(Pt. 3) Quality vs. Quantity: Which Content Strategy Leaves Your Audience Begging for More?

Content creation: a tug-of-war between quality and quantity. Where should you be investing your time and efforts?

In our final installment of this three-part series, we're diving deeper into the cause for quality and dissecting why leading brands pour resources into crafting research-driven, high-value content. This includes swaying user trust, boosting engagement, and bolstering your brand reputation.

I'm Sonja Crystal Williams, your guide through this maze of content strategy. Tune in as I unpack how regular delivery of top-notch, well-researched content can elevate your brand to an authority in your field, magnetizing a loyal following. We'll also scrutinize the role your content creation strategy plays in your budget planning and team requirements. Join me as we wrap up this series with a fresh perspective on the quantity versus quality debate. It's time to discover if your brand needs a fine balance of both!

Transcript

Sonja Crystal Williams: 0:12

Hi everyone, I'm Sonja Crystal Williams and welcome to this episode of 10 Minute Marketing, so check this out. We are in part three of our three part series around content creation, quality versus quantity, and if you've been following along to the other parts in our series, in part one we really kind of talked about this age old or timeless debate of whether brands should focus more as they're building content or even planning content as we are rounding out the year. Should you be focused on creating more content next year, like lots and lots of it, so you're more visible, more seen? It could be a good thing, right? Or should you focus on quality maybe not as much, but investing more time into crafting high quality content that your audience will really value and that can really help you when it comes to other areas of your website, your social media channel and so on. So I haven't shared my opinion yet. I haven't said whether I think there's a right or wrong answer, so I'll tell you the truth. We're going to talk about that more later in this episode what I think, but I want to spend a little time first making the argument for quality.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 1:31

In part two of this episode, we talked about quantity and some of the reasons why focusing your strategy on producing lots of content high quantity might be important. Now I'm going to make the argument for quality. Why does that make sense? And if you were listening to part one or if you're just tuning in here in part three, here's what I want you to think about. Okay, and this is the assignment I gave everyone else that listened to part one and part two Get a piece of paper or type up a spreadsheet, go through your social media accounts, your website, your blog post and, by each account, do a ranking on a scale from one to ten one being low quality, ten being high quality and rank where you feel like today your content quality falls. Give yourself a self assessment, okay, and look at that per traffic channel Instagram, tiktok, linkedin, pinterest, website and so on. And when we think about content, we're thinking about the way you write posts, the way you write captions, the way you write blog articles, the way you generate imagery or graphics, infographics, video content. You know it could be any of those things podcasts, content but give yourself an assessment is what I'm doing high quality, okay. Now, as you're in this planning phase and thinking ahead about what you want to do for next year, then let me give you some reasons to consider why you should be very, very focused on high quality content that you are posting.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 3:11

Okay, so first of all, I want to go back to a study that I referenced in part two of this series, because I told you part of the study, okay, and it was this study from Simrush on content marketing statistics. They did the state of content marketing global report in 2023 and released it and one of the results on the report, they surveyed content marketers globally. They asked them some really specific questions and one of the questions in particular, they asked them which tactics help the most to boost your ranking. Specifically, this is around like website ranking okay, and referring to the content they're creating for blog posts, and the number one result or answer was creating more content and posting more often 55% responded. Right, that would make the argument I need to be focused on content quantity, but right below that, the next two things that ranked high were improving the quality of our content, making it more valuable 53% surveyed and then, right below that, creating more research driven content 37%. Okay, so what does that tell a person? What does that tell you? Tell you what it tells me. It tells me that top brands are paying attention and shifting their attention to making sure that they are producing high quality content, that they're taking time to do research before they produce it so that it's more valuable to their audience. And if the top brands around the globe are doing this, this sets a trend. This sets an expectation for what consumers, or your audience, might hope to see in your content. So it's one of those things where you might need to think about getting on that bus, okay. So that's number one things you need to think about when it comes to your content quality. Okay.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 5:16

Other things also that you need to really consider is the fact that the higher your quality is of the content you're producing, we talked about value, and value is great. Yes, it's going to produce more value for you, but what it also does is it helps tremendously with trust, the trust factor, the fact that your audience can go to your content at any given moment. Even think about it like this even if they're on your email list right, trying to get subscribers to join an email list is hard. Getting them to read can be harder, but if you're constantly delivering high quality information, that is really going to impact your audience, along with probably some really good subject lines to get them to open it, they're more likely to stay on your list for longer, right, they're more likely to engage with your offers, because that's the bottom line. Right, we're trying to get more website visits, which leads to signups, purchases, you know things like that, requests for demos, depending on what kind of product you have but that really starts to matter. So user trust is huge in this equation and you have the ability to influence that by the type of content that you're putting in front of people.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 6:41

