If you’ve been in business for even a couple of months, you know that there is one particular debate topic that sparks again and again – Is quality more important or quantity?
Which one is more important when it comes to content – quality or quantity?
Resting the case on the age-old debate
For years, this has been an on-going debate and many experienced leaders have put forth their views on it.
Some strongly believe that in order to drive traffic, and by extension leads and customers, you need to publish more and more frequently. It doesn’t have to be jaw-dropping, insightful copy. It just has to answer a very specific niche query that your target audience would probably be looking for.
This is a strategy that Amazon incorporated in its early days. Well, known entrepreneur and investor Gary Vaynerchuk also used a similar strategy in the early days of starting, Wine Library, when he purchased a number of Google ads all at once, so as to gain more visibility on the search engine.
On the other hand, HubSpot’s Senior Communications Manager Janessa Lantz says, “Product managers spend their time figuring out the highest-impact feature to build. They use data to understand the impact of a feature. They project manage. Content marketers will also build muscle in these areas, we have to — attention is too scarce to risk it on low-impact content.”
So the question is, which wins – Quality or quantity?
The answer is – neither. Quality and quantity are both two ends of a spectrum, and the proportion in which both are to be incorporated into your strategy is largely influenced by your company’s current position and its overall marketing strategy.
Thus, the real question you should be asking is – Which mix gives you the maximum ROI?
The answer depends entirely on your business. If you run a news site, the approach would lean in more towards quantity, so as to get more ad views. But if it’s a niche blog/service, your focus may be quality.
Neither approach is cheap or easy to implement, irrespective of whether you are a well-funded corporation or a promising new age start-up. Here are 5 steps that could help you:
Step 1: Map out a plan
Irrespective of whether you’re an army of marketers or a one-person show – a plan is going to be the most essential weapon. The way to go about with this is to first analyze your company’s marketing strategy and goal, and then go ahead and craft your content strategy. Enlist your blog posts, social feeds and big pieces of content such as infographics, videos or e-books, and then decide your optimum mix of quantity and quality.
Step 2: Understand your audience
One of the most essential aspects of your content is to align it with the interests and needs of your audiences. If you’re in the early stages of business, think about creating a customer persona as it will help you relate back to it whenever you create your content. This step involves a lot of market research and testing.
Step 3: Get your creative juices flowing
This is the tricky part. As Stephanie Stahl, General Manager of Content Marketing Institute, rightfully points out, “There is more content produced every day than we can possibly consume.”
Therefore, your job is to make sure that your content is unique and stands out, as opposed to just being one amongst most kinds of content. Make sure your content is able to place you in a position of thought leadership.
Step 4: Tell your story
The game, the ultimate asset, is capturing attention. But that will not happen through standard forms of content that will be available on every other website. That will only happen through differentiation by virtue of a brand identity. To do so, you need to tell your story. Once you’ve captured your audience’s attention, you can then begin to showcase your offerings and entice them to become customers.
Keep in mind, your story needs to be simple and to the point. Remember that the idea is to get your customer to respond to the call to action.
Step 5: Hire a pro
Looking at all of the steps enlisted above, if you feel that your current team or resources may not be able to balance quantity and quality, hire a professional or a team of professionals who can take over the content creation. This will take you much further than you would imagine.
The quality of your content is important, but then so is the amount that you’re doing. Once you start creating quality content, you’ll attract an audience who will come back for more. And if you’ve got nothing more to show them, you’ll only lose them. Therefore, the only correct answer to the age-old question of quality vs quantity is that just one is not enough. You need to have an optimum mix of both, or else your strategy could fail.
