Hubspot recently published some research on whether marketers should strive for more quality or quantity in their blog posts. The Hubspot marketers ran their analysis against three objectives, all of which are relevant for engineering marketers:
- Views
- Net new leads
- Subscribers
In this post I’ll contrast what they found with our blog posting strategy.
What happens when experiment with number of posts versus quality
As a content marketing company, Hubspot publishes tons of content. They ran two experiments against their benchmark standard of four posts per day:
- LVHC = Low Volume High Comprehensiveness. In this experiment they posted half as many posts, but made them longer and more technical.
- HVLC. In this experiment they published 50% more posts that were skewed towards less depth in each post.
As you can see in the chart, having fewer posts (LVHC) resulted in fewer views during the experiment. That begs the question, “Did the fewer visitors have higher conversions?” Actually, the opposite was true.
Increasing the number of posts led to almost double the number of leads.
Before we rush out and start publishing 100 posts per week (with each one about the length of a tweet) we need to dig a little deeper.
Different types of blog posts serve different purposes
The Hubspot folks categorized their posts by type as well as by the level of comprehensiveness. They split the categories into short: Tactical, Infographic/Slideshare, Promotional, versus more comprehensive: Deep Tactical, Editorial.
Perhaps it is not surprising, but they found that promotional and Tactical posts produce the most leads while Deep Tactial and Infographic / Slideshare generate the most traffic. But even if your goal is leads, you can’t just publish promotional posts! That’s a sure-fire way to alienate your readership.
Instead, we consider our long-form thought leadership posts as an investment in our list. These are the posts that we want to be known for. The promotional and short tactical stories are there to derive some value from that investment.
There is lots more depth to the Hubspot analysis. Hope you enjoy reading it.
John
