How often should your marketing clients be publishing new content? This question—and its answer—is arguably the most crucial consideration your clients need to make when it comes to their overall content marketing strategy.
But why?
The bottom line is—blogging increases the effectiveness of your content marketing plan. That part is clear. The magic number of blog posts needed to drive potential customers to your clients’ sites, however, is not so obvious. In fact, it completely depends on several factors, including the target audience, the problem that the content is trying to solve, and the resources your potential client has available to them.
Marketers need to identify their client’s posting frequency, as well as when to post social media content, when to post fresh content, and SEO related to the published content.
While it’s possible to support your new and potential clients through an in-house content strategy, your best bet is to partner with a content marketing agency to get comprehensive support.
Identifying Your Content Production Strategy
Unfortunately, the question of how often you should blog is exceptionally complex.
Experts suggest publishing an average of 11 or more blog posts per month would directly impact inbound website traffic. But is this the right number for YOUR clients? Possibly.
Publishing content biweekly may seem unreasonable, especially for some businesses, like a new business that still wants to produce great content. However, know that you can always hire a content marketing agency to outsource that content production.
A good content marketing agency can take on a lot of content marketing work. They might:
- Provide guidelines for posting frequency, topic generation, publishing strategies, producing evergreen content, and publishing to different social media platforms
- Provide content marketing consulting services
- Help you develop a content marketing campaign for your existing clients and potential clients to help them figure out the blogging frequency sweet spot that meets their needs
- Write fresh content
- Provide SEO optimization through writing for targeted SEO keywords or long-tail keywords, or optimizing old posts
- Meet regularly with you and/or your clients to keep content production on-pace
- And support additional content strategies, like linking strategies, guest posting, and following SEO best practices for page-related factors
Having a reliable content marketing agency as a partner will give your agency the confidence that it needs to recommend blogging or content marketing strategies aligned with its goals.
Partnering with an agency gives you sales tools and increases the value of your business offerings. Outsourcing partnered services is a highly effective business strategy and a great way to lump together support and customer service packages, creating even better long-term business relationships.
Identifying Your Publishing Frequency
Naturally, it’s not always possible to outsource content marketing. In any case, you still need to provide your clients with guidance around optimal publishing strategies.
To help you with these, we’ve identified four major milestones that you should follow. First, identify the content’s goal. Then plan a content strategy, and identify the available resources. And finally, get creative!
Determine Your Blogging Goals: Organic Traffic vs. Brand Awareness
The following infographic from Hubspot provides a helpful summary of blogging frequency by purpose. Regardless of the objective, SEO optimization is enhanced by refreshing or updates previously posted content.
Organic Traffic
If your client’s fundamental objective is to increase traffic and “clicks” (aka organic traffic) to their site, they need to post at least 2-3 times per week (at minimum), but most experts recommend somewhere from 3-5 blog posts a week.
If it is part of your agreement to post for them, you will need to coordinate the publishing frequency with them. This is especially important if they are writing blog articles.
Organic traffic has a lot to do with consistency and authority. Therefore, you want high-level blogs that touch on all the related topics to that subject. Identifying content topics is extremely important in this instance, followed by linking strategies and long-tail key phrases.
Brand Awareness
Your client’s main purpose for blogging about their company might be to create buzz around their product or service. If brand awareness is their goal, and they are at the point where they are zeroing in on building their image, the key is to expand the content. They should be thinking about how blogging can build and help define their image or brand.
Blogging for brand awareness will be focused on building a voice or narrative for their brand. The focus is on quality content, not quantity, here. All things considered, one blog post per week is a great target for smaller businesses, but even biweekly will do well.
If this posting schedule is not feasible due to time or resource limitations, working with a content marketing agency is well worth the investment for long-term ROI.
A target audience can get helpful information about a company’s brand when using a brand awareness approach to blogging. Any opportunity to provide statistics about the company or industry – such as branded infographics – will help your clients develop a rapport with their target audience and increase brand loyalty.
Some examples are posting about the “employee of the month,” celebrating the team’s successes, recapping a recent event, or clarifying the brand’s mission statement through an infographic.
Plan Ahead
Your clients also need to be asking themselves, “what is my plan?” and “how can I match and optimize my marketing and business objectives?”
For small teams with limited resources, it tends to be hard to conceptualize, create, and promote shiny new blog posts each day. This is where having a predetermined editorial calendar or content calendar comes into play. Planning for events like product launches and coordinating blog posts with the launch is an effective way to combine forces and drive traffic to a site.
Organizing and outlining the content ahead of writing saves time. Since your clients will need to post as much as possible, they should consider posting instructional content. Some blogging ideas include industry how-tos, campaign round-ups, and bullet point articles, or “listicles.”
Creating a loyal following and expanding your brand takes careful planning and requires a specific direction – without these measures, building a brand and being successful is like rolling the dice and hoping for luck to be on your side. Don’t take this risk with your clients.
The response to how frequently your clients need to post every week, month, and quarter is simpler to decide when it is attached to a concrete plan. Refer to Hubspot’s infographic if you need to remind them about the strategies they can choose from and the best uses of each related to their mission and purpose of blogging.
Identify Available Resources
Before any planning can begin, however, take stock of what resources are available and identify roles and responsibilities. Once the team and its capacity for content marketing have been decided, begin to focus on the strategy that best meets the brand’s mission and establish benchmarks that allow success—or failure—of this alignment to be measured.
Your clients should also consider two elements related to the blog posts they curate – freshness and volume. Your clients need to know how the newness of their content will impact where they rank in web search tools and make posting new content regularly a priority.
Google’s algorithm incorporates a QDF (query deserves freshness) metric to decide search rankings. Additionally, modifying already existing content can also help drive more traffic to their site. HubSpot, for example, spends a large amount of time and energy updating or reviewing existing posts, as 70% of traffic comes from the content they’ve already curated. Do both, and the traffic is guaranteed to increase!
But in case your clients need more proof, HubSpot has data to back up their recommendations. In one study that included reviewing the activity of more than 13,500 clients, traffic to blog sites with over 400 posts doubled when compared with sites that had less than 400 posts.
Does this mean you need to recommend that your clients post 400 unique pieces of content as quickly as possible? No. But awareness of data and best practices from industry leaders and a willingness to heed this advice will undoubtedly help them succeed in driving traffic to their sites and creating brand loyalty.
Again, if this seems like an impossible task, a content marketing agency can help make quick work of blogging demands.
Get Creative
What fun is work if you can’t get creative doing it?
Social media has made the mundane act of blogging a shiny new experience on each platform, so your clients can use this to their advantage.
When considering just what kind of content to post, refer your clients to these tips:
- Develop blog posts based on topic complexity, promotions, and special events
- Aim to double the distribution of content by making use of schedules
- Analyze the audience by incorporating fun polls, surveys, and other ways their target groups can interact with content
- Experiment with different blogging tactics such as free giveaways, free email courses to pre-sell a product or service, guest and influencer posts, and pop-ups or banners
- Solve the problem of their target audience
- Tell a story (everyone likes stories)
When in doubt, never fear—there are content specialists out there who are happy to lessen the burden of creating blog content for both you and your clients.
Posting With Purpose
You should always post with purpose, post often, and stay active with content creation. Do this, and the traffic will come.
To better support, your clients in their efforts to produce valuable content, improve search engine rankings, and increase traffic, reach out to okwrite! We have years of experience creating high-quality content across several industries.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you and your clients!
