Content Hierarchy will help deliver messages that are more likely to connect, resonate and motivate an audience.

Content Hierarchy provides you with the pre-campaign empirical data to measure and predict the audience reach of communications. By supplying the specific knowledge required to shape, develop and amend messages it’s easy to produce communications that will provide the optimum audience reach.

How does it work?

Numerous psychological research programmes have shown that individuals and collectively groups of individuals perceive, absorb and process information differently. Knowing the preferences of your audience and delivering messages in their preferred style is proven to increase rapport and therefore attention, retention and motivation.

The ESP Benchmark Instrument measures audience preferences by eliciting individuals' personality markers through an online questionnaire. Via the password protected dashboard, clients can access this preference data to create audience profiles. These audience profile preferences can then displayed in the Content Hierarchy Chart and measured against other audiences or communications.

Perception Styles

Some individuals ‘feel’ information instinctively based on their direct experience. They tend to be more intuitive and process through their feelings to make sense of the information before connecting it to meaning. These abstract/feelers trust their instincts and intuition.

Others consciously think information through before applying it to possible situations. These individuals tend to be more sequential and logical. Their preference is to analyse, examine and reason. These detailed/thinkers detach themselves in order to judge objectively.

Processing Styles

There are two differing styles of processing information; some like to jump straight in and try things for themselves; others are a little more cautious and prefer to reflect on what they have learnt before taking action.

Content Delivery

The combination of preferences for perceiving and preferences for processing information provides us with four distinct styles, each with its own preferences and behaviours. Each style accepts or rejects information in distinctly different, but predictable ways . Each style engages with different sequences of information delivery . The traits of each of the four styles can be encapsulated in the thinking style they use to perceive and process information. Each thinking style has at its core a point of reference, which for marketing purposes, can be summarised as a single question.

Style one: Point of reference is the question; Why?

Style one individuals seek meaning and clarity, have highly developed imaginations, learn by feeling their experiences and are interested in growth and self-awareness. So communications to this style need to answer the question; “Why do I need to know this?”

Style two: Point of reference is the question: What?

Style two individuals are intrigued by how things function, look for order and structure, seek continuity and certainty, want knowledge and accuracy and make decisions based on logic and analysis. So communications to this style need to answer the question; "What, do I need to know about this?"

Style three: Point of reference is the question: How?

Style three individuals are pragmatists, they need closure, excel at problem solving, like to get to the ‘core’ of things, prefer to be hands on, understand and master things quickly. So communications to this style need to answer the question; "How, does this work?"

Style four: Point of reference is the question: What If?

Style four individuals like challenges and are risk takers, they integrate present experience with future possibilities, are flexible, excel at synthesizing, enthusiastic and like to put a new spin onto things. So communications to this style need to answer the question; "What (are the possibilities) if I had this?"

Why? What? How and What If? - sound familiar?

Some marketers may recognise this question sequence. It is the psychometric basis for many ‘creative’ development structures, the AIDA, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action copy sequence being amongst the best known. Whilst useful as a guide, without the measurement and analysis of the audience preferences, static structures like AIDA will only work for some audiences and not others.

Every audience is unique, blended with its own individual personality profile and therefore predisposed towards a preference for one, or more of the four styles. It’s this audience blend in their rapport model that suggests the optimum messaging hierarchy. Applying that hierarchy to resulting communications provides not only a degree of objective certainty but also a distinct competitive advantage.

Imagine tailoring messages to the communication style of the audience.

By charting audience preferences and rapport model, the ESP Benchmark Instrument can be used as a briefing guide providing valuable insights into the communication preferences of an audience. By answering our questions in a way we can analyse they have told us exactly how they prefer to receive information. The Benchmark Instrument extrapolates this data into a form that can be applied to the creation or development of communication.

The resulting communications can then be compared to the audience rapport model, areas of match and mismatch highlighted so that adjustments can be considered and if necessary acted upon. The Content Hierarchy provides a robust and objective measurement of audience communication preferences and the degree to which resulting communications match.

And of course, where appropriate, individuals who have completed the Online questionnaire can have message variations selected to deliver their specific preferences perfectly for maximum rapport, connection and motivation.

Content Hierarchy is just one of the measures available as part of ESP’s Benchmark InstrumentFor more information contact either Glyn Parry or Jim Brackin.