Not too long ago, the question of who to trust and why had a fairly straightforward answer. It all came down to the messenger.
That might have been a news presenter on TV, a writer in a known publication, or even an author who took the time to assemble their thoughts into a book.
Whatever the case, trust often came along for the ride because we trusted who was sharing that information with us.
These days things are different. The media landscape has broken down into hundreds… thousands… tens of thousands of different options, from social media feeds, to niche influencers, narrow media and more. At the same time, many of the legacy outlets seem a… little less trustworthy these days.
So, what’s the solution? It comes down to what is known as information literacy, or the ability to evaluate a source not just for what it says but for why it is saying it, what it is leaving out, and whether the confidence it projects is proportionate to the evidence behind it. It’s all about having the ability to recognize when a piece of content was produced to inform versus when it was produced to persuade.
Most B2B professionals have always had some version of this skill. Call it the bs meter. What has changed is how important it has become and how high the cost of triggering it has gotten for the firms on the receiving end of that judgment.
Information Literacy in Financial Services
The sharpening of information literacy in financial services did not happen in a single moment. Rather, it is the accumulated product of several overlapping trends.
The first is volume. Financial professionals today receive more content from more sources than at any prior point in the industry’s history. Newsletters, market commentary, white papers, LinkedIn posts, podcast episodes, conference presentations, regulatory updates, third-party research. The volume alone has forced a kind of triage that did not exist when the information diet was thinner.
The second is experience. Every advisor who has been through a full market cycle has watched strategies that looked impeccable in the pitch behave very differently under stress. Every allocator who has done enough due diligence has seen the distance between what a fund sponsor’s marketing communicates and what the actual investor experience turns out to be. That gap, encountered repeatedly, builds a specific kind of skepticism that is not cynicism but calibration.
The third is the rise of AI-generated content. When fluent, well-structured content became easy to produce, the surface signals that financial professionals had been using as proxies for credibility stopped working. Correct grammar, logical flow, appropriate hedging, confident tone… all of these can now be generated without any underlying expertise.
The result is a professional audience that evaluates content on dimensions that most messaging was not designed for.
What Information-Literate Readers Actually Evaluate
Understanding what a reader is actually assessing when they engage with your content is the starting point for understanding how to communicate with them effectively.
- Specificity: Specific claims are more credible than general ones, not because specificity is inherently accurate, but because it is harder to fake. A firm that says its underwriting process is “rigorous and disciplined” has told you nothing. One that says it underwrites to a specific debt service coverage ratio, rejects deals above a certain loan-to-value threshold, and has maintained that discipline through three different rate environments has made claims a reader can evaluate.
- Proportionality: Information-literate readers pay attention to whether the confidence expressed in a piece of content matches the evidence behind it. A market outlook that expresses high conviction about uncertain future events without acknowledging that uncertainty reads as a red flag. A piece of analysis that reaches a conclusion carefully, notes the conditions under which it might be wrong, and hedges proportionately to the actual evidence reads as more credible, not less, even though it is making a weaker claim.
- Omission awareness: Sophisticated readers have learned to ask what is not in a piece of content as carefully as they ask what is. A white paper that discusses a strategy’s historical performance without discussing the market conditions that produced it, a firm bio that emphasizes relevant experience without acknowledging the experience that is missing, a market commentary that addresses the favorable implications of a trend without engaging with the unfavorable ones. These omissions stand out to savvy readers.
- Motivation transparency: Readers can form an opinion quickly about why a piece of content exists and what it’s trying to accomplish. Is it here to help me understand something, or to convince me of something? Content that is genuinely trying to help the reader understand something is received differently, and trusted more, than content that is dressed as information but functioning as advocacy.
What This Means for Your Messaging
The practical implication of communicating with an information-literate audience is a set of messaging principles that run counter to the instincts of traditional financial services marketing.
Lead with the reader’s question, not your answers.
The instinct in a lot of marketing is to lead with the firm’s capabilities, the strategy’s strengths, the track record’s highlights. An information-literate reader encounters this structure and immediately categorizes the content as advocacy. Leading instead with the question the reader is actually trying to answer, framed in terms that reflect genuine understanding of their situation, signals that the content is for them rather than for you.
Say the thing you don’t have to say.
The content that earns the most credibility with sophisticated readers is almost always content that acknowledges something the firm was not required to acknowledge. A discussion of the conditions under which a strategy underperforms, an honest assessment of where the market consensus might be right and the firm’s thesis might need to be updated, or a candid description of what a strategy can’t do as well as what it can… These disclosures don’t signal weaknesses, but are actually powerful signals of genuine credibility.
Earn your confidence.
Every claim in your messaging should be accompanied by the evidence that warrants it. Not as a defensive legal exercise but as a demonstration that the confidence is grounded rather than performed. An information-literate reader who encounters a confident claim and can see the reasoning behind it trusts the confidence.
Write for the skeptics.
The most useful editorial test for any piece of content is to ask how it reads to a sophisticated professional who starts with mild skepticism and is actively looking for reasons to discount it. If the content passes that test, it will almost certainly pass with less skeptical readers.
The reality is that readers who encounter a firm’s content repeatedly and find it consistently specific, proportionate, honest, and oriented toward their interests develop a different relationship with that firm than readers who encounter a standard managed-messaging program. They share it with colleagues. They bring a different set of priors to conversations. They are easier to work with because the credibility foundation has already been built.
That’s why today’s environment around information literacy is not a problem to be solved, but a new environment for financial services marketing. Standards are rising, and the challenge now is to up your game to meet them.
Layup is the strategic marketing partner for financial services firms building the authority, credibility, and trust that compounds over time. If you’d like to talk about what that looks like for you, reach out at wearelayup.com.