Somewhere around week four of publishing consistently, agency owners ask me some version of the same question: “how much of this do I have to do before it works?”
What they want is a cadence. Three posts a week, five, a newsletter every Thursday, something that goes on a calendar and can be defended when a client fire shows up on Tuesday. I understand the pull, because I’ve wanted the same thing (a number to hit is so much easier to live with than a judgment call you have to keep making forever).
But cadence measures how much you produced, and nobody has ever booked a call because you produced something. They book because they spent enough time with your material to decide you were worth the risk, and that’s a completely different number.
Time on brand is the total minutes a prospect spends with your content before they reach out, and my rough estimate is somewhere around 45 minutes, which I suspect is low for a lot of buyers.
Quick Take
- I have no confidence in 45 as a precise number and I’d rather you didn’t either. There’s no clean math behind it, you’re after a general average, and the useful part is the unit rather than the figure.
- Cadence tells you how hard you’re working, and time on brand tells you whether any of it’s landing. Only one of the two has ever put a call on the calendar.
- Five LinkedIn posts a week is maybe four minutes of reading if somebody reads all five, so the gap almost always closes with one long asset rather than more short ones.
- Most agencies already produce the raw material for those minutes, and it’s sitting in the recordings of calls you’re already on.
What this covers
- What time on brand means, and why minutes are the unit
- How much content someone consumes before they reach out
- Why publishing cadence is the wrong thing to grade yourself against
- How to count what’s in your 45 minutes right now
- How to close the gap without buying more hours in the week
- How you know the number is moving
What is time on brand?
Time on brand is the number of minutes a prospect spends consuming your material before they contact you, counted across everything they touch: the LinkedIn posts, a blog post or two, the podcast episode they finished on a drive, your homepage, whatever’s on your YouTube channel.
Minutes are the unit on purpose. A piece of content is a unit of your effort, and a minute is a unit of their attention, and attention is the thing that has to pile up before a stranger turns into an inbound message. Two agencies can publish the identical number of pieces in a quarter while one of them gives a serious buyer 40 more minutes to spend, and the one with the extra 40 minutes gets the call.
It also puts the question in the buyer’s frame, which is where it belongs. “How much content do I need” has no answer, because it depends on the piece, the channel, and the person. “Do I have 45 minutes of anything a stranger would stay for” has an answer, and you can go count it this afternoon.
How much content does someone consume before they book a call?
My rough estimate is somewhere around 45 minutes, usually made of a handful of LinkedIn posts, a blog post or two, and one long thing (a podcast episode, a webinar, a real video) that does most of the carrying.
I want to be straight with you about where that number comes from, because it isn’t a dashboard. There’s no clean way to watch one stranger move across a podcast app, LinkedIn, and your site, so what I do instead is ask people how they heard about me and then walk the path backward with them on the call. It usually goes something like this: they caught me guesting on somebody else’s podcast, then followed my LinkedIn for a while, then joined the newsletter. I know how long that episode ran and I can see how many weeks of the newsletter they’ve had, so I can put a rough number on it. That’s arithmetic on top of somebody’s memory, which is the best anyone’s going to get here, and 45 minutes is where it tends to land. If anything I think it’s low.
A rough average still beats no number at all. “Publish consistently” gives you nothing to check your work against, and 45 minutes at least tells you whether you’re in the neighborhood or nowhere near it. It also explains the thing owners find most confusing about content, which is why marketing appears to do nothing for five months and then work all at once. Nothing changed on the day they reached out except that they’d finished the 45 minutes.
Why is publishing cadence the wrong thing to measure?
Because cadence measures your output while time on brand measures their attention, and the two come apart faster than you’d think.
Run the arithmetic on it. A LinkedIn post takes somewhere around 30 to 40 seconds to read, so five posts a week is three or four minutes of material even when somebody reads every one, and a full month of that is maybe 15 minutes. An agency posting daily for a year can still be handing a serious buyer less than half of what they need before they’ll raise their hand, while an agency with one 40-minute podcast episode and a homepage that gives a visitor somewhere to go clears the bar on a Tuesday afternoon.
Which is why “be consistent” is both true and the reason a lot of owners stay stuck, since consistency at four minutes a week is still consistency. The advice isn’t wrong, it just measures the part you control instead of the part that decides.
None of that means stop posting. Volume is what creates the data you’d need before polishing anything is worth doing, and most agencies are busy improving content nobody has seen yet. So keep publishing, and just stop treating the count as the scoreboard.
What’s in your 45 minutes right now?
Open a doc, list every asset a stranger could find and finish today without talking to you, put an honest minute count next to each one, and add it up. That total is your ceiling, and most owners have never once looked at it.
I’ll be honest that this isn’t an exercise I run with clients, and I’m not going to pretend it’s necessary. You could go your whole career without counting and be fine. It’s worth doing once anyway, because the number itself matters less than what looking for it does to how you think about the question.
A few rules make the count honest. Only score what’s findable, because a case study sitting three clicks deep with nothing linking to it doesn’t exist to a stranger. A 60-minute webinar that loses everyone around minute nine counts as nine, since you’re measuring what people consume rather than what you uploaded. And the homepage counts, because a stranger reads it before they read anything else.
