If only the answer were the same for every business, blog, or person, life would be much easier. Oh well. Luckily, there are factors you can look at to determine whether your content will start bringing your business in 4 months or 17 months.
(3 to 12 months are the commonly reported ranges.)
Let's get some things clear first. You should segment your content into the part of your marketing funnel that you're trying to focus on. For most businesses, that is just getting eyeballs to your website. From there, it ought to have offers and other things to exchange something of value for an email address. (A lead magnet.)
There will be a smaller section of posts describing your product, how it solves your customers' problems, why you are superior to your competition, etc.
So the "results" of content marketing could mean any number of things to different people. Dollars. Page Views. Downloads.
Factors
Market/Industry
Some markets are tricky. Take one time purchases for example. People will look for something like pet insurance once for the lifetime of their pet. On the other hand, if you sell essential oils, you will customers coming back frequently for different oils and accessories. (Provided your product is decent.)
The business with frequent buyers has an easier time than the business who's client makes a purchase once every decade. The customers of infrequent purchases will do more research on the product before buying. You will have less influence because people ask their friends and family's opinions before making large purchases.
Frequency of Posting
Post at least once a week. Do yourself that favor. Posting once a month makes it easier for your clients to forget who you are and why they care.
If you post every day, that's a ton more work on your part. This is particularly true if you're a small organization without dedicated inbound marketing.
A couple of times a week is the sweet spot, according to a Hubspot study.
Quality of: Viewers, Hook, CTA
You will hear everyone telling you that quality matters. It does. No question about it. But then you get into the details of how to create quality.
The type of product you offer will change the nature of your prospects. People are more likely to share posts on things it's okay to obsess over/collect. Fewer people will get excited about something like anti-itching cream and tell all their friends about which brand they love.
Your hook and your call to action are the other two trickiest parts of your posts. It takes practice to get those right. You can test both of these with your analytics.
Look at the amount of time someone spends on your page. If it's only a few seconds, work on writing a better hook to get people into the article.
If they read the whole thing and then leave your page, then you need to check two things. First, make sure that you have plenty of internal and external links in your post. Second, verify that your CTA matches the purpose of the article and where it fits into your sales funnel.
Distribution
You have can the best product in the world, but without showing it off, who will know? That's why you have marketing after all.
Organic traffic is lovely. It's satisfying to know that you're doing a good enough job Google, sends people your way.
On the other hand, if you don't' distribute your content, you are missing valuable eyeballs. It's like not having a marketing plan at all.
- Numbers to Watch
- Shares
- Backlinks
- Bounce Rate
But I want my posts to go viral right now!
Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to be able to splice my genes so I can photosynthesize instead of getting sunburned. I would even take the green skin.
Back to reality. Having a post go viral isn't something you can force to happen. It's like those overnight business successes that were ten years in the making.
There are ways you can help yourself do it.
- Create sensational, opinionated content
- Build an enormous audience
- Make sure some of your audience are influencers in their own areas
- Pray to whatever supernatural being you want
- Have your timing down perfectly
But when you have all those things, you still need the stars to align correctly to "go viral."
Don't waste your time on it. Focus on the above bullet points and if it happens, awesome for you! Seriously, congrats. If it doesn't, you still have a killer content marketing program that will make you money.
More is Better!
Just write more. Quantity isn't everything, but it helps. If you have lots of posts, lots of lead magnets, lots of landing pages, then you will get lots of eyeballs. Statistically, you can expect a % of those eyeballs to turn into customers.
Ta-da!
Just keep writing, my friends. Make it informative. Make it interesting. Make it available.
TLDR; 9ish months is an average time to start seeing results from your content marketing. Depending on your industry and several other factors, it could be as short as four months or as long as 17 months.