The “quality vs. quantity” argument is one of the most heated in content marketing, and it seems to have been going on for a very long time.
In 2023, in just a few weeks, we read two pieces that seemed to support opposite ideas. Janessa Lantz wrote for ThinkGrowth that less content but better content was better, and Steve Rayson wrote on BuzzSumo’s blog that more content was better.
It’s important to note that they both handled the subject with more objectivity and less emotion than is typical.
As it turns out, the fact that both of these pieces are so well-written and make good points makes it harder for a digital marketer or business owner to side with either one.
In the “quality vs. quantity” eternal war that will last for years to come, metrics and common sense both agree that high-quality content is probably the best bet (but you can never be sure of anything in content marketing).
The best lasts
We often think of the internet as a collection of moments because news stories, social media posts, and other content are posted, read, and then thrown away at a rate that has never been seen before in the history of human culture.
Click bait used to work for a reason. It made people make snap choices based on the cynical idea that no one really reads content all the way through anyway, so why not just go after one-time, almost automatic clicks?
People and businesses that put number over quality, like marketers, often make choices based on this same cynical point of view. They believe that everything is doomed to be lost and thrown away as soon as it’s created.
It’s not.
Good material will last. People will read, share, refer to, and comment on good material months or even years after it was published. Like the two pieces about quantity vs. quality that were talked about at the beginning of this article. Or in the case of Theodore Levitt’s famous piece “Marketing Myopia,” which came out in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review.
It doesn’t matter when it was made; good material is still useful, even after over fifty years.
Not enough time for amount
Those of you who read Mr. Rayson’s piece will know that the numbers he uses to describe the amount of content are completely unrealistic for a small to medium-sized business or even a marketing agency with more than two clients.
He talks about a lot of numbers, like the 800 articles that Neil Patel supposedly writes himself every year. That’s every day two or more. Also, Mr. Rayson talks about some news outlets that can put out hundreds of pieces of material every day.
This much material is something that only the biggest companies in the world can afford, and they usually have to spend a lot of money to do it.
That much money would never be spent on material by a small business. It wouldn’t make sense for a marketing firm with a few customers to make that much stuff either. For someone to do that, they would have to be some kind of content-making robot.
This much quantity is basically impossible, and it makes a lot more sense to try to get the same result with high-quality material that is made and shared at a more reasonable rate.
Simply put, anyone who isn’t a huge media company or a huge corporation can’t stay competitive without high-quality material.
Curation playing a bigger role
We can all agree that every day a ridiculous amount of material comes out. Around the world, more than 87 million WordPress posts were made in March alone. That’s almost 3 million every day. That’s just WordPress.
The post came from https://wordpress.com/activity/posting/.
No matter how you narrow your search to only half-decently written content in your niche, you will still have to read thousands of pieces of content every month.
An impossible job.
So, we can’t ignore the fact that content managers, both real people and machines, are becoming more important. They will continue to do so in 2024 and beyond. For the most part, these people and pieces of software will become normal parts of reading on the web. They are needed because there are so many of them.
It’s easy to guess what kind of content will get their readers’ attention and tell them what to read.
It’s right there: high-quality material.
Only material of the highest quality.
Your good name
We content marketers often act like the parts of our brains that control shame have been physically removed.
This month, clickbait works. Get us some posts that will make people click on them!
People are sharing the “7 Best Ways to…” lists. Do a bunch of those right away!
This means that company blogs are full of old information that is useless after a few weeks and, if we’re being honest, gets the businesses’ reputations hurt.
This kind of low-quality material is also bad for the reputation of the content marketer who made it.
This might not happen at first, or it might take years. It’s possible that this won’t always happen. But one day, someone will look back at your old content and see that you just followed the latest trends without doing any real study for your posts.
Not having to tell you what will happen is enough.
And this is becoming clearer every year. People who buy content this year are much smarter and more learned than people who bought content in 2013.
You should be one step ahead of everyone else.
Word to End
It seems like every year more and more material is being made. There is so much low-quality material being released every day these days that quality has become a must.
For 2024 and after.
