Quality vs. Quantity: What’s the Best Content Strategy?

This is Vilfredo Pareto. In addition to having an impressive name, he had an impressive observation. And his observation is that in many cases, a small percentage of the inputs can lead to a disproportionate percentage of the output, called the 80/20 rule. An example would be 20% of the clothing you own accounts for 80% of the time that you're out in the world, essentially. This t-shirt is a good example. So we decided to look into this, it's like, okay, well, we're gonna analyze all the posts that HubSpot has posted. Do our top posts, our top 20%, do they produce 80% of the leads? That's what the content is supposed to do. And we were a little bit disappointed with the results because our top 20% did not, in fact, produce 80% of the leads. They produced 93% of the leads. Now the reason this was a little bit disappointing was that it meant in theory we could have done 80% less work and still gotten only 7% fewer leads. That's the theory. And so like any good theory, we decided to test it. Here's what we did. We said we will take one of our blogs and we will cut the blog posting volume down by 50%. We will pick the above-average blog posts. We'll publish those. What happened was actually not that shocking. As the quality went up, even though we took the post volume down, the number of views that we got, the number of leads that we got per post went up. Better content does better. Who would have thought that? The lesson here, hard-won lesson for us, is that we should all be doubling down on content, but we should be focused on the quality of the content, not the quantity. quantity of the content, spend twice as much time, pick only your best articles, because what you're trying to do is think of each little piece of content as this tiny little vector, and you're trying to align it with marketing's goals and the company's goals overall. And your goal is not to produce a lot of content, your goal is to produce a content brand where you have a reputation for publishing remarkably useful, brilliant content. That's what you want. Dharmesh Shah,