Creating Content: Quantity over Quality
Marketing is creating and distributing relevant content that will educate, entertain, and/or engage your customer with consistency. Each one of these key parts is critical to the success of your marketing. You can have a relevant message, but if you only publish once you are not going to be successful with your marketing. With the amount of information and content available for customers to consume, one message (no matter how great) is going to get lost.
If you are consistent with marketing messages, but it has no relevance to your customer, that will fail as well. However, with a consistent series of messages, at least your customer will be seeing your name over time. Consistency has this benefit over a single piece of great content. Because of this and several other reasons, I am proposing that when it comes to content marketing, Quantity over Quality.
Consistency keeps you top of mind
Ree Drummond, known as The Pioneer Woman, is the star of several Food Network Shows, has her own line of products at Wal-Mart, has authored several cookbooks, and is building an empire in Oklahoma. All of this started with the first post to a blog in May of 2006, if you scroll all the way back to page 134 on her blog this is her first post:
Her success was not based on this post, or her 2nd, or her 20th. Her success was the culmination of 5 years of work that led to a TV show, that led to products, etc. All the while she has continued to add to her blog and over time the quality of the photography and content has naturally gotten to where it is today. If she had be concerned with putting out the best quality post on that day in May 2006, it possibly would have kept her from posting.
While quality is important, consistency and relevance are more important. If your message is relevant to your customer, the quality does not matter. If they see value in your content regardless of the quality, then you have done your job. Consistency keeps your message in front of the customer over time, ultimately reaching more people. If you are consistently bringing value to more and more people, you will win. This is the “plan” followed by most of today’s stars: Chip & Joanna Gaines, Gary Vaynerchuk, Casey Neistat, Seth Godin, and many more.
Practice makes . . . better
Voltaire is credited with saying “Perfect is the enemy of good”, what he actually wrote in the poem, La Bagueule:
“Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. ”
“In his writings, a wise Italian
says the best is the enemy of the good.”
This wise Italian understands that creating consistently over time will provide the practice so that each subsequent creating will improve in quality. The goal should be to produce the best quality messaging you can today and publish. Your first post is never going to be of the same quality as your 100th or 1,000th, but you will never reach the quality of your 1,000th if you do not make the first.
When Gary Vaynerchuk started making wine videos in the basement of his Dad’s Liquor Store he used a $300 camera that his employee bought at best buy on the same day. Now he has a whole team that produces content. As you can see the quality of the videos is night and day. If he had not started publishing in May of 2006, ironically the same month as Pioneer Woman, he would have never gotten to this level of quality.
The first wine library video.
A recent video put out by Gary’s team.
Ultimately, you cannot be the best unless you are good first.
Consistency creates a body of work
In 2002 Seth Godin started his blog. Originally, he was posting just whenever he could and starting in 2004 he started posting at least daily, and hasn’t stopped. The result is 16+ years and thousands of thoughts, rants, learnings, and information. All of this, in addition to his books, adds to a tremendous body of work. Any time you research marketing, motivation, or doing your best work, Seth’s work will be at the top of the list.
With consistently marketing to your customers by delivering them value, it creates a body of work that will become a future reference for who you target. As an example, let us assume you own an engineering consulting firm that is in the business of designing food production equipment. If you start to produce content around food production, designing equipment, material selection, trends, etc and do so consistently; after a few years you will have more content around this subject than anyone else. Your firm will be the industry’s library of information regarding food equipment. And, when a client is looking for their next equipment design why wouldn’t they hire the most knowledgeable firm?
This concept applies to any business. All of these examples focused on creating content and doing it consistently and in all cases the quality came from the consistency.