If you have ever had to defend your content budget to someone who only looks at last-click conversions, you have probably been asked whether there is real evidence that content marketing brand trust is something you can build. So, does content marketing work? The short answer is yes, with a limit. Published research supports the idea that helpful brand content can contribute to trust and to buying decisions, but the evidence is stronger for positive associations and stated intentions than for a proven, universal increase in actual purchases. We would grade it mixed. The studies use different designs and measure different things, and "trust," "affinity," "purchase intention," and "completed purchase" are four separate outcomes that often get blended together when people say content works.
This piece goes through the main studies one at a time, says who ran each one and when, and is plain about what each can and cannot show.
What does it mean for content marketing to build trust?
Before looking at results, it helps to agree on what is being tested. A 2019 paper by Linda Hollebeek and Keith Macky in the Journal of Interactive Marketing describes digital content marketing as creating and sharing relevant, valuable, brand-related content with current or possible customers, with the aim of building engagement, trust, and relationships rather than pushing people straight to a purchase. That is a useful starting point because it separates educational content from a sales pitch.
It also shows that the question has several parts. Here is how this article uses the main outcome terms, keeping in mind that each study defines them a little differently.
| Outcome | What it means here | What it does not show on its own |
|---|---|---|
| Brand trust | Confidence in the brand's capability or reliability | A completed purchase |
| Brand affinity | Positive feelings or a favorable attitude toward the brand | Trust or loyalty |
| Purchase consideration | Being in the set of options a buyer might look at | A stated plan to buy |
| Purchase intention | A stated likelihood of buying | Verified buying behavior |
| Reported purchase | A respondent says they bought or began working with a company | Independent proof, or proof that content caused it |
Two more distinctions come up again and again. Trusting a company's competence is different from believing it is impartial about its own products. And trusting one article is different from trusting the organization behind it, so a study has to measure the brand-level outcome before you can say it found a brand-level effect.
What evidence supports a trust-building effect?
The broadest view comes from a 2022 scoping review by Charmaine du Plessis in Sage Open. It screened 488 studies, assessed 96 full papers, and included 32 publications from 2008 through 2020. The included work links digital brand content with engagement, trust, loyalty, attitudes, and buying-related outcomes, and it points to helpfulness, informative content, and transparency as recurring themes. A scoping review maps a field, though. It does not calculate an average effect, and conceptual papers were eligible alongside research studies, so the number 32 should not be read as 32 experiments.
The Hollebeek and Macky framework is also a theory. It proposes that valuable content leads to cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement, which supports brand-related understanding and identification, which in turn contributes to trust and favorable attitudes. The authors built this from a literature review, and they did not run a randomized test of the whole sequence.
The first empirical result worth knowing is a 2019 survey by Kimmo Taiminen and Chatura Ranaweera in the European Journal of Marketing. They surveyed people on the email list of a large B2B brand and analyzed the results with structural equation modeling. Helpful brand actions, such as offering relevant topics, taking a problem-solving approach, and explaining topics well, were connected with perceived relationship value and brand trust, and cognitive and emotional engagement played a central role. That supports a more specific claim than "publishing builds trust." It says usefulness and engagement matter.
The limits are worth stating. These were existing email subscribers, who may already like the brand. Prior trust could affect both how helpful people rated the content and how much they trusted the company. And this kind of model can show that the data fit a proposed set of relationships without settling which way the causation runs.
A third source is the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, a survey of 3,484 business executives in seven markets, fielded from November 30 to December 14, 2023. In it, 73% of decision-makers said an organization's thought leadership was a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials and product sheets. Look closely at the comparator. The 73% did not say they trusted all content, and the finding does not say thought leadership raised trust by 73%. It says that, for judging competence, buyers favored thought leadership over product sheets. It is also sponsor research from a communications firm and a professional network, surveyed in English among LinkedIn members.
Is there evidence that content shifts purchase decisions?
Yes, though what counts as evidence here is softer than it sounds, so the details matter if you plan to quote anything. The research on content marketing purchase decisions mostly comes from stated intentions and recalled behavior, and the two best-known sources show it clearly.
The first is Conductor's Power of Content report. This is Conductor's own research, not independent academic work, and the report does not state when the fieldwork was done. The page that summarizes it was updated in April 2022, but that is not the date of the experiment. The study had 500 incentivized participants split into two groups of 250, one that read educational content and one that read none. They looked at three product categories (blenders, hiking backpacks, and outdoor speakers) and 12 mock brands, and answered a questionnaire right away and another one week later.
Conductor reported that readers of educational content had a 131% higher purchase likelihood right away, and 48% higher after one week, compared with the no-content group. When asked to pick among four brands, 83.6% chose the brand that had produced the content. These are survey answers about products and made-up brands. They are not sales. A "131% higher likelihood" is a relative comparison, so it cannot be turned into a forecast of how much your revenue would grow. The report also does not document random assignment to the groups.
The same report covers the softer outcomes. Right after reading, 78% agreed the brand was helpful, 64.4% rated it trustworthy, and 66% reported positive feelings. A week later, the trustworthy rating was 73.3% and positive feelings were 74.49%. Those are gains of about 8.9 and 8.5 percentage points. They are post-content ratings compared over time, and the report does not clearly show a trust increase against the no-content group. This is where content marketing brand affinity shows up in the data, as favorable feeling that sits next to buying intent without being the same thing. A one-week follow-up also says nothing about what happens over months.
