A Grid for Planning Blog Content

This week’s Say It For You blog posts are based on guidance offered by Jeanette Maw McMurtry in her book Marketing for Dummies…..

As tools for planning how to best market any product or service, marketing maven Jeanne Maw McMurtry recommends using an ESP grid. Since most brands market to more than one segment, she explains, you’ll want to create and deliver content that’s specific and relevant to each type of customer. Segments might include:

• different generations
• different emotional needs
• different professions or industries
• different geographic areas
• different levels of authority within a company

For each segment of your market, the author recommends, consider the following factors:

1. Respect accorded to authorities – (does this audience form its own opinions, or tend to emulate authority figures?)
2. Values – (what cultural values are most important and how driven is this audience by those values?)
3. Messaging – (what promises must be made to this audience?)
4. Creative – (what colors and fonts will work best for this audience? How important is mobile access to the content?)
5. Trust – (what level of trust does this audience tend to have in content presented to them?)

In working with so many different business owners and professional practitioners over the years, we’ve come to realize that customers want to help “fill in the ESP grid for their providers.” In fact, we tell Say It For You clients, customers want and need to “feel heard”; and it’s often unnecessary to initiate formal market research procedures in order to gather valuable insights into what’s working and what is not.

Of course, the very fact that searchers found their way to your page indicates their interest in the subject of your blog, but now the content writing challenge is to create those “targeted and personalized experiences.” In fact, the process of creating ESPs is ongoing, with the blog content creation constantly adapting to new customer and reader feedback.