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A content calendar feels like control. Calm. A friend you can rely on, even.
In reality, it is a control theatre, set against the backdrop of escalating AI-generated workslop and imploding economics of marketing.
One of our most comfortable and trusted tools as content producers and marketers needs a rethink.
Falling through the funnel
The content calendar is built on the assumption that buyers move in straight lines; i.e. if we publish the right sequence of posts at the right cadence, audiences will progress neatly from stranger to buyer.
But humans don’t behave like funnels. They behave like humans, ‘funnel’-y enough.
They hesitate, then lurk. Maybe binge three articles at midnight. They disappear for six weeks. They screenshot something and send it to a colleague. They chat with their grandmother at a family barbecue. And, chat with their ChattyBot. They panic about whispers of lay-offs. Sometimes, they return and buy.
At the heart of the issue is that, in order for anyone to make the journey from stranger to brand lover, and hence buyer, they must first build trust. And, trust does not grow in neat quarters. It grows in progressive loops.
The content calendar, as we know it, may not fully identify where trust is leaking. It simply assumes that we are all falling through the funnel synchronously.
The problem is the trust gap
The content calendar assumes your audience is moving together as one. They certainly are not. They are moving alone. Each person is going through the process of building trust with your brand on their own timeline. They are falling through your funnel asynchronously.
The ‘trust gap’ is the distance between your current content calendar, and each person in your funnel. It is the distance between what you publish and what your audience is emotionally ready for. Brands that have already established trust – think Nike, Slack, Taylor Swift – can do anything they like. Brands that are emerging simply cannot.
Indeed, one of the biggest mistakes that new and growing brands can make is copying the marketing tactics of those that are already established. It would be like going on a first date and behaving as if you already have 20 years of shared bond, trust and experiences.
The problem with content calendars is that they do not acknowledge the trust gap of the target audience. A content calendar simply says, ‘What should we post on Tuesday?’
But, belief cannot be scheduled like that.
AI summaries bring a curveball
Compounding the inherent structural issues with the content calendar are AI summaries. That non-linear process that was ‘owned’ by you, either through socials or your website, is being lost to AI summaries, both in browsers and also inside the AIs themselves.
Although the discovery process appears to have been imploded by AI, the actual process that your target audience goes through remains the same. The strangers still need to go through the same steps of progressive trust-building to transition from, ‘Are you for me?’ to ‘Let me tell my grandmother about you’.
From a content calendar perspective, this change makes the ‘campaign’ concept almost obsolete. Not only are people not falling through your funnel, they are also not engaging with your neat and orderly campaigns in a linear way.
Impressions are fake
Most marketing dashboards celebrate movement and vanity metrics: impressions, clicks, traffic spikes. But they rarely show where doubt entered the room. Here’s a snapshot of what these markers do not equate to:
- impressions do not equal belief
- clicks do not equal confidence, and
- traffic does not equal trust.
Dashboards do not tell you where confidence cracked, or where emotional safety has evaporated. And, yet, trust is the biggest predictor of marketing ROI (return on investment).
When trust is high, conversion costs fall. Sales cycles shorten. Advocacy increases. When it is low, everything feels like an uphill battle – campaigns do not drive successful results, management gets disgruntled with marketing and agencies appear to be dropping the ball. Your content calendar can be driving traffic and impressions, while eroding trust with your audience.
Content needs a new OS
If we look at marketing through the trust lens where the goal of any piece of content or marketing activation is to create the right conditions for a stranger to become a loyal shopper, the question becomes, ‘How do we create and measure the status of this trust with our target audience?’ Knowing this will point us towards what content we need to create to increase net trust.
Every interaction is a trust signal. The easiest way to think of this is to imagine the interactions that all your site visitors have with your website. Or your Instagram account, or emails, or ChatGPT itself. Each of these digital interactions leaves behind tiny footprints. These can be analysed to provide a quantitative measure of trust.
The content calendar is quietly becoming inadequate. However, content itself still reigns supreme. It is what the robots feed on. The future of content needs to be rebuilt on adaptive systems that measure trust, identify the content needed to fill the trust gaps, ensuring that this content is distributed across the right channels for consumption either by humans or robots.
What can you do?
Keep creating quality content, but be strategic about the purpose of the content. Shift from asking, ‘What are we publishing next month?’ to ‘Where are we losing trust this month?’.
- Measure the trust gaps between your brand and your target audience.
- Identify what content is needed to fill the gaps.
- Create versions of that content for human and AI consumption.
- Deploy to the right channels.
- Re-measure and adjust.
Trust is the only metric that compounds over time. Algorithms fluctuate, platforms come and go, vanity metrics fade like memories of high school. The brands that win will be the most trusted (not the most timely).
Remember, you can schedule posts. You cannot schedule belief.
Dr Anna Harrison is a consumer interaction specialist and ‘Brand Relationships Therapist’
Read more: Stop creating content – start designing decisions
