Quality or Quantity Content
There is a lot of debate on what is better — to publish quality content and post less or publish more frequently, but sacrifice quality.
I think it depends on the context and what type of quality we are talking about. In some cases, I see some social media posts that are really badly designed. I would say it’s better not to post that at all because it damages the brand.
Bad content and bad quality designs can damage the brand because once a potential customer sees it, it’s hard to unsee.
It will cost the brand more to try to tell the customer that they have good/great quality products or services.
I met a startup owner last month who is building a luxury brand. He showed me his brand guidelines and asked me for my advice on the aesthetics and brand purpose. The designs were really bad, I could see that he hired a cheap designer from a freelance website to do the work.
When we had a chat, he told me that the designer he hired was from Fiverr and it cost him pennies.
In his case, I wouldn’t sacrifice quality, as you are building a brand, and your brand identity is the foundation. Potential clients will see that and subconsciously decide that the quality of your products are bad too.
You can’t afford to sacrifice quality there because you will have to pay much more in the future.
Your brand identity should show that it’s quality products that you are selling, without you having to spell it out. It’s show vs tell.
In fact, I damaged my own brand by publishing content that is really bad quality. For example, there are articles that I have online that are full of spelling and grammar mistakes. There are videos that I have on YouTube that I did seven years ago that are cringe-worthy. The way I talk is awful, I mumble and don’t look confident.
I’m sure that someone who was thinking of working with me and the agency saw that and said to themselves that they would never work with this guy.
But that’s fine for me — I take the loss and move on. Because in my mind, I think I need to create bad content so I can improve.
Even some designs we’ve done as an agency 10 years ago, when we started, are really bad, they are full of mistakes and very unprofessional.
Luckily, I hired a really talented designer seven years ago and she taught me more about aesthetics and how great design looks.
Yesterday I was interviewed on a marketing podcast and when I was chatting with the host, I told him that I used to host a podcast years ago and I actually have a new podcast that is ready to launch but I paused it last year because I thought I don’t want to do it half-arsed.
If I do launch it, I want to have a full set up, high quality sound and visuals, editing should be done on a weekly basis, sound bites should be immaculate, and I need to improve my interview skills which means I need to take on a course or hire a professional to teach me.
Right now, podcasting is not a priority, and I’m focused on other elements of the craft, like writing, storytelling and filmmaking as I go to school weekly.
Last week, I published an article and a friend of mine read it. He send me a message on WhatsApp saying that the ideas in the article I wrote were good, but he felt it was rushed.
He was 100% correct, it was rushed. The reason it was rushed is because I made a promise that I would publish one article a week and send my Thoughtful Thursday Letter every Thursday. I was late and had client priorities so I wrote the article quickly and didn’t go back to edit it or clarify it.
It made me think — what is more important:
- Have a lot of articles but bad quality
- Have less articles but better written (higher quality) and have people piss themselves from excitement when you publish one.
I believe the answer is not linear. I think that we need to be publishing content frequently with the highest quality we can produce. If it’s important, we should focus on quality. If we want others to engage with our content, consume our content and make an impact then we need to pay more attention to it.
People are not as tolerant and forgiving as they used to be years ago.
We are not competing just against other people. We are competing against really good content creators whose full-time this is and billion pound production videos.
I came to the conclusion that anything I do for Way Boutique needs to be top notch quality, the standard is really high. Anything I create for my own brand can have sometimes something that is not really top notch quality.
So there needs to be a balance and that balance is up to each individual business owner/marketer to figure out.
For brands that want to make a difference and create something really good I would suggest that they don’t sacrifice quality — it’s better to publish less but have really high quality content.
For people that listen to GaryVee and his advice on “create and publish 15 pieces of content daily” because you need to be everywhere, well, GaryVee has a team of 15 people working on his content. His agency, Vayner Media, has 500 employees across the world. He isn’t writing articles, shooting videos and editing them. He has people doing it for him. There is a huge difference.
When he says he used to do bad quality videos and become well known through his Wine Show — he did it 15 years ago when people were more tolerant and we didn’t have more options on YouTube.
We can listen to different people and their advice but we can only look at our own circumstances and the growth our companies have and just ask one simple question: “Am I doing the best I can with what I’ve got?”