Then check the order, because a stranger can’t start with the 40-minute thing. Every channel does up to three jobs: discovery is where people learn a solution to their problem exists, relationship is where they work out how you think, and conversion is where they can buy. LinkedIn is rarely a discovery channel, since people go there to network rather than to search for answers, so an agency whose entire 45 minutes lives on LinkedIn is handing all of it to people who already found them somewhere else.
My bet on what you’ll find is plenty of material, all of it short, which is a different problem from the one most owners think they have.
How do you get to 45 minutes without adding hours to your week?
Take the minutes out of the calls you’re already on, because a recorded client call is a first draft that didn’t need to be scheduled.
Content loses to client work for a structural reason. Client work is immediate: you finish it, you see the result, the client’s happy, the box gets checked. Marketing pays off on a timeline where nobody external is waiting on you, so it loses every negotiation with the calendar. (This is Delivery Drag doing what it does.) Since the cause is structural, more discipline doesn’t fix it, and a source of material that doesn’t depend on discipline does.
So record every coaching and client call, because the questions clients ask are content. Record sales calls, because every question in one is an objection, and answering objections before the call both smooths the sale and hands you a topic list you didn’t have to invent. Team idea meetings surface patterns across clients that no single client can see.
One of my clients outside the agency world records all of their sales calls and looks for what’s repeating across personas, then publishes on it before their market catches up. They’ve turned into the place people go for the read on their space, and the entire input was a recording they were already making.
Then find your minimum viable effort, which is different for every agency, and is the smallest weekly amount that keeps leads arriving rather than the amount that looks impressive on a content calendar. One agency owner I coach runs about 30 minutes a day: five LinkedIn posts a week, one newsletter, one long-form piece a month. His first inbound landed in week five, which was a small deal and a big signal, because it was the first time in over a year that his marketing had pulled a conversation toward him instead of him chasing one down.
The posts keep him visible, and the monthly long-form piece is what moves the number, since one 40-minute episode adds more time on brand than a full quarter of short posts.
How do you know your time on brand is going up?
You’ll hear it before you can measure it, and the tell is prospects using your language back at you. They describe their problem in your framing, they reference your point of view, and the booking call sounds like they already get it.
The measurable proxies are thinner but they’re real: average session duration and pages per session on the blog, watch time rather than view count on video, and the question I ask on every call, which is just “how did you hear about me?” Then walk the path backward with them, because the first answer is never the whole path and the rest of it comes out if you keep pulling. Do that twenty times and write the answers down, and you’ll have your own version of the 45 minutes instead of borrowing mine, which is the version worth having.
And judge by exposure rather than by weeks on the calendar. Time by itself does nothing, and people seeing your material over time does, so set an actual test: put the assets in front of a specific number of the right people and measure calls booked against that. A slow quarter where barely anyone reached the material tells you nothing about the material, and owners keep reading those quarters as verdicts.
The honest limit is that you can’t follow one person’s whole path and you shouldn’t try to build a system that does. Time on brand is a trend line, and the only decision it has to inform is whether your next move is more short things or one long one, and it’s almost always the long one.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much content does an agency need before it starts getting inbound leads?
Closer to 45 minutes of consumable material than to any particular posting cadence. That’s a rough average I’ve put together by asking people how they found me and reconstructing the path, so treat it as a general read rather than a measured figure, and assume it runs higher for a considered purchase.
Is time on brand something I can track in Google Analytics?
Not cleanly, no. You can’t follow one prospect across LinkedIn, YouTube, a podcast app, and your site, and any tool that claims it can is guessing. What you can watch is the trend through proxies like session duration, pages per session, and video watch time, plus the answer to “how did you hear about me?” on every call, walked backward until you’ve got the whole path rather than the last step of it.
How many LinkedIn posts a week should I publish?
Whatever your minimum viable effort turns out to be, which for most owners is a couple a week plus something longer. The count matters less than what it adds up to, since five posts a week is roughly four minutes of reading and won’t get anyone close to 45 on its own.
Does a podcast or a webinar count toward time on brand?
Yes, and long assets are the most efficient way to move the number. A single 40-minute episode adds more minutes than three months of short posts, which is why agencies that publish one real long-form piece a month tend to clear the threshold well before agencies posting daily.
What if I already have 45 minutes of content and still nothing’s coming in?
Then you don’t have a volume problem, and adding more won’t help. Either the material isn’t reaching the right people, which is a channel question, or it is reaching them and giving them no reason to choose you, which is a positioning question. Both are worth more of your attention than another post.
The short version
Open a doc this afternoon and count it, once. Every asset a stranger could find and finish today, with an honest minute count beside it. Don’t treat the total as a score, because the useful part is which way it’s off. A handful of minutes means more posts won’t close the gap and one long asset will, and a total well past 45 with an empty calendar means the problem was never the content and the work is positioning.
Then ask the next person who books how they heard about you, and keep pulling until you’ve got the whole path rather than the last step of it. Twenty of those and you’ll have your own number, which will be worth more than mine.
If you’re publishing steadily and still waiting on the first inbound conversation, that’s the exact problem we work on inside the Dynamic Agency Community.