Look, most people just want their problems solved. They don’t care about your ad spend. They don’t care about your clever slogans. They care if you get them. And that’s where most marketing falls flat. It’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. This is what the latest thinking on marketing use means for you: less chasing vanity metrics, more genuine connection. Or, more likely, more wasted money and confused customers.
The whole point of marketing is to get people moving. From “meh” to “hmm.” From “hmm” to “aha!” And finally, from “aha!” to “I’m in.” That forward momentum? That’s use. The folks who write about this stuff go on about negotiation case studies. Bill saving a building. Smart. But for us, the grunts in the ad trenches, it’s about cutting through the noise. It’s about stopping people scrolling their feeds and actually making them do something. Because let me tell you, I’ve seen plenty of campaigns that look like they have punch, but they don’t. They’re just flailing.
Most marketing teams? They don’t realize they’ve got no use until their budget’s gone up in smoke. They’ve mistaken shiny objects for actual power. And that’s a costly mistake.
The 5 Smoke Signals of Marketing use
Here’s what passes for use, but really isn’t:
1. Jargon Isn’t Clarity
Some teams think they’re being simple. They’re not. They’re just speaking a language only they understand. They’re so deep in their own product’s weeds, they forget nobody else is. The generative AI company I saw? Took me three calls to figure out what they did. Their potential customers gave up after one.
2. Data Without Insight
Data’s everywhere. It’s like confetti. Easy to collect, harder to make into anything meaningful. You can track clicks and impressions all day long, but if you don’t actually understand the human behind the click, it’s just numbers. It’s like going to speed dating and thinking you’ve mastered relationships. Please.
3. Old Habits Aren’t Market Wisdom
Remember ACT!? Salespeople lived by it. Then Salesforce and HubSpot blew it away. ACT! thought they knew what customers wanted forever. They only knew what customers wanted then. Experience is a good teacher, but only if you’re still listening.
4. Awareness Is Not Trust
Sure, your ad went viral. Congrats. You’re noticed. Are you trusted? Awareness gets attention. Trust gets action. People move when they feel like you get them. Not when you’re just the loudest voice in the room.
5. Cleverness Is Not Persuasion
Marketers love a witty tagline. Who doesn’t? But funny ads don’t always sell. When the cleverness becomes the goal, you’ve lost the plot. Funny gets attention. Truth resonates. Truth makes people feel seen. That’s where trust is built.
How To Actually Build use (It’s Not Pretty)
Leverage is weirdly specific. It depends on who you’re talking to. The folks who consistently make people move? They’re obsessed with understanding their customers. What do they want? What scares them? What are they sacrificing? They aren’t just “knowing the audience.” They’re studying them. Like a coach studies game film. They get this insight from a few key places, because no single tool tells the whole story.
Talk to People. Really Talk.
The best marketers I know spend an embarrassing amount of time talking to their customers. Not in focus groups. Not with surveys. One-on-one. They use frameworks like jobs-to-be-done or CX mapping, sure, but they’re not rigidly attached. Think of them as GPS – helpful, but you still need to watch the road. You’d be amazed what you learn from 15 actual conversations. People reveal things when you’re curious and patient enough to listen.
Watch Them In Action
I used to think just talking was enough. Nope. You need to see what people actually do. Words are one thing. Actions are another. The gap between them? That’s where the real insight hides. Seeing how someone struggles with your product, or bypasses your intended feature – that’s gold.
The goal is to spot patterns in motivations and ideal outcomes that shape decisions, but are otherwise easy to miss.
Think of it like this: your product’s a tool. How are people really using it? Are they using it to hammer in nails, or are they trying to pry open a can of beans? The latter is probably not what you designed it for, but it’s what they need. That’s the kind of understanding that builds real use. It’s the messy, uncomfortable truth you find when you stop guessing and start observing. And listening.
This whole idea of marketing use feels eerily like the early days of Silicon Valley startups. Lots of hype, lots of buzzwords, and very little actual understanding of user needs. Companies chased funding, not product-market fit. They mistook venture capital for sustainable growth. It’s the same trap. Chasing attention, chasing data points, chasing viral moments – these are the easy outs. They look like progress. But without genuine customer understanding, without that deep dive into their motivations and pain points, it’s just noise. And noise doesn’t move mountains. It doesn’t even move customers.
