For content marketers, it’s a publish or perish world — but have you ever thought about the balance between quantity and quality of content? In most cases, it’s a simple equation: more quantity often does not mean greater quality. The key in content marketing — as in most areas of life — is to find the balance between quantity and quality. 

For building SEO, the old rule of thumb of quantity over quality is no longer valid. Today, Google tracks more than word counts, and quality is rewarded in SEO; leading social media companies — including Twitter — are voicing the importance of quality content. Yes, a regular stream of content is important, but if that content isn’t top-shelf, then what’s the point? You’re just wasting your time and building a reputation for mediocrity as you alienate your audience. Instead focus on creating great, quality content.

The benefit of strong content is that you can often repurpose it, so you can take the same solid idea and spin out a blog post, video, email, and infographic, resulting in quantity as well as quality. To strike the right chord, consider the three Cs of content marketing: current, compelling, and consistent.

Current

Yesterday’s news is only good for lining birdcages and wrapping fish. Is your content current? Articles, videos, posts, and digests must be relevant to your audience. This may sound like a no-brainer, but you would be amazed at how often this rule is broken. When you’re creating content, think about it from the perspective of your audience and see if you still think it is current, impactful, and keeping with today’s trends.

At the same time, know that you can upcycle current content you’ve recently posted; in fact,  you should. Hours of work go into creating a blog post, a photo album, and a new website page. A single post on Facebook shouldn’t be the only way your audience hears about this content. Instead, share your current content on each of your channels, be it Twitter and LinkedIn or Instagram and e-blasts. For a blog post, choose a different pull quote to caption each post and a unique image to pair with it. This will create the illusion of more content, even though it is simply packaged differently to give more people different ways to engage with it.

Compelling

The balance between quantity and quality may be defined by how compelling, alluring, and insightful your content is. You can have the best information, but if no one reads your content, then what have you accomplished? Package your content in a way that makes people consume it, follow your channels, and crave more content. E-books and video are both leading ways to package your content. Your audience has needs: consider what needs are you filling with your content to keep an audience enticed and compelled. What problems are you solving with your content? If you can’t answer this question, then your content probably isn’t very useful. Also, if your audience can’t understand what you’re saying, then your content won’t be useful until you speak your customers’ language.

Consistent

You’ve heard the cliché “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch.” With content, it’s the same idea: write one lousy piece or share one poorly constructed video and it may be a lead gen’s first impression of your brand. Coupling high quality items with low quality ones actually cheapens the overall effect of your content; so, make sure to keep your content consistently awesome.

Don’t buy into the idea that if your competitor is tweeting every hour and blogging every day that you need to tweet and blog twice as much. Instead, focus on creating the very best content you can that is specifically geared toward a target audience, wisely hitting the balance between quantity and quality.