Quality vs Quantity Marketing—Quantity Wins

Today, I started re-reading Originals by Adam Grant today as I was looking for some inspiration for my business and a marketing blog post.

It did not take long to find an important message to share on page 37.

“It’s widely assumed that there is a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false.”

Then a little further down on the same page:

“Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.”

Well known creators like Edison, Bach, Picasso, etc. constantly put out new material and in doing so had some really memorable creations. I dare you to count how many you can remember from well-known creators. I bet you will only be able to name enough that you only need one hand.

During my 15 years helping and consulting companies with marketing programs, I have run into some marketing managers that become obsessed with only putting out “perfect” marketing materials. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with making sure all of your marketing material is “great or perfect”— no one wants shoddy work out there for the world to see.

But, some managers get so caught up in refining and refining the material or making sure that it is perfect that they put out very little material over the course of the year.

The problem with only putting out a small number of marketing materials in a year.-What if after all that work and time refining –the message, image, video, email, social media post, press releases, content, etc. —It does not work?

All that work and there are NO new sales leads, NO increase brand awareness, NO video views, NO shares, NO likes, etc.

Even after 15 years I think I know what is going to work. Every day I get shocked by a LinkedIn post that I am sure of that will get views/ share and it goes nowhere.

Other days we create a press release that I think it just ok and every editor wants to use it.

My advice—make sure you do put some effort into your marketing material so it is not shoddy. But most importantly keep moving—keep putting new ideas together all the time and testing them in the marketplace.

If you do—you will be surprised by an increase in overall results towards your yearly  goals compared to only putting out a few “perfect” things a year.