When does it make sense to invest in content quality? When is the time and expense—the research and interviewing, editorial review, structuring and optimisation, UX and design—worthwhile? And when is it not necessary?

These are hard questions to answer, and something every marketing leader has to wrestle with. Here’s a framework to help.

The Quality Cliff

All content has a minimum quality threshold that needs to be surpassed in order to generate any results. The “height” of that threshold is influenced by a host of factors: the maturity of the search results, and the quality of the existing competition; the complexity of the topic; the expertise and expectations of the audience.

All marketers need to aim to clear the minimum quality threshold for every article. Falling short of this threshold represents a complete waste of resources. Take SEO content: if you fail to meet the basic search intent, you can expect to join the 91% of content that generates no visitors.

Beyond that threshold, better quality usually generates better results, but at a diminishing rate. There is a sweet spot where extra time and energy generate meaningfully better results, where the juice really is worth the squeeze. But past a certain point, it takes lots of extra time and effort to eke out even a tiny improvement in performance.

All content also has a ceiling, a maximum potential benefit. At a certain point, spending extra time and energy on an article will make no difference to the results it generates. There are only so many people searching for a given query.

Here’s what that looks like in pretty graph form:

As a marketing leader, you need to balance great results with efficiency. Marketing is constrained optimization. Your job is to reconcile your company’s limitless growth goals—traffic, sign-ups, revenue—with a limited set of resources.

That means taking a nuanced approach to quality. Consistently undervaluing the need for quality risks dismal results; pursuing quality at all costs winds up expensive and over-engineered. You need to evaluate every topic and campaign on a case-by-case basis.

“Consistently undervaluing the need for quality risks dismal results; pursuing quality at all costs winds up expensive and over-engineered.”

That means asking:

• Where is my quality cliff? For this topic, what is the minimum effort required