Excellent, well-crafted content is great, but let me tell you why you need to be putting out a lot of content rather than great content. Not pitiful content, but not great content. You need to be putting out lots and lots of good-enough content.
Perfectionism is a sure way to kill time and not a whole lot more. As a marketer, I don’t always have the luxury to perfect, except when it is for my own ventures; then it rears its ugly head. Whether creating marketing or artistic content, we often put so much value in what we do that the little perfectionists in our heads want us to waste our time: tell us head back to the drawing board, tell us to revise and revise and revise, and paralyze us with that “almost there, but not quite” mantra that keeps us from doing much at all.
The problem is that we don’t know what perfection is. Sure, in art it is more likely that we are seeking some sort of expressive truth and maybe it is more forgivable to agonize over tiny decisions. In marketing, though, we are trying to communicate with others and build relationships with others. We are missing the point entirely if we think we can figure out perfect on our own.
You don’t know much about your audience, about what messages will resonate with whom, and which channels you can best reach them through. Sure, you’ll have some strong intuitions and they will likely be pretty good, but you’re not going to be able to refine who your customer is nor your ideal messaging until you start experimenting.
Until you start putting a bunch of content out there, you’re not testing anything. And when you aren’t testing anything, you aren’t learning anything new. At best you are following your untested assumptions and hoping that your sparse content lands hard. Unless you are incredibly lucky, your ROI is going to suffer.
What Your Good-Enough Content Allows You to Do Better
See who responds and refine your understanding of your audience
You’re going to need to do it for a while before you know what is working. The data from this are really important. No, you’re not going to have the data needed to make statistically sound inferences. That’s relatively rare. But what you will be able to do is analyze your audience’s behavior and compare demographic information (to the extent that it is available to you). Age, gender, etc. differences can confirm or disconfirm your prior assumptions. Did you assume that men over 40 would be most interested in this or that product?
Great, did it bear out? If yes, full steam ahead writing for men over 45. If it’s actually men in the 35-44 range, then you’ll need to brainstorm the key differences between the two age groups and particularly how those differences intersect with what you are offering.
Of course, it may not be that simple and you may have a wide range of demographics interested in what you do. When that’s the case, you may not have significant enough differences to identify precisely who you should be talking to. That’s all fine and well, though, because your messaging is the next lever to pull.
Find the messages that resonate
Once you know who is responding to your content, or once you know you don’t really know who it is resonating with, messaging is a good place to focus. By messaging, we don’t mean just the imagistic and linguistic content, but also the general tone or vibe. If your “we are super chill and hip” tone isn’t resonating, then perhaps your audience is a bit more buttoned up. If your goofy pet pic content isn’t working, then perhaps your audience doesn’t really care for levity or animals or both. If your super corporate content isn’t working, perhaps your audience craves authenticity.
Experiment broadly at first to see what works. Then home in from there. If your goofy pet pic content is killing it, then start playing around to see if it is the goofiness or the pets. That part is easy. Drop the pets in half and keep the pets in the other half. Hold the other variables constant. For example, you can’t post one variety at 11 am and the other at 3 am and expect the difference to be from the change in content.
Remove as many confounding influences on your audience response as possible. Is there a clear winner? Don’t worry about statistically valid results. It requires a lot of data and is generally a bit of a pipe dream. Let’s say Instagram is getting lots of interactions, compare the mean likes of goofy no-pet content to goofy pet content. No-pet content outperforms or performs just as well? Then your audience just likes silliness and you can feel free playing further with content subjects until you find something that really resonates.
Figure out which channels, days, and times work best
There’s a lot of benchmark information about what channels are best based on your product, services, audience, etc. Do that research, but keep in mind that these benchmarks aren’t reliable. They may or may not be accurate in your case, and while they are often better than taking a shot in the dark, you’ll also need to do your own testing.
You’ll want to test the days and times your audience is most active. Post at different times of the day the same number of times. For example, post 7 days at 9 am, 7 days at 12pm, and 7 days at 4pm. You’ll want to make sure you are accounting for holidays and other potentially impactful timing. For instance, you definitely don’t want to assume that weekends are no good for you if you included Fourth of July weekend in your averages. Half of your audience was out of town and not attending to their phones for a good portion of your observations.
