(Pt. 2) Quality vs. Quantity: Which Content Strategy Leaves Your Audience Begging for More?

In Part 2 of this series on Content Creation: Quality vs Quantity, Sonja continues to navigate this debate, providing insights on why some brands need to consider Content Quantity as an approach to their overall content marketing strategy.

Sonja kicks off with a compelling study from Semrush, revealing a surprising connection between content quantity and improved website rankings. This data-driven argument makes a strong case for considering content quantity as a viable strategy for brand growth.

However, she emphasizes that a high-volume content approach is not without its challenges, requiring unwavering consistency, an in-depth understanding of your audience, and effective content production at scale. By auditing past content and smart budget planning, you can leverage a well-executed high-volume content strategy to significantly enhance your brand's visibility and growth.

Transcript

Sonja Crystal Williams: 0:12

Hi everyone. Welcome to today's episode of 10 Minute Marketing. I'm your host, Sonja Crystal Williams. All right, so we are in part two of our three-part series around content creation quality versus quantity and today I want to talk in more detail in our part two segment about content quantity. Okay, so make sure to take a moment. Hit subscribe to our podcast channel. Make sure you're listening to episodes. Give us feedback. We want to hear from you. Make sure you take a moment to do that and let's roll in.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 0:50

So question for you. I want you to ask yourself in our organization or if you're branding for yourself with my personal brand, do we or do I post content too often? Do I post too often to my social media channels? Do I post too often blog updates on my website? What's too often? You know what too often is. You know what it is. Your meter is what you think. Your meter is based on, what you see when you engage.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 1:33

Okay, if you ask yourself that question, if you look at your Instagram account and you say do we post too often on Instagram? What's too much? You know what too much is based on when you're overwhelmed by seeing the same content from the same brand over and over and over again Is once a day too much? Probably not. Is twice a day? Maybe not Right, but it also depends on where you're posting it. On a network like Instagram, is it in the feed? Is it in stories? I always say, in stories, go crazy, right. So it just depends on where you're posting content. But the main questions you're asking yourself is am I doing it too much? And if your answer, if you could answer really fast and say no, and then you start thinking about it and you're like, well, maybe we don't post enough at all, then listen closer to this episode. Let me give you some reasons, some compelling reasons, why, as you look ahead to next year and you're planning your content creation strategy out and you're thinking about how are we going to market this content? How do we do it? Should we be doing it? Should we be positioning ourselves to do more? Listen to today's episode. Okay.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 2:44

Now in episode one, if you listen to episode one, I gave everybody a little homework assignment. Okay, nothing too complicated to do, just a little challenge for yourself. And if you listen to that episode, hopefully you did it. If not, the quick summary of what I recommend that you do is go back through your most recent or maybe your top social media posts per network. Go back through your blog posts on your website and give yourself a ranking one to 10 in terms of is this quantity, was it high or was it low? Give yourself a ranking One is like low, we didn't do enough, 10 is like yeah, we did, and rank it per network or per channel. So do that step, first for yourself and then, assuming maybe you recognize that we didn't do enough in the realm of quantity, let me give you some more compelling reasons why quantity makes sense.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 3:39

Now remember, in this episode or this series, we're actually doing a little debate here. Should you be doing more quality or more quantity? Okay? So today I'm making the argument for content quantity and why you need to ratchet it up. So answer those questions for yourself. Do we post too often? Are we doing too much? Are we not doing enough to your ranking? Figure that out now.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 4:05

Four reasons recap why content quality so useful. It's gonna give you more visibility, more consistency. Social media networks love this. I referenced Instagram releasing in 2022 and their algorithm guide straight from the horse's mouth that they reward accounts and show posts to more followers when you publish content more consistently, and content in the Instagram world or across these social media channels is the text you write in a post. Sometimes it's the graphic, the photo, the video. It looks different, right? Content takes on many different forms.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 4:44

So you also need to think about if I am gonna produce more, higher quantity of content, what can I produce effectively in big numbers or like in bulk? Right? You need to be thinking about what can I produce in bulk? If it's video, maybe you're not doing hour long videos in bulk, but you could do 15 second videos in bulk. You could do 30 second videos in bulk. If it's graphics, maybe you got a designer. You give them a series of images to create. Go on Fiverr, you go on Upwork, you find a freelancer who can do that for you. If you got somebody in-house, even better. But give them a really clear assignment and give them again a way to create it in bulk, right, not just a one-time thing. Get them to package it for you. That way you can spread out that content and give yourself more leverage for your quantity that you're trying to create. That's gonna give you the ability to publish it on a consistent schedule.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 5:46

Okay, we don't wanna be all over the place when we're going for quantity as our strategy, at the very least we need to post daily, okay. That keeps us visible. We're always in someone's feed. That keeps us consistent, okay. We also need to remember that quantity often leads to faster growth. When you post more frequently, over time, you're gonna reach a wider audience, you're gonna reach more followers. So that's important as well. Now, don't get me wrong, y'all, if you're trying to grow your followers, there's many other factors that go into that, but quantity definitely feeds into it. Okay, and, of course, again, we talked about algorithms More frequent posts, better chance of reaching more followers. So those are some things to think about.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 6:33

