There's no shortage of information anymore, and there hasn't been for a while. The scarce thing now isn't knowing something, but knowing whether to believe it.
To make sense of the world, your audience builds semantic associations between the sources of information available to them.
One bucket holds the sources they trust. The other holds the sources they don't. The same words may be interpreted differently depending on which bucket they come from.
This constant game of sorting heavily dictates your place in the market. The catchiest idea and the widest reach don't matter if your audience has placed you in the low-trust bucket.
At one point the north star was reach. Then it became virality, and now it is trust.
Trust is the single most important thing you have with your audience, and consumers are willing to give out less and less of it.
AI complicates this
In a world dominated by AI-generated content, your bucket placement gets harder to earn.
Many teams (including my own) are trying to figure out how AI fits into their go-to-market. The obvious thing AI does is speed up work. It allows you to achieve equal or greater levels of output in less time with fewer resources.
The logical next step with a tool like this is to maximize output, but that's the trap.
When making things gets cheap, making more things is the wrong instinct, because everyone else can do it too. This becomes particularly dangerous when AI is pulling context from the same messaging that may have eroded consumer trust to begin with.
To combat this
Instead of solely chasing the most efficient way to generate output, placing extra emphasis on quality will yield stronger results.
But what does quality look like? High-trust content generally shares a common set of traits across the industry.
- (1) It is plain-speaking and easy to follow. The content doesn't hide behind jargon or hedge every claim with vagueness. The reader never has to work to decode what's implied, because the language is explicit and concise. This runs counter to traditional marketing-speak, which is exactly why it is valuable.
- (2) It is rooted in fact and example. The content avoids bare assertions and anchors every statement to something quantifiable or externally documented. Every claim is one that can withstand inspection and isn't framed to flatter the company publishing it.
- (3) It teaches you something you didn't already know. The content explains a concept from a point of view that's unique or informed by inputs not easily found anywhere else. It leverages the author's expertise to educate the reader rather than persuade them.
- (Bonus) It is sourced from a voice people deem credible. You see this in the rising prominence of engineering blogs, where the author carries credentials that build trust on their own, whether through technical depth, access to scarce information, or a track record of quality.
To land in the high-trust bucket requires a rethink of content and the incentives behind it. The current content strategy is built to drive pipeline, rank in search and generative engines, and answer competitive pressure. While all of these are necessary, they are also the reason many vendors end up in the low-trust bucket.
In a landscape ripe with information, you need to work a little bit harder to get someone to engage with what you're providing.
In practice
To accomplish this, take time to think about the outputs you're generating and put yourself in the shoes of the person you're creating them for. Why should they care about this? What are you giving them that they can't find elsewhere? Does this read like a keynote or a press release?
Answering these questions is the first step to improving quality and building trust. The next step is making sure what you built is informed by a perspective only you or your team can offer.
There are simple ways to find what this is. Do you work for an industry leader? Talk to your technical talent or draw on your large customer base to sharpen your point of view.
Are you part of a startup solving a novel problem? Discuss how you found this problem and validated that it was worth solving.
Are you trying to create a new category? Don't shy away from the architectural differences that set you apart from the rest of the market.
The common thread is that trust isn't won by saying more. It's won by being the only one who can say a particular thing, and saying it plainly.