How to Determine Your Good Enough
You’re going to be producing a lot of content. You don’t want to be wasting your time making perfect content, but you also don’t want to be wasting your time being irrelevant to your potential audiences. Here are some simple heuristics to keep you producing good-enough quality content to grow your brand.
Stop worthy
Your content should be worth glancing at. Maybe it isn’t the most compelling, but it needs to at least be compelling enough to get eyes on the image, readers on the headline, whathaveyou.
Whether it is an IG post or a linkedin post, imagine yourself as an outsider scrolling on by. Would you stop and give it a read, listen, etc.?
As a baseline starting point, your content should at least pique your interest. If it isn’t catching your attention, then ask why and start taking note of the posts that do catch your attention. Find common themes and then start using those tactics yourself.
Relevant to your audience’s interests
Once you at least have a passing interest in your own content, put yourself in the shoes of a general consumer that may have an interest in your product, services, etc.
DO NOT imagine yourself to be a consumer that is a hair away from buying what you’re selling. Imagine yourself as a consumer that has the vaguest inkling of a sense of interest in what you’re selling.
What motivates them? What value are you giving them? Are they going to notice your content?
How to Get Mentally Prepared
Quantity-forward content marketing is in no small part an opportunity to give yourself exposure therapy. Exorcize all of your self-doubt, misperceptions about what works, and anxiety about hitting the wrong message. After a few months, your marketing will feel far more natural. Especially if you follow these tips.
Quit sweating the small stuff
I want to leave you with a factoid that may help put this all in context. You probably have very few followers. Like next to none in the context of building your brand.
The number of people that will see your first six months of content is miniscule. This is not a dig. This is just a fact of growing your brand.
Quit pulling your hair out and running out your clock perfecting content for your audience of fifty. Worry about it when you have fifty thousand.
Get used to crickets
You’re probably not going to have much of an audience. Success may look like nothing at all. You may be fearing negative comments, but it’s likely that you’ll start with very little interaction. Most of it will be positive because your initial followers will be relatively close to you: family, friends, colleagues, friends of friends.
As you grow, you’ll have to deal with more negative interactions, but you’ll have thicker skin by then.
Know that originality is overrated
Lots of us want to say something new. Chalk it up to our cultural fetishization of genius or infatuation with individualism. Whatever the cause, get originality out of your head. Say it 100 times in the mirror every morning if you need to.
Go ahead. Google whatever content you’re thinking of creating and witness the 10,000 people saying the exact same thing.
If you happen to find something truly original to say, chances are, nobody cares to hear it, nobody has google searched it.
How to Keep it up
Don’t overdo it
Pick a reasonable cadence to publish your content. You’re probably not going to get a blog a day, a video a day, or several social posts per day. There’s a balance here between output and burnout.
There’s no surer way to stall your audience growth than to start out pretending as if you’re going to be pumping out tons of content.
Iterate and be consistent
Once you start drilling down on content that works and segmenting based on what works for which portions of your audience, you can start iterating and perfecting by seeking what resonates best.
Some of your experiments will not be terribly successful on their own, but to lament these wayward pieces of content is to miss the point. You aren’t delivering the truth of reality to your audience, you aren’t taking your one shot at success. You are building a relationship with your audience.
Building relationships requires saying the same damn thing over and over, it requires saying awkward things, it occasionally requires saying the wrong thing. Mostly, though it requires a lot and that’s why you need to produce and produce and produce. Regularity and authenticity build trust. We are in an age of relationships and authenticity, not an age of the perfect slogan.
The reason why you need to focus on quantity over quality is that you will never reach and affect your audiences without finding out who you are communicating with and what they need.to hear from you. No number of edits, nor perfect diction, nor flawless research will deliver you that connection with your audience.
Wrapping it all up
To bring it all back together, in order to grow your audience:
You should focus on publishing more rather than publishing “better content”
You should publish as much as you reasonably can to avoid burnout
You should use the resultant data to define your audience
You should use content performance data to determine what better content actually is
You should experiment and do more of what works
You should get used to lackluster results at first
You should view this as exposure therapy so that creating content is second nature