When I counsel clients on content marketing, invariably, I am asked some variation of this question: “how much content should I produce?” The answer is, “it varies.” It’s annoying to hear this, but there is no magic answer to this question. You have to balance your resources and capabilities with your customers’ needs and preferences. Let’s unpack these variables and look at the question of how much content do you need?

First, what are your resources? Are you able to create killer content on a regular basis? How regularly can you create it? Remember, content comes in many forms—whitepapers, ebooks, infographics, blog posts, presentations, etc.—but the one commonality between all content types, is that quality, not quantity counts.

Don’t post garbage on your blog just because your editorial calendar says you need X-number of posts a week. Editorial calendars are great tools, but they shouldn’t govern your content marketing strategy (that’s your job!). The job of an editorial calendar is to help you—it’s a tool; don’t let it be a tyrant.

Take a good hard look at your capabilities and decide how much high-quality content you can realistically produce. This is the first gate in your content strategy, meaning even if your customers X-amount of content, but you can only create X-10, then you only give your customers X-10. Giving your customers X when you can’t do it well is a recipe for long term failure and dissatisfied customers. Your customers will understand if you only give them X-10, but that smaller quantity is of top-notch quality.

Next, what are your capabilities? What is your area of expertise in? Take a hard look the capabilities you and your organization possess (and what you can afford to outsource if you don’t have it internally). Ask yourself these questions:

Do you have the research facilities to do studies and create detailed whitepapers? Do you have designers who can make infographics? Do you have internal content experts who can provide you with information for blog posts? Do you have time and money to do video? How about social media?

Your answers to these questions will inform you about your limits in these areas and these limits will help you determine how much content you can create.

What do your customers want? Do you know how much content your customers/potentials want from you? One of the great things about digital marketing is that you can get loads of data instantly about your content’s performance. Dive into your analytics and see which content is working and which content isn’t. Look at metrics like web traffic and leads to see what content frequency you should adopt.

For example, say posting on your blog daily boosts your website traffic by 5% over posting weekly, but it takes 50% of your team’s time to create the daily content. Are you getting conversions from that extra 5% of web traffic that would make it worth the enormous time drain it places on your team? If yes, than carry on. If no, then it’s time to reevaluate your posting frequency. Fight the law of diminishing returns and avoid overwhelming your customers and potentials with a deluge of content that they can’t handle.

At the end of the day, you want to give your customers the best possible content. If you don’t have anything good, don’t share anything until you have something good. That may mean you only blog once a week or less. Don’t blog everyday just because you think you should if you’re only going to post rubbish—quantity over quality.