Now I wanna shift gears and I also want to talk about a study that was published a couple of years ago. This study was published by Simrush. If you've ever heard of Simrush, they are a tool that you can use that helps you analyze your SEO position, search engine optimization position. Okay, great tool. By the way, okay, I'm not endorsing them, I'm not getting paid, but it is a great tool. So, on Simrush's blog, they actually published this article. Actually, it was published in February 2023. It was actually earlier this year and in their article, they focused on doing a state of content marketing 2023 global report, where they looked at the trends in content marketing. And for those of you that are leaning toward content quantity that side of the argument as your strategy and trying to really confirm should I be doing it or you're just on the fence, here are some compelling factors that came out of that report, based on the stats that they ran.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 7:44

Okay, so one of the biggest things they asked in that survey to this group of content marketers was which tactics help the most to boost your ranking. Now they're referring to website ranking. Okay, so this would apply if you are writing blog posts and you're trying to make sure you get more visible, which, the more your blog and website is visible, the more sales you're getting, the more inquiries you're getting. Possibly again may help you with your social media traffic right, but it helps with your bottom line which tactics help the most to boost your ranking, and 55% of the people surveyed said creating more content and posting more often. 55% of the people surveyed huge right, so that's huge. Okay. Now, they picked more than one answer, but that was the top answer that they picked when it came to things they could do to boost rankings.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 8:48

Here's the other thing based on that survey that you really need to think about. If you are going to shift into a content quantity focus as your strategy, you need to be thinking about again how do I produce that content in big numbers? And you need to be thinking about your budget. What is our budget going to look like if we are going to up the ante for what we're doing when it comes to our content quantity? Do we need to hire people to fill specific roles? Do I need an entire content production team? Do I need an intern? I'll have some clients and companies I work with who are like well, we're going to hire an intern to help produce our content. Yeah, that might be good. Maybe you need an assistant, maybe you need a videographer, or maybe you're doing the video yourself and you need a video editor. But I would encourage you to write that down Again. That is driven by the content you're producing.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 9:53

If I wanted to, I'll use myself as an example. If I wanted to up the ante with my podcast next year and content quantity was a strategy, I probably need to hire a podcast producer so I can get more podcasting done faster, producing more content that I could share across my network. That might be my angle. If podcasting is of high importance to me next year, you need to think about that. What is of high importance when you think about the buckets, of how you could create lots and lots of content? Is it we're going to follow in the video bucket? We're going to do live video next year? Is it podcast or audio content? Is it more images, more graphics? That's the beauty of content quantity. If you don't know which of those that you should be doing, the truth is you could experiment with it all.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 10:45

Because you're producing so much content, you have the opportunity, over a period of maybe six or 12 months, to experiment with various content formats and strategies to figure out what exactly is resonating the most with your audience. There's a lot of opportunities there, but that's also what it goes back to. As you build that strategy, you do need to be thinking about whether or not you know what already resonates with your audience. That's why you need to do that audit. First, you need to look back at your brand and figure that out Okay, but that's part of the puzzle in assessing all of that and then, once you know what the buckets are that you're going to focus on whether it's all those different content buckets or it's one in particular, then you build a budget around it, right.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 11:38

So, going back to my example, if I'm going to focus on podcasting, if you're a podcaster like me and you say, all right, I'm going to get this podcast producer, then you need to build the budget right. We got to do the research to figure out what does that cost? And are there other things beyond hiring the producer that I need to anticipate cost for? What do those look like? How do I build that in to my overall budget? So you really want to think about what that looks like and that's going to help you make more informed decisions and really figuring out if content quantity is the way you want to move down.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 12:25

So I gave you a few examples of simple buckets. There's videos, there's podcast content. Get more creative too. Think about even thinking outside the box. Do I want to do quizzes? Do I want to create rulers, calculators, tools, other things, even from an offer standpoint that gets my audience to opt in? That could live on my website, live within a blog post. When I think about social media content, even beyond posts that go up directly in the feed, can I think about stories and some of the interactive elements that go into stories, like building those polls, building short little quizzes and other features that get my audience to engage more, because if I am going to spend and invest more time in upping the quantity of how much content I put out in front of people, then I need to make sure it's paying off. I need to be getting the engagement.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 13:21

So one final thought when it comes to quantity, and this is a really good one. It's one my husband put me on to when he was sharing with me some insights from Grant Cardone. If you're not familiar with Grant Cardone, look him up. Wrote a really great book and one of his strategies that you'll hear about, that you'll hear Grant Cardone talk about over and over again, is how you need to 10X your business, or you need to 10X your marketing right, and one of his recommendations techniques, strategies is you need to make sure that people know who you are.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 14:00

Okay, don't live in obscurity. Don't live in a place where no one knows who your brand is. Step into a space especially those of you that are small business owners and really put yourself out there. Don't be nervous about it. Blanket your particular chosen social media network. Blanket your website. Put your message out there. The more people that know who you are, the more stages that you put yourself on, and those stages can be the stages you create for yourself, or content quantity that you create that goes on other people's stages. Get on other people's podcasts. Collaborate with other people, get your content on their websites and to their email list right. The more you do that, the better and more powerful your quest for content quantity will be okay. So I'm going to leave you with that thought, and I want to make sure to tune in to our next episode, where I'm going to talk about content quality and share some arguments why that might make a lot of sense. All right, so thanks for listening. Hope you all listen next time. Until then, have a great day. Thanks everyone. End.