Frequency in Marketing: Striking a Balance Between Quantity and Quality

As marketing professionals, we hear it time and again - one of the fastest ways to turn a prospective client into someone that wants nothing to do with your business is to contact them too many times in too short of a period. People don't like to be bombarded with marketing materials - it makes them feel overwhelmed and can be quite off-putting. Despite this, quantity is still important, as you always want to keep your brand at the forefront of their minds. Contacting too frequently can give the perception that your materials lack quality, however, which is why striking the right balance between the two is so important.

The Google of it All

Search engine giant Google has made a number of significant changes to its algorithm in recent years, starting with Panda in 2011. These updates have regularly been designed to penalize low-quality sites that spam the Internet with content, weeding them out of the top portions of search results to be replaced with sites that are actually relevant to what Google's own users are really looking for. Despite this, Google still places a high priority on sites that update regularly. A site that posts one blog post every day is seen as more authoritative than one that only posts once a month.

So what, exactly, is this trying to tell us when it comes to quality versus quantity?

The answer is simple: while both are important, your marketing campaigns need to be crafted with an eye on relevance and value first, everything else second. Period. End of story. Google's own representatives have said time and again that the search engine is designed in such a way that so long as you are constantly putting well-designed, high-value content out into the world, everything else will essentially take care of itself. We're inclined to agree, but we're willing to take it one step further - we don't believe that this logic begins and ends with Google.

Taking This With You Into the Print World

Even though Google's stance on quality versus quantity exists exclusively in the digital world, it's still a great set of best practices to take with you when crafting print marketing materials, too. By taking the rules and guidelines set forth by search engines like Google and applying them to all of your marketing materials regardless of channel, you're building a much stronger foundation by which you can put your best foot forward to both prospecting and existing customers alike.

Essentially, just because you won't get penalized by Google for sending a customer a print flyer through the post office twice a week doesn't mean that you should. Google's "rules" are built on a tremendous amount of study into things like customer preferences and buying habits. The playing field may change (as your print materials don't affect your SEO in any way), but the logic that those guidelines were founded on remains the same. Google spent a huge amount of money figuring out that Mark from Atlanta doesn't like it when businesses send him high volumes of low-value materials twice a week, so use what Google is trying to tell you to your advantage.

Frequency in marketing is always a delicate balance to strike. Quantity is important, as making contact too infrequently can quickly cause your brand to be forgotten by even the most loyal customers. You should never place a bigger emphasis on volume than on quality, however, which is why quality should always be your number one concern. If you focus on creating the best marketing content that you can first, everything else will fall into place pretty naturally.

Bill

www.inkimages.com