Write each post for one need. Let the archive cover the segment.

Every brief we receive names its audience in the plural: heads of marketing at B2B software companies, owners of small accounting firms, procurement leads in manufacturing. That plural is where posts go vague. A post written for a segment has to serve every need the segment contains, so it serves none of them fully. Each post should answer one need, and covering the segment is the archive's job, not the post's.

A segment is a population, not a reader

Take "heads of marketing at B2B software companies". Inside that phrase is one person about to fire an agency, another whose CEO has just asked why the blog went quiet in spring, and a third building next year's budget with no idea what content should cost. They share a job title. They do not share a question, and each needs a different page.

A post that tries to serve all three can be recognised by its shape. It opens with context everyone already has, hedges every recommendation so that it fits every situation, and closes on advice general enough to be true for anyone. Nothing in it is wrong. Nobody leaves with what they came for.

Google's own self-assessment questions are worded in the singular for a reason. Its guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content asks whether, after reading, someone will leave feeling they have learned enough to help achieve their goal. A segment has no goal. A person in a situation does.

GOV.UK settled this for the widest audience there is

If any publisher could be excused for writing to "everyone", it is a national government. GOV.UK does the opposite. Its guidance on identifying user needs says every user need follows the same three-part template, As a… I need to… So that…, and tells writers not to begin with "as a user".

The same page also carries the concession that keeps this from becoming a fetish for personas. A user does not have to be one person; a broad group is fine if its relationship to the need is the same, and different needs get their own user need. The unit is not the reader. It is the need. A whole segment can share one, and when it does, one post serves all of it.

Its worked example is worth stealing. "As a carer, I need to get financial help, so that I can carry on looking after the person I care for" is a valid need. "I need to use a benefits calculator" is not, because it invents a need to justify content that already exists. Company blogs make the second mistake constantly: the post exists because the product has a feature, and the "need" is written afterwards to fit it.

A machine given a plural writes for the average

This matters more for an engine than for a human writer. A person writing for "marketing leaders" quietly pictures someone they once met and writes to them. A model given a plural audience has no one to picture, so it writes toward the middle of the distribution, and the middle is where the register every competitor shares comes from. We have argued before that every blog in a category ends up sounding the same. Writing to an averaged reader is one of the ways that happens.

So in our engine the audience is not a field you fill in once. Each subject in the backlog carries the situation behind it: who is asking, what they are about to do, and why. Our own archive works this way. Deleting posts is a last resort is written for someone looking at a traffic drop with a cull already half-planned. The blog you already have is for a buyer who arrives with a neglected archive rather than an empty one. Neither is written for "marketers".

Where the rule goes wrong

There are two ways to misread this. The first is to slice the segment into ever-thinner needs until posts start competing for the same query. GOV.UK's rule cuts against that too: if the relationship to the need is the same, it is one need. Ten posts that differ only in the job title in the first paragraph are one post written ten times.

The second is to manufacture narrow needs because coverage sounds like strategy. Google lists producing lots of content on many different topics, in the hope that some of it performs, as a warning sign. A need you invented to fill a slot in the calendar fails the same test the benefits calculator fails, and we have said elsewhere that not every subject is a post.

The archive covers the segment

Once the post stops trying to serve the segment, the archive can. Thirty posts, each answering one real need, describe a market far more completely than thirty posts that each address all of it. The segment shows up in the pattern rather than in any one page.

For your brief, the change is one line per post. Write the so that. If you cannot finish the sentence, there is no reader yet, only a topic, and Google's position on machine-written content was never about who typed it. It is about pages nobody needed. A post with no stated need comes close to the definition.