Quality vs Quantity Content: The ROI on Writing Less

Last night I spoke at an amazing private event for the top public relations and marketing professionals in New York City, put on by Meltwater for their clients. I discussed, in depth, how big data is impacting the customer journey and how it impacts our content strategies online. The talk was so popular that we’re following it up with a full whitepaper!

One of the questions that someone posed to me was how they can convince their leadership that improving writing quality and spending more time researching and executing their blogging strategy would attain a much better return on investment than focusing on the quantity of blog posts produced. This infographic from InboundWriter really tells the tale…

The average blog posts costs a company $900 and over 90% of blog posts do not produce results

Ouch!

I’m not against frequent posting… we often preach recency, frequency and relevance as we’re talking about corporate blogging. Frequency is important because you’re building an audience and community that you are setting expectations with. Momentum is a huge factor in readership, sharing, and building trust and authority with your audience.

But it means nothing if you’re not engaging with your audience.

We’ve been utilizing InboundWriter to assist us in this process for the last few months. And the impact of researching improved topics, aligning it with your audience, and assuring that you can be competitive on the subject is imperative.

InboundWriter keeps track of sharing and analytics to provide a solid performance metric on every piece of content you write. Not only that, it will also compare it to your overall readership.

Take this post for example! I did an analysis of the topic, it’s relevance to my audience, and how well I can compete:

In reviewing the topic, a simple edit of vs over versus could make a significant impact. So I changed my title and my post slug to match.

The results? Overall, since utilizing InboundWriter, we’ve seen anywhere between 200% to an 800% increase in engagement on our content. Think about that – just with the slightest research into appropriate topics, we’re getting a huge return on investment. In other words, if we wanted to slow down our posting (as often happens as we’re busy with clients), we can still sustain growth in our readership and engagement.

There absolutely can be a return on investment on writing less!