The second source is the Edelman-LinkedIn survey again. Among decision-makers who said thought leadership had led them to research something they had not considered before, 60% said they then began buying from or working with that organization. That is a stronger statement than a hypothetical intention, because it describes something respondents say they did. It is still a recollection by a selected subgroup, with no independent check and no comparison group, and other touchpoints could have played a part. It does not mean thought leadership converts 60% of buyers. The same report found that 70% of decision-makers were moderately or very likely to invite an organization that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership into an RFP, which is a stated likelihood and not an observed one.
The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn report adds a different kind of point. It describes research with nearly 2,000 professionals and argues that less visible stakeholders read thought leadership and can speak up for vendors they do not know well. That is useful context for why content might matter beyond the person who fills out a form, but the overview does not give enough detail to support a new number.
When can branded content fail to earn trust?
The evidence against a simple version of the claim is just as important. It is what keeps the positive findings believable.
Nielsen ran a study commissioned by the vendor inPowered, published in March 2014, with 900 participants recruited for Nielsen MediaLabs in Las Vegas between December 2013 and January 2014. People saw expert content, user reviews, or branded content for products in nine categories, and answered surveys before and after. On average, expert content produced an 88% larger familiarity lift, a 50% larger affinity lift, and a 38% larger lift in purchase consideration than branded content did. Those are comparisons between the sizes of the pre and post improvements, so they are not sales differences, and the advantage was not the same for every product. The study is also old, sponsored, and based on a convenience sample.
The same study found that 50% of participants said they would not trust a product's own website for an unbiased assessment, and 61% were less likely to trust product reviews paid for by the selling company. So a brand's content can be useful and still not be treated as impartial, especially when it talks about the brand's own offering. That cuts against the idea that buyers automatically trust what a company publishes, and it does not argue against helpful content as a strategy.
A 2023 experiment by Eva Van Reijmersdal and colleagues points to a related complication. Participants in the Netherlands were randomly assigned to read a fictional cycling-safety blog post, either with or without a sponsorship disclosure, and attributed to either a brand or a government source. The disclosure set off two opposing responses. It helped people recognize the post as advertising, which was associated with less favorable brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. It also made the sponsorship feel more transparent, which was associated with more favorable attitudes and higher intentions. The study does not show that disclosure always lowers trust. It also does not tell you that hiding a sponsor is a good idea. If you are thinking about how this applies to AI-assisted writing, our piece on whether to disclose AI-assisted content goes through that evidence separately.
Why do these findings not contradict each other?
At first glance it can look like Edelman-LinkedIn says buyers trust thought leadership while Nielsen says they are skeptical of brand content. They are answering different questions.
Edelman and LinkedIn compared thought leadership with marketing materials and product sheets, and asked about assessing capabilities. Nielsen compared independent expert content with branded and user content, and asked about unbiased assessment. A buyer can find a company's explanatory article more useful than its product sheet for judging how well the company understands a problem, and still prefer an outside source for an unbiased view of the product.
The audiences also differ. Conductor tested consumers on mock brands, Taiminen and Ranaweera studied an existing B2B email audience, Edelman and LinkedIn surveyed business professionals, and the disclosure experiment used one sponsored blog post. These cannot be averaged into one number for what content does. The periods differ too, since Nielsen's fieldwork was in 2013 and 2014 and the scoping review stops at 2020, so older findings are best read as history and not as current benchmarks.
Does content marketing work, and what does the research justify saying?
Putting it together, you can say the following with a straight face. Helpful, explanatory content is associated with trust, favorable feelings, and buying consideration in the settings studied. Buyers say they use thought leadership to judge a company's competence, and a share of them report that it led them to buy. And readers pay attention to who is speaking and why, so credibility depends on how the source is seen.
The evidence on content marketing purchase decisions has its limits too. You cannot say that content marketing is proven to build trust, that a particular percentage of sales comes from content, or that more content produces more trust. None of these studies tested publishing volume, and none tracked real purchases against a credible comparison group. Numbers repeated without a named source are a common trap, and our piece on content marketing myths covers several of them.
For a marketing lead, the practical use of this is a more precise argument. Instead of telling leadership that content works, name the outcome a piece is meant to support, such as helping a buyer judge your competence, building familiarity before a sales conversation, or getting you into the set of options considered. Our piece on what counts as thought leadership helps with deciding which outcome a given asset is aimed at. Our guide to building a thought leadership strategy goes into how to plan for it.
It also helps to keep two things apart. A lack of immediate conversions does not prove that content failed to affect trust or consideration, so direct-response metrics alone are an incomplete picture of content's role. But clicks, impressions, and publishing frequency do not show those effects either, and it is just as unsupported to assume that unconverted traffic is quietly building trust. If you want to look at what you can measure on your own site, how to measure blog performance covers the KPIs that tend to hold up.
A note on scope. This article is about how human buyers respond to content. How AI search systems judge trust is a separate topic, and we cover it in measuring whether AI systems trust your brand. Our explainer on E-E-A-T for AI search covers how those systems judge expertise and authority.
What would change this verdict?
The grade would move up with independent, well-reported studies that randomize who sees content or use a credible real-world comparison, measure trust before and after in both groups, separate competence from impartiality, observe completed purchases, follow readers for longer than a week, and repeat the result across brands and markets. A body of that kind of work would justify stronger causal language about content marketing brand trust. Repeated null or negative results under credible designs would weaken the positive reading. Another sponsor survey would add context but would not settle the causal question.
Several things are still unknown. Nobody has established the average effect on trust across industries, how much of it lasts beyond short follow-ups, whether unfamiliar prospects respond the way subscribers do, or how much of a purchase should be credited to content versus other interactions. That is not a reason to dismiss the work. It is a reason to describe it accurately, and a defensible case for content is one that matches the claim you make to the evidence behind it. Use the research to separate what your content is meant to change from what your reporting can actually prove.
