The Real Reason Audiences Trust Content

The X-Files might be twenty years old but on its return to television screens this year, the message was the same: we want to believe. For Mulder and Scully that means aliens, conspiracies and creatures from the Black Lagoon but for the rest of us it’s… everything. We might be skeptical when a used car salesman tells us the sticker price but when someone speaks with authority and gives us no reason not to believe them, our natural tendency is to give them our trust, at least until they prove us wrong.

It’s a phenomenon seen repeatedly in psychology experiments. A trust game often organized by psychologists gives volunteers five dollars and three choices. They can keep the money; they can reject the money, allowing a stranger to receive twenty dollars and choose either to split the sum with the volunteer or keep the entire amount; or they can reject the money and toss a coin to determine whether the stranger splits the twenty bucks. Consistently, more than half the volunteers choose to trust the stranger, even as little more than a third state that they believed that the stranger would share the money with them. It’s why people working in cafes will ask a stranger to watch their laptops while they top up their frappuccinos even though that stranger might just as easily be a thief as the person they want to be protected from.

That natural degree of trust is what content marketers receive when we deliver articles and videos to an audience. In philosophical terms, we all begin with a certain amount of epistemic authority: the knowledge that we deliver is believed to be true.

Epistemic Authority Versus Life Experience

The challenge, though, is that the same is true of all content creators until they prove that the trust was misplaced. As content chaos has spread online, we have all become our own content aggregators, forcing content marketers to stand out by delivering greater authority and deeper trust.

One way that we can increase that authority is how we package the content. A video for a healthcare company, for example, might offer medical advice from someone in a white coat and holding a stethoscope; doctors have more authority and trust than others. But that might come at the expense of a willingness to listen and identify with the message; doctors can also be distant and patrician. So sometimes we swap authority for empathy and exchange the medical professional for someone closer to our audience’s persona.

But it’s what happens next that matters the most. Trust varies with experience. If we leave our laptop with a stranger and come back from the counter to find both gone, we’ll know to keep our valuables with us in future. And if we deliver a message that turns out to be false, we’ll need to work much harder to persuade future audiences. Building trust and authority is far easier than winning back trust and authority that have been lost. Holding onto both is easier when the content is part of a content strategy and supported by a unique content infrastructure that produces consistent engagement.

Content marketers are fortunate enough to have audiences that want to listen and want to believe what we tell them as long as what we tell them is relevant to their lives. We have enough authority to hold that trust. But it’s only by not betraying that trust, by providing information that is genuinely valuable, and by creating a comprehensive, targeted content strategy to retain that authority that we can keep coming back year after year.

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