It’s one of the most frequently asked questions in content marketing: How often should I be publishing?
This is a critical consideration as marketers strive to maximize their impact and results while dealing with the reality of constrained resources. In an ideal world, you might like to be putting out great new content every single day, but for most, that is an unrealistic aspiration.
This post offers guidance on evaluating your needs and developing a content cadence that works best for your brand and your audience.
What is content cadence?
In a nutshell, content cadence is a representation of how often your brand publishes content. But it’s about more than just frequency. Cadence is about strategic timing and patterns. It’s not just how much content you’re putting out, but when you’re publishing it and why.
As Olivia Gochnour puts it on the Tiled Blog: “Frequency relates more to volume and the haphazard way that many organizations send content out, at random times to random people.” Indeed, your publishing cadence should never be haphazard or random, and putting a thoughtful plan in place as part of your content strategy helps ensure that it’s not.
“Timing is important,” says Gochnour, “but there are a number of other factors that come into play when your marketing team is looking for the right content cadence. Factors such as who you are marketing to, what platform you’re using, how you engage them, when you engage them, what you engage them with, and the value that it brings.”
Content cadence statistics
According to HubSpot, which surveyed 1,200 marketers to understand how often they publish content across various channels:
- 34% of marketers publish content multiple times a week
- 33% publish content once a day
- 13% publish multiple times a day
- 10% publish weekly
- 6% publish multiple times per month
- 4% publish once a month or less
In other words, 80% of marketers are publishing content at least multiple times per week. This demonstrates that by and large, brands recognize the value in a healthy and active content cadence for staying top of mind, improving search visibility, nurturing audience engagement, and providing ample opportunities to address buyer needs throughout their journey.
Content cadence best practices
- Aim for consistency: Maintain a predictable schedule, tone and quality of content delivery to meet audience expectations and drive sustained engagement.
- Plan around audience insights: Analyze data around your audience and publish based on times they are most active and likely to engage.
- Prioritize variety and diversity of content: Include a mix of content types — long-form, short-form, visual, video — to cater to your audience’s varying preferences.
- Use data to adjust and optimize: Review performance metrics and adapt your publishing schedule based on what the data tells you.
- Champion quality over quantity: Focus on creating and publishing high-quality pieces with a distinct purpose, rather than churning out content to meet a threshold.
One of the most critical things you can do to ensure adherence to these best practices is developing a strong content planning discipline. Create a detailed content calendar or editorial calendar that maps out upcoming publications so you can get aligned as a team on what’s in the pipeline and stay ahead of publishing needs.
Find expert content planning tips on our blog
Customize your cadence based on content type and channel
As we’ve established, while there are some universal best practices for content publishing cadence, approaches should be customized to your company and its audience. As you think about the different channels and platforms, it’s important to think about how your customers engage with them.
Blogs
Maintaining a consistent cadence on a blog is vital for SEO, visibility and engagement. From a search standpoint, algorithms reward sources that consistently feature fresh content, especially when focusing on topics that are in flux. This can also lead to more frequent crawling and indexing.
Beyond that, though, you want to set expectations for your audience and follow through. Build a habit for your readership by letting them know when they can anticipate new content on your blog. If you choose to publish once per week or three times per week in lieu of a daily cadence, try and make sure you’re always pushing new content live on the same days. (For the TopRank Blog, we usually publish new posts every Monday and Wednesday.)
Social Media
As with blogs, consistency is key for social media content. We all know it can be difficult to break through on feeds as a brand, but keeping a regular presence helps a lot.
Again, much of this is about habit-building. As Alex White wrote in our big guide to organic social media marketing, “You’ll want to ensure your posting schedule is consistent, and that your content is valuable and thematic. The value will help people recall why they’re returning, and the thematic recurring content will train them when to return.”
Social media algorithms also reward accounts that publish engaging content on a recurring basis — because it encourages people to keep returning to the platform. For example, according to LinkedIn, company pages that post at least weekly see double the engagement, helping drive organic reach and follower growth.
Email is an interesting channel since it’s so direct and personal. You’re not attracting people to your own website, but instead showing up in their inbox. Because of this, an added level of scrutiny is warranted.
Keep goals top of mind when establishing an email marketing cadence. Newsletters could arrive weekly or even daily if it’s what your audience wants. The occasional soft-sell promotional email is okay, so long as you’re also providing value, but sending too many of these is a quick path to the spam folder. Email should mainly be used for relationship-building.
One thing marketers can consider is putting recipients in control of the delivery cadence: allow them to set preferences for how often they hear from your brand, or opt into specific categories of emails.
Resources
Much like blog content, resources usually live on the company website domain, but they serve a different purpose. This educational content is more evergreen in nature, and often organized within layered content hubs that cover solution-related topics in depth.
The beauty of resources — aside from the fact that Google loves this kind of authoritative, comprehensive content — is that you don’t need to worry so much about cadence or publishing overload. Because it’s not as timebound as blog or social content, and isn’t typically presented in a chronological way, you don’t need to worry about publishing too much in succession and thus burying content on a blog home page or social feed.
In fact, in the case of resource content or similar types of marketing assets, it behooves your brand to publish as much as you can, as fast as you can. Content is the most powerful lever for SEO — the sooner you get it live, the sooner it gets to work helping you reach your goals.
Kickstart your content marketing engine
Looking for more resources and expertise to supercharge your content marketing results? Explore our services and reach out to find out how we can help.
