Every entrepreneur faces the same fundamental challenge: You have limited time, money, and energy to invest in your business. This creates a pivotal question that affects everything from product development to marketing campaigns: Should you focus on creating one or two exceptional things, or would you be better off producing many good-enough options?
The answer isn’t always straightforward. Whether you run a small business or an ecommerce store, or whether you’re an artist or a content creator, the quality versus quantity decision depends entirely on your specific goals and circumstances.
Here’s how to determine when each approach makes sense for your business and how to strike the right balance.
When is quality important?
Quality becomes essential when you’re looking to make a lasting impression and build brand loyalty. If you run a small business selling t-shirts, for example, you already know that quality is important; your customers will stop buying your shirts if they quickly fall apart. If you run a subscription blog, you may lose readers if you’re writing articles riddled with typos, factual errors, or narrative gaffes. In marketing, your quality versus quantity choice is the difference between focusing on high-value repeat business or finding new customers by casting a wide net through low-effort social media ads.
Jeremiah Curvers, co-founder of mattress company Polysleep, explained his quality versus quantity decision on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. Jeremiah admits that although there aren’t many repeat customers in the mattress industry, focusing on quality referrals instead of widespread ads has been a winning strategy for his company. “I would much rather give you 50 bucks [for referring a friend] than give 200 bucks to Facebook and Google,” he says.
Example of quality over quantity
Imagine you’re an ecommerce business owner who sells backpacks through social media. A quantity approach would involve sourcing a lot of cheap backpacks and using social media advertising to get them in front of as many people as possible.
A quality approach, on the other hand, would require sourcing high-quality backpacks that solve a specific problem and then posting detailed reviews on social media that break down the backpacks’ strengths. To show off the backpacks’ uses and basic materials, you could even create a video series about a personal long-distance hike. You might also put a significant portion of your advertising spend toward ads on a hyper-niche nature podcast versus several podcasts with listeners who are potentially less engaged because it earns you a better return on ad spend (ROAS).
Being deliberate with how and where you spend your marketing dollars is always important, but especially when you’re just getting your brand off the ground. “There’s a cost associated with each and every step of growing a business,” Jeremiah says, pointing to the advertising and hiring costs he encountered when starting Polysleep.
To illustrate how much Polysleep values quality over quantity, Jeremiah explains how the company has always prioritized local manufacturing for its foam mattresses instead of seeking out merely the cheapest manufacturing option. “We manufacture our product here [in Quebec] … as much as we can, even the material, the raw material,” he says. “A good example of that will be our fabric. Our fabric is actually knitted here.” Jeremiah says this emphasis on high-quality, locally made goods resonates with Polysleep’s customers.
Quality approaches often require more effort than quantity strategies, but they can significantly impact how customers perceive your brand. Potential customers won’t see your product as just another ad in their feed but will instead learn about its real-life efficacy on a social media platform they trust.
When is quantity important?
Though quality is an important factor in any business, prioritizing quantity can also be advantageous. An example of this would be using your ad spend to boost posts on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Instead of focusing on a niche platform like a specific video creator, podcaster, or even physical periodicals like local newspapers or national magazines, this approach attempts to get a lot of new content in front of as many eyes as possible.
This kind of approach can benefit you in a couple of ways. First, it can help you determine your target audience. Second, it can help build some early brand recognition that you can leverage later, even if you are focusing only on quantity initially.
Quantity over quality example
Let’s say you just started a wedding photography company. A quantity approach might look like taking two weddings per week and spending little time on post-production. Contrast this with a quality approach, which would mean taking two or three wedding jobs per month and spending a lot of time editing each photo to make it perfect. With the quantity approach, you still provide immense value to your clients by offering your services at a lower price than your competitors.
In this scenario, a quantity-focused approach can help you build a portfolio and make a lot of connections quickly, both of which are serious benefits in an industry where word-of-mouth referrals are very important.
How to balance quality and quantity
The most successful businesses don’t choose between quality and quantity—they strategically apply both approaches based on their specific goals and circumstances. Here’s how to find the right balance:
Identify an objective
Your strategy’s success depends entirely on what you want to accomplish. In ecommerce marketing, identifying your objective is a crucial step in determining how to approach your marketing strategy. For instance, if your goal is to sell a lot of units quickly and aggregate insights into your target audience, you might elect to prioritize a quantity approach. But if you hope to gain long-term, loyal customers, you might instead consider taking a quality approach.
On Shopify Masters, Jeremiah makes it clear he values quality over quantity in every move Polysleep makes. He says, “I would much rather have 200 people on my website that are reading content that they do appreciate and potentially subscribe to my newsletter because they see value in this content than to have 2,000 of them that just bounce after an article and will never come back to my website.”
Gather data
After you’ve identified a goal, it’s time to start implementing your business strategy. Market research, surveys, and demographic data can help you set benchmarks, measure your performance, and identify significant factors affecting how people interact with your brand. Imagine you start posting one high-effort, high-quality marketing video a week. You would want to gather data related to engagement and any sales leads generated to help you determine whether or not the time, effort, and budget are translating into sales revenue.
Review and optimize
After you collect data on your strategy’s performance, it’s time to reflect on what is and isn’t working well. This will help you identify areas with potential for improvement. Let’s return to the example of posting high-quality marketing videos. Imagine the data reveals that engagement is super low and the strategy is not leading to sales. That information would inform what steps you decided to take next. Perhaps you would choose to pivot to a quantity approach for some time, prioritizing daily, behind-the-scenes snapshots of your business operations that aren’t meticulously edited. After collecting and studying the new data, you find that your audience is engaging more with the less-polished videos.
Listen to customer feedback
Though concrete figures related to engagement, sales, and other key business metrics are vital for understanding your business strategy’s performance, some circumstances call for collecting anecdotal evidence, too. You can collect this customer feedback through surveys or by reaching out to customers directly. For example, if you want to add new features to your line of exercise apparel, you might survey current or potential customers to learn which features they would most like to see in future products.
Quality vs. quantity FAQ
Is quality actually better than quantity?
The debate between quality and quantity sets up a false binary. Though there is an inherent tension between the two because everybody has limited time and effort, in reality, each approach has its advantages. Businesses that recognize when to prioritize each element tend to do better than those that don’t.
Why do people say quality over quantity?
The old saying “quality over quantity” is true in certain circumstances. Focusing a lot of time and effort on sheer excellence can pay off if you’re a contractor who’s building a house or a composer who’s writing a masterpiece. However, in business, ecommerce, and marketing, there are times when prioritizing quantity can be advantageous and help you grow.
What is more important, quality or quantity?
Both quality and quantity are important, though one may need to be prioritized over the other in certain contexts. For instance, if you’re publishing TikTok videos for the first time, focusing on volume initially can help you build up your profile, attract an audience, and determine which types of videos resonate most. On the other hand, if you’re running a niche podcast, you might find that consistently posting one high-quality episode a week earns you deeper appreciation from your audience than several poorer-quality episodes a week.
