Thought Leadership: Keys to Winning in both Quantity and Quality in Your Marketing

In building any successful company, we all know having consistent marketing efforts is imperative to your growth. If you’ve researched industry topics on content marketing you’ve naturally heard about the ongoing debate for: quantity versus quality.

Quality is vitally important to the long-term success of any company and it must be merged into everything the company does. Our company has invested a great deal in an internal training department that enables our team to deliver quality results every day. However, when it comes to outbound communications, quality is the destination but only part of the journey.

My approach to public relations and marketing has been all about quantity in the early days of a campaign developing into quality as the campaign matures. There are a number of reasons for this approach.

1. Just do it. If you wait until you have the perfect messaging for your target prospects, your competitors will beat you to the market and you may never even get there. Develop something valuable and get it out there, where the people you want to do business with can see it.
2. Substitute “Value” for “Quality”. Your content should always be valuable to your audience. Your company should have a general idea of its target audience to know if the content they are pushing out will be valuable enough for the audience to take time to read. Focus on creating valuable content that would be appealing to your audience. This will help you define what your audience needs—what they see as valuable.
3. Test the market. In the early days of a campaign, you may not know enough about your target market to know what will resonate. You must test and that requires quantity. Get more messages out there and measure to find out what works. For example; our company pulls analytics of our social media interactions per post to use as a guide for future content and graphic creation.

With a quantity first approach, you will find the quality that supports you for the long-term.

4. Quantity is a measure of volume (loudness) in marketing. If you don’t send out enough messages, a competitor will drown you out in the marketplace.

Avoid the mistake of limiting your outreach to a single or even a few channels.

If I’m marketing a residential real estate property report to a prospect and I send them a postcard, it will get a second of attention and then is likely tossed out. But if that prospect then sees NTC writing articles about important industry issues, sees our posts on social media, sees our banner ads all over the industry and then sees another postcard, it will get much more attention.

Lastly, do not let your marketing lead your public relations. Good marketing is an invitation to buy from you. Good public relations is an invitation to find out who you are and why you are credible. Remember, people do business with people they know and trust. Be sure to introduce yourself with good PR efforts before asking for your prospect’s business.

Of course, with this approach, good measurement is the key to arriving at your destination, valuable content. That means you’re going to need good data. I will dive more into the importance of data in my next article.