The Dangers of Valuing Quantity Over Quality Marketing
by Candace Huntly
The best way to look at any marketing and communications strategy is to value quality over quantity.
Whether you are a solopreneur, small business owner, or a marketing executive at a global company, you will always have to make choices when it comes to your marketing strategy.
Here are four major areas focusing on quantity over quality that would hold you back in your marketing and communications strategy:
#1: You want to target everyone with your marketing strategy. Because we are so connected across the globe, it can be easy to say “I want to target EVERONE!” However, when reality sets in, unless you have an unlimited budget and other resources, that’s just not going to happen overnight and in your first marketing efforts. Starting with a targeted niche audience will allow you to generate quality results and long-term customer relationships based on loyalty and trust. The better you do at reaching your smaller target audience, the more people will hear about you because your customers will act as brand ambassadors. It might take longer, but you will be able to accomplish more on a long-term perspective than if you try to reach everyone from the start. Maybe your video goes viral or you have a push of interest in the beginning, but the key to business success is sustaining the success over a longer period of time.
#2: You equate media hits with results. This is a tough one because when you are running a media/influencer campaign you obviously want to see your name or your brand in the media. However, if you or your PR agency takes a blanket approach to outreach, chances are you will get a lot of hits, but they won’t be very valuable. You need to target your outreach to outlets and influencers that appeal directly to your target audience. First, if the media is worth it, they won’t cover a story that doesn’t suite them, and second, why would you want an outlet that doesn’t appeal to your target audience to write about you? How will it affect your revenues? It is better to get ten really solid media hits than fifty that are so-so. You will see higher returns.
#3: You think that more is more when it comes to social media channels. There are countless social media channels your business could be on. That doesn’t mean you should be on all of them. You need to evaluate the opportunities that your top picks would bring and select a manageable number of channels. If you are running your own business, you may want to re-think having an account on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, Periscope, Blab, Tumblr (you get the gist)… You will have a hard time keeping up with all of the channels and you will likely just end up posting the same content on everything (what’s the point then?) or you will just not post at all and it looks like you don’t care about your marketing. In some cases, brands have accounts that they post on maybe once or twice a year and then your audience may start to question whether you are even in business. Choose your channels wisely, and choose according to where your audience hangs out most. That way you know that you will be able to reach them. Having two channels that are full of great content is more important than having ten that are inconsistent.
#4: You think that the more noise you make the better. It can be tempting to post content on social and on your blog constantly, but when you think about it, do you really think your audience wants to be nagged by brands? There is also a chance that your content quality will suffer because you quickly run out of things to say after the 24th tweet of the day.
In terms of blogging and other long form content, trying to accomplish more than you have the time and resources for can hurt you in other way. For example, you’ve decided to do a huge content marketing push and you want to write more blogs. So you write ten blog articles in ten days. Three of them are dynamite, and the other seven are so-so. The dynamite blogs get shared multiple times on social media, generate dialogue among your target audience, and lead to half a dozen sales. The seven so-so articles don’t get much traction on any social channels and don’t drive traffic to the website to even start the path to purchase. Sure, you wrote more blogs, but at what cost? Thinking back, those seven so-so articles were written under time pressure when you could have been working on social media engagement, reaching out to new customers who had just purchased, networking with other business owners, etc. You want to make sure that you aren’t just creating noise and that you are creating meaningful connections with your audience.
The key is to budget your time wisely according to your overall business goals. If you want to write more content, then either hire someone to help, or make sure you can accomplish everything you need to in your schedule.