How to Build Trust in Content Marketing Talent

“Do you think you’re smarter than me? You might be, but I’m a better lawyer.”

This is the a rebuke the superstar lawyer Lisa Arthur delivers to the arrogant media scion Kendall Roy in Succession. I think about this exchange when I see heavy-handed or plainly rude comments from a non-marketing person in a thought leadership byline or blog post doc.

Don't get me wrong; non-marketing people can comment on marketing writing. They should be integral to informing and enriching it. It’s the expertise of the non-marketing person for whom marketers ghostwrite that often transforms what could be consensus-parroting pablum into industry-shifting wisdom. 

But having written and edited hundreds of marketing bylines and blog posts, I can identify immediately when a commenter just doesn't respect the expertise of the people they're paying to create and pitch content for their company. Their tone, like Kendall’s, betrays their assumption that the person on the other end of the doc is not a master of their craft. They assume the writers they’re hiring have nothing to teach them or do not understand their business. “Who’s this marketing person I have to deal with?” 

Trust is the foundation of strong marketing results

The issue is a lack of trust. That may sound abstract, but it’s of vital importance to building a strong marketing program. Because if you don’t have trust, already well-written bylines get torn to shreds for the wrong reasons. The writer’s morale suffers. The company spends three times the money or time on a piece that was required to get it done right. The non-marketing stakeholders are frustrated. Churn happens, either because the exec wants to fire the marketer or because the marketer quits, and the wheel of inefficiency keeps spinning faster.

Of course, sometimes a lack of trust is warranted. Maybe the marketing agency or in-house marketer really isn’t that good. As someone who’s edited a publication that receives many byline pitches from PR agencies, I can confirm that many of them traffic in bad writing. But that’s for the client or boss to figure out before they hire an agency or in-house marketer. If you hire someone, you should believe they are a master of their craft (or junior employee with skills and potential). You should trust that they bring competent writing to the table.

So, how does the breakdown in trust occur? How do writers find themselves reading nasty comments from an exec who clearly does not trust that the writing team members know what they’re doing?

In my experience, this almost never happens with a client who has directly hired me. In those situations, the trust has to be there — they hired my agency for a reason. They know my background and trust that, though, again, they may do other things better or be smarter than I am, they don’t know better than I how to write or run a content marketing program. 

So, trust tends to break down when the exec does not know who the person on the other end of the Google doc is. They don’t trust me; they don’t even know who I am. They just see words appear on a page, and they think, “Who is this marketing person — probably a 22-year-old cutting their teeth at our PR agency — writing this stuff?”

In other words, heavy-handed editing results from a lack of trust in marketing talent, and the lack of trust stems from a structural breakdown in communication and collaboration. 

How to build trust in content marketing and PR

For marketing to work at maximum efficiency and effectiveness, the content marketing or PR workflow needs to be set up with trust in mind. Everyone who touches the Google doc needs to believe that the people who wrote and edited the byline, blog post, or social content before them are expert writers who are not only probably better writers than they but also better acquainted with industry best practices, journalistic norms, and content marketing strategy.

Now, you may be thinking, “This is much ado about nothing. OK, so an exec is mean to a writer or gratuitously verbose when making comments. Who cares?”

You should care — if you care about efficiency, limiting churn, and producing the strong marketing writing, whether for owned, earned, or shared media, that forges bonds with customers, shortens the path to conversion, and drives sales. If you don’t care about shoring up trust to boost those outcomes, don’t hire a content marketing or PR agency. If you don’t think you can find a content marketer or media relations specialist in whom you have the kind of trust I’ve described, don’t make the hire. 

(To illustrate the cost, I recently worked on a byline that went through four rounds of revisions over several months that cost the client about $3k. The piece should’ve taken a couple weeks to go out and cost $1-1.5k. These are the real costs, in time and money, of a lack of trust.)

If you do think you can find a trustworthy marketer or agency, hire them, and explain why you hired them to anyone who will be in charge of approving their work and either blocking or amplifying their success. If you’re a PR agency or head of comms setting up an exec with a writer, explain why you hired that person. Proactively build trust — because it’s a whole lot easier than sorting through seven gratuitous rounds of ill-advised edits by an exec who thinks “We should talk about ourselves more” is the answer to improving an Ad Age byline. 

Your CEO, CTO, or head of sales may be smarter than your content or PR team. Maybe, maybe not. But your content team is better at writing. If the people for whom they're ghostwriting don't trust that, you have a problem to solve — and a lot to gain by solving it.