better to post one well-thought-out, original blog each week than five mediocre or completely AI-generated pieces of content.

Never sacrifice quality for quantity! Google will ding you for posts that don't perform, and you'll end up worse off than you would have been without publishing.

Lead Nurturing Emails

Let's start by addressing a common misconception. "Email marketing is dead."

Marketers have been crying wolf on that front for years, now. But over 80% of pros say email is still one of the most immediate ways to reach and nurture your leads. 

Studies show that letting a week pass without contacting a lead can significantly reduce responsiveness. Research indicates that every four days tends to be the sweet spot for lead communication.

However, this certainly isn't a law. Much like blogging, there are a number of factors that can impact how often you should be communicating with your leads via email:

• The length of your buyer's journey
• The amount of research required to make a purchase
• A lead's status (highly-engaged, disengaged)
• A lead's potential qualification

If your buyer's journey tends to drag on for months, emailing your leads twice per week could be overkill. For brands with a relatively low price point and short buyer's journey, emailing daily could be perfectly appropriate. If you're unsure, selecting the middle ground of emailing every four days during your nurture sequence may be the right place to start.

Podcasts and Video Content

Not all of your customers learn the same way. As a result, you should try to reach them through more mediums than just text. Get creative with your content marketing and explore some additional options like podcasts, YouTube, and short-form video.

Let's take a look at the rules of thumb for publishing frequency for these more creative content types:

• Podcasts: If you're hosting a podcast, your ideal frequency will depend on your show format, length, and audience. If you're conducting long-form interviews, for example, you'll post less frequently than a show with ten-minute episodes diving into specific topics. Overall, the ideal posting velocity for a podcast is posting once every 3-14 days.  
• YouTube Content: If you're making video content for YouTube for your brand, you'll want to make sure you post at least once per week. Any less frequently than that and you'll see diminishing returns. You want to stay top-of-mind and top-of-feed for your ideal audience. 

Social Media Posts

Social media is, by far, the trickiest section of this blog post. Social media post frequency can be among the most challenging metrics to establish. Optimal post frequency varies wildly based on everything from audience and industry to the algorithms of the platforms themselves.

HubSpot's research has found that the median number of posts varies significantly according to industry:

image source: HubSpot

However, your company's size and posts per week can also have a significant impact on your potential for social media engagement:

image source: HubSpot

Brands that post approximately twice a day, seven days a week, tend to have slightly higher-than-average engagement on Facebook. LinkedIn gives you a little more wiggle room, requiring more in-depth and valuable content, but requiring only two to five posts per week to keep the algorithm happy. 

It's important for business social media users to understand the relative life cycles of a post on each social media metric and how this can affect their potential to gain notice. The lifecycle of a post on Facebook, LinkedIn, or TikTok is much longer than a post on X. Adjusting your social posting schedule to each network is critical to strike the balance between informative and annoying.

Putting It All Together: Building Your Content Calendar

Now that you've gained a baseline knowledge of industry data on how often to post, it's important to shift toward finding the frequency that works for your audience. If you're wondering how in the world you'll manage to create all this content with the team and resources you have, there's a simple answer: Content repurposing.

Instead of thinking of this in terms of creating blog content, podcast and video content, social content, and email sequences as separate entities, you need to think about creating one piece of great content, then multiplying its impact. 

Let's take a look at a sample:

1.  Micro Content: Start by creating social posts or other short-form content. Post these daily across channels to test your topics, find what resonates with your audience, and build your awareness channels at the same time. You might even choose to boost posts on X or do sponsored posts on LinkedIn, if you have a small audience to ensure you're getting the data you need to identify the strongest topics for your target customers. 
2. Supporting Content: Once you have identified the "winners" from your micro-content, you know what your audience cares about. You can then invest more time and resources into those topics through supporting content. Repackage and expand upon those social posts and snippets, creating blog posts, podcasts, case studies, or YouTube videos. You should plan to post this type of content at least twice per week between all channels.
3. Core Content: Take the winners from your supporting content - your best-performing YouTube videos, traffic-magnet blogs, and more - to establish the core content you need to create to draw in more leads. Build offers like webinars and e-books around the topics you've proven through your social posts and supporting content that your audience cares about.

Using this method, you can invest your time, resources, and technology in building content you know resonates with your audience. 

Pro Tips for Implementation

1. Test Until You're Confident

Statistical significance is the concept of collecting enough data to eliminate risks of errors. Running a publishing frequency experiment for a single week probably won't reveal results you can trust. Test until you're certain, but not a moment longer. The concept of "failing quickly" means you should move on quickly once you've learned that a change in publishing frequency has improved or worsened your results.

2. Support Your Metrics

Has your boss asked you to generate 30 new leads this month? Or 20,000 website visitors? Using your brand's historical metrics to determine your average number of new leads per offer or visitors per blog post can be a powerful tool to plan the right publishing schedule.

3. Increase Volume Slowly

Say you're blogging once a week, and believe that blogging seven times weekly would bring you closer to your goals. Suddenly multiplying your blogging volume by seven can put an enormous burden on your marketing team, especially if you don't have freelance writers or an inbound agency to help out.

Could making the jump in publishing volume overnight quickly improve your metrics faster? Possibly, but it certainly won't help if you burn out your marketing team or experience a drastic drop in content quality along the way.

4. Consider Days and Times

The volume of social media posts is only one factor to consider when it comes to metrics. The days and times you post can also have an impact on the performance of your social media posts, blogs, content offers, and emails.

Chances are, your buyers spend the most time engaging with content during business hours on weekdays. This is probably especially true if they're in the B2B sector. However, the only way to be sure is to test. By measuring content performance on various days of the week and times of day, you can determine when your buyer personas are most likely to consume and share content.

5. Ignore Vanity Metrics

There's an abundance of inbound marketing metrics you can measure as you experiment with optimal publishing frequency. Website visitors, leads, customers, social media followers, email opens, and email subscribers are just a small sampling of the behaviors you can measure using a tool like HubSpot or Google Analytics.

However, it's important to focus on what matters. Keep track your marketing team's key performance indicators (KPIs), and avoid getting too lost in metrics that don't contribute to your bottom line, such as Twitter followers or Pinterest repins.

To learn more about the difference between vanity metrics and KPIs, check out 5 Ways to Measure the Impact of Your Content Marketing.

6. Don't Lose Sight of Quality

Regardless of your plan for marketing experimentation, avoid letting your quality slip. Dramatically increasing your posting frequency isn't easy. You may need to hire additional writers or an agency to help with a newfound volume of work. However, one thing is abundantly clear. You almost certainly won't see better results if you stop writing 2,000-word blogs and switch to 400-word posts. Never sacrifice quality for volume. Your audience is sure to notice.

Finding the Right Volume

If your brand is struggling to build an audience and win customers, the frequency at which you deliver content could be to blame. Increasing the volume of your emails, blogs, offers, and social media posts can increase your exposure and chances of remaining at the top of your consumers' minds. With industry data in mind, the smartest marketers treat their publishing schedules like a continuous marketing experiment.

Following these steps and tips can help you build awareness and drive more traffic to your website through your content marketing efforts. However, you know that getting visitors to your site is only half the battle.

If you want to check your website's performance and get the data you need to optimize your website and turn it into a lead conversion machine, check out our free tool, the Growth Grader, today.