People always ask me whether I prefer “quantity” or “quality” when it comes to content.
To me, the answer is always both – you want more quality and more quantity. I always talk about how the creative is the variable of success and I couldn’t believe in it more.
But if I really had to pick just one, I’d go with quantity.
Here’s why – a lot of people think that quantity comes at the expense of quality but I think it LEADS to quality. It gives you more opportunities to find out what “quality” is.
So many of you are not posting because of your own subjective opinion about your content, not what the audience actually cares about.
The more content you put out for more audience demographics and segments, the more you can really understand what they respond to and refine what you’re putting out based on actual data – instead of only depending on the subjective opinions of decision-makers.
So even though I believe that creative quality is the variable of your success, it’s the quantity execution that becomes the opportunity to figure out what the quality is.
The reason I have so many insights about content is that I’ve created a machine around me that allows me to listen at scale. It looks like I’m just talking, but it’s led to a level of listening that gives me such profound consumer insights. The next decade is will be one enormous game of value of output – and whichever companies figure out that game first and can execute it will pick up a disproportionate market share.
More Volume Doesn’t Mean You Post for the Sake of Posting
Creating more volume isn’t about posting for the sake of posting. Having the post-production capabilities or the skill set to create contextual content for the platforms that matter for you (i.e. LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, etc) is equally important.
Ironically, the volume of content inevitably makes your content more relevant to the people consuming it. Once a company or a brand accepts this framework for producing content, the next thought is, “so… what are we going to say?”
Once you have the option to create so many pieces of content, you can start the process of making them contextual to specific audience segments. You can make content for – say – female CIOs in Russia. And because you’re making a ton of content, you’re not going to make “vanilla” anymore. You’re no longer depending on 2-3 pieces of content to reach and convert everybody.
Once you adopt this framework, you become deeply knowledgable of how powerful these social platforms really are. For example, if I want to reach a CTO who went to MIT, I can use MIT colors in my creative to make it more likely for him or her to click into it. Imagine being able to scale that concept over many job titles, locations, schools, and organizations. You can literally make a piece of content that starts with “Hey, are you 28 years old?”
After a detailed conversation about this, you can’t imagine how fast 100 pieces of content actually starts feeling too little!
If You Don’t Have a Team, Start By Picking The Content Formats You’re Best At
If you had the option to go back in time and buy up beachfront property in Malibu for pennies on the dollar, would you do it?
The answer is yes!
The number one asset for you no matter what you do – whether you’re a financial advisor, whether you’re in real estate, whether you sell sneakers, or whether you’re trying to run for mayor – is attention. You need other people’s attention before you can tell them what you want from them.
Attention is the singular asset. And right now, the attention of the world sits in mobile devices at scale on a handful of social platforms. And the game is about communicating with them in written, audio, and/or video form.
Ideally, you’d do them all – but if you really don’t have resources, think about what you’re best at. Are you a great writer? Do you feel comfortable on video? Or are you more introverted and want to do a podcast? It doesn’t matter what it is, just start talking – then start doing it a lot more.
To produce 100+ pieces of content a day, maybe 52 of those are just single tweets. Maybe 26 of them are Instagram stories. Maybe 1 of them is a blog post and you’re able to repurpose some of the text for your tweets. Maybe you write text posts or record short videos on your phone for LinkedIn. The volume will give you the opportunity to hit different segments and find out what messages the market deems as “quality.”
For example, if you’re a real estate agent and you’re trying to sell a home, if you make 1 video, a 22-year-old woman who makes $100k a year and a 49-year-old woman with two kids making $47k are going to look at it very differently!
We have these platforms that allow us to target people at such narrow levels at scale – the volume of creative helps you context the creative to different segments. When I say things like “Hey California!” Or “Hey Mexico!” at the beginning of my videos and run it in those areas, they do disproportionately better.
The opportunity out there is just remarkable, and it WILL go away!!