The other thing is, as that user trust does increase, so does your engagement rates. Your engagement rates start to go up on particularly content that you might be sharing across social media channels. Right, if you're creating something that's high quality, whether that's a video where you invest at time in researching and creating a really good script, you've got great graphics or great produced video content to back you up then wouldn't that make your content more shareable? Right, might make it more shareable, might make it more like worthy, might get people to want to comment more. So user trust may translate into increased engagement rates, or vice versa.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 7:30

Okay, the more people see your brand and their feed because your audience is liking it and sharing it, the more there's a trust factor associated, because there's that common person in between sharing your stuff that people already know. It's kind of like word of mouth, right, but it's digital. Those are a couple of things that really make a huge difference. It also impacts your brand reputation. Okay, so you get known as this brand that's really producing good and high quality content, not the brand that's just pushing stuff out there for the sake of having information in front of people and producing content with a lot of fluff. Instead, you again get this distinction right and then that distinction begins to position you, the people who work for your brand, the brand itself, as an authority in your field, and it demonstrates a commitment to excellence. Over time, this can lead to a strong brand reputation that attracts a loyal following. So you really wanna think about that, okay. So all of these things go together right.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 8:43

When you consistently deliver and I did say consistently so when you are delivering high quality content, it still doesn't mean post sporadically here and there and it took you a month to come up with that content and then release it. Like you still need to post consistently, okay, but when you consistently deliver valuable, well researched, well crafted content. This is gonna get your audience more likely to get on board with you and find that high quality content valuable and trustworthy. So, again, makes a huge difference, okay? So I want you to think about this and hopefully you've listened to all this entire series and now you need to start assessing what direction am I gonna go in? Am I gonna go in the direction of more quality content? Am I gonna go in the direction of more quantity? And this makes a difference because it has an impact on your budget who you have in place to help you drive your content creation strategy? You know, if you're creating things in bigger numbers, do you have someone on your team or a freelancer? You've hired a contractor, a vendor, someone, employee who's going to support that? If it's high quality, someone's gotta support doing the research and really coming up with a plan per content piece. So, either way, this is an investment that you really wanna think about.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 10:11

Here's my opinion. When it comes to quantity versus quality, you need both. The truth is, you need a balance between both of them, and I also believe that where you land may depend on where you are in your brand's evolution. Here's what I mean. If I'm a new brand, I might kind of flood people's feeds in the beginning with high quantity to get in front of people, to kind of match up to those algorithms, to make sure I'm highly visible.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 10:51

But at some point in time, as I'm focused more on shifting to becoming more of an authoritative brand and I wanna add again more value and I want to increase my reputation, it may shift. I may shift to quality. I may shift to investing more in research and still producing some stuff that gets out in front of my audience for consistency sake, but a few times a month, investing more time into high quality pieces or longer pieces. If I were doing this, for example, for a blog, I might have let's just say really simple I release one article per week on my website, and so that's about four a month, maybe five in some cases, and two of those articles might be more general. We did some research but we didn't invest as much time into it. We were able to generate those articles relatively quickly and easily based on our knowledge base today. But two of those articles might be longer form articles. We might spend a lot more time researching what goes into those articles. Text-wise they might be longer, maybe 1500 to 2000 words, versus your standard blog posts around 600 or 700 words. We might invest time to add more detailed graphics on the blog posts that we want to be longer Screenshots, custom-made graphics, maybe even inserting video content into the blog posts.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 12:24

Those are examples of how you get to that quality phase, and so that's the truth that I may move in and out, and I think brands need to consider that that there is no set perfect go this way or that way forever. It's gonna shift and evolve over time and you, at this moment, just need to figure out which one am I focused on. Okay, and you could again think about do I wanna go that route where I'm trying to figure out how to balance both? And if you're trying to figure out, can I strike a balance between quality and quantity, then again, you've gotta find an equilibrium that suits your goals and your audience. That's what's most important in all of this, and I want you to remember that ultimately, again, the right balance depends on your specific objectives and resources, and a combination of well-crafted, engaging content posted consistently is often going to be your best recipe for success. So I'm going to leave you with a really good quote that I saw as I was browsing my LinkedIn feed and this is just something where I'll leave you something really cool to think about.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 13:43

This quote was written by Brian Dean. He is the CEO of Exploding Content. He's backlinko. You may have heard some of those names before. If not, google him, check him out. But here's what he wrote what most people think content marketing is blog posts, videos, case studies, podcasts. What content marketing really is solving problems, curating, educating, adding value. If you can do those things again, you have a winning recipe for success. So I wish you success as you are developing your content creation plan as we roll into the new year and, as always, make sure you subscribe on your favorite podcast channel to listen for more upcoming episodes of our podcast, some solo like this, where we do series and we dig into something real specific, sometimes interviewing guests and figuring out the secret sauce behind their marketing and what's working for them in this online marketing world. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time. Bye, I'll see you next time.