When does it make sense to invest in content quality? When is the time and expense—the research and interviewing, editorial review, structuring and optimisation, UX and design—worthwhile? And when is it not necessary?
These are hard questions to answer, and something every marketing leader has to wrestle with. Here’s a framework to help.
All content has a minimum quality threshold that needs to be surpassed in order to generate any results. The "height" of that threshold is influenced by a host of factors: the maturity of the search results, and the quality of the existing competition; the complexity of the topic; the expertise and expectations of the audience.
All marketers need to aim to clear the minimum quality threshold for every article. Falling short of this threshold represents a complete waste of resources. Take SEO content: if you fail to meet the basic search intent, you can expect to join the 91% of content that generates no visitors.
Beyond that threshold, better quality usually generates better results, but at a diminishing rate. There is a sweet spot where extra time and energy generate meaningfully better results, where the juice really is worth the squeeze. But past a certain point, it takes lots of extra time and effort to eke out even a tiny improvement in performance.
All content also has a ceiling, a maximum potential benefit. At a certain point, spending extra time and energy on an article will make no difference to the results it generates. There are only so many people searching for a given query.
Here’s what that looks like in pretty graph form:
As a marketing leader, you need to balance great results with efficiency. Marketing is constrained optimization. Your job is to reconcile your company's limitless growth goals—traffic, sign-ups, revenue—with a limited set of resources.
That means taking a nuanced approach to quality. Consistently undervaluing the need for quality risks dismal results; pursuing quality at all costs winds up expensive and over-engineered. You need to evaluate every topic and campaign on a case-by-case basis.
"Consistently undervaluing the need for quality risks dismal results; pursuing quality at all costs winds up expensive and over-engineered."
That means asking:
Run this thought experiment with your next article, and you’ll realise that content generally falls into one of two camps.
Many articles can be visualised as possessing a high minimum-quality threshold: it will take substantial investment to generate any return, and a greater focus on quality—research, editorial review, design—is both necessary and desirable.
Many topics (perhaps even most) fit into the high cliff group. You’ll notice this high minimum standard whenever you find yourself:
Much of the work we do with customers falls into this category. We interview SMEs, analyse and challenge industry truisms, work through rigorous editorial review—and the investment pays off, allowing us to clear a high-quality bar that most companies fall short of. We summit the cliff, instead of falling short.
Other articles can be visualised differently, possessing a low minimum quality threshold. Here, extra expenditure beyond the minimum very quickly enters the realm of diminishing returns. Extra effort does generate better results, but only just.
Ten years ago, most topics fell into this camp, but today, there are fewer situations that create a low-quality threshold. You’ll notice this when:
In these situations, the benefit of extra effort isn’t clear-cut. It may be in your company’s interest to wring out every cent of revenue from its content (no matter the cost)—but it may be better to focus that energy on a different article, or a different campaign.
We all want to create great things, but funnelling limited resources into quality can be hard to justify. Sometimes, it’s enough to lead with conviction and act on faith. There is an advantage to doing things that can’t readily be justified with metrics and KPIs. As we’ve written before,
“The ability to justify a decision through concrete data means that other people can also justify (and act on) the same data. By the time something is measurable, the greatest opportunity may already be over.”
But for situations where resources are scarce or executives are sceptical, it can help to bring a framework like the quality cliff to the table. It helps prove the idea that in many situations, quality isn’t just a nice-to-have: it’s an essential tool in your arsenal, a prerequisite to getting any results from marketing efforts.
