Walk into any marketing meeting and you'll hear phrases like 'our customers want,' 'people are looking for,' and 'the market needs.' Ask for the evidence behind these statements and you'll often get silence or vague references to past experience.
This is the fundamental problem with most marketing today. Decisions are made on assumptions, not evidence. Campaigns are built on what we think people want, not what they actually say they need. Budgets are allocated to channels we believe work, not ones proven to drive results for our specific audience.
The Cost of Assumptions
Marketing without evidence is expensive. You spend months building campaigns around messages that don't resonate. You invest in features customers don't care about. You position your product against problems people aren't trying to solve.
The numbers bear this out. Studies consistently show that companies making decisions based on customer research outperform those relying on intuition. Yet most businesses still skip the research phase, jumping straight from product to promotion.
Why? Because gathering evidence feels slow. It seems easier to trust your gut, copy what competitors are doing, or follow industry best practices. But speed without direction is just motion, not progress.
What Evidence Actually Means
Evidence-based marketing doesn't mean endless research paralysis. It means basing decisions on observable patterns rather than preferences.
Evidence comes from multiple sources:
- What customers say when they're not being surveyed
- How they actually behave versus how they say they behave
- What problems come up repeatedly in their words
- Where they already spend time discussing these problems
- What solutions they've tried and why those solutions failed
This is different from asking 'would you buy this?' in a focus group. People are terrible at predicting their own behavior in hypothetical scenarios. Real evidence comes from observing actual behavior and listening to unprompted conversations.
The Three Questions You're Not Asking
Before launching your next campaign, answer these three questions with specific evidence, not assumptions:
1. What problem are we actually solving?
Most companies can describe their product's features in detail. Far fewer can articulate the specific problem it solves in the exact words their customers use.
Your engineering team might say 'we provide real-time data synchronization.' Your customers might say 'I need to stop manually updating spreadsheets.' These are not the same problem, and only one of them will make someone click your ad.
Evidence: Find ten recent conversations where potential customers describe this problem. If you can't, you don't know what problem you're solving.
2. Why do existing solutions fail?
People don't buy new products because they're bored. They buy because current solutions aren't working. Understanding why is the difference between positioning that resonates and positioning that confuses.
Maybe your competitor's product is too complex. Maybe it's missing a specific feature. Maybe it works fine but their support is terrible. Each of these creates a different positioning opportunity.
Evidence: Review complaints about competitors. Look for patterns in what people wish existed. This tells you where to position.
3. What triggers someone to start looking?
People don't wake up randomly deciding to buy your product. Something happens that pushes them from 'dealing with it' to 'I need to fix this now.'
Maybe they just got promoted and inherited a broken process. Maybe they're scaling and manual work no longer works. Maybe a competitor launched something that exposed their weakness. These trigger moments are when people are receptive to new solutions.
Evidence: Ask recent customers what specifically prompted them to start looking. Look for common events or circumstances.
Building an Evidence-Based Process
Here's a practical framework for making evidence-based marketing decisions:
Start With Observation
Before asking questions, observe. Where do people in your target market already discuss problems you might solve? What language do they use? What patterns appear?
Online communities, review sites, social media, and support forums contain thousands of unprompted conversations. Start there. You'll learn more in a week of observation than months of surveys.
Document Patterns, Not Anecdotes
One person complaining about something is interesting. Twenty people describing the same frustration in similar words is a pattern. Patterns are evidence. Anecdotes are not.
Keep a document of recurring themes. When you see the same pain point mentioned multiple times across different sources, you've found something real.
Test Small Before Going Big
Use evidence to form hypotheses, then test them before committing resources. Run small campaigns using the language you found. See what resonates. Double down on what works.
This is faster and cheaper than building entire campaigns on assumptions, launching them, and discovering they don't work.
Update Your Evidence
Markets change. Problems evolve. What was true six months ago might not be true today. Evidence-based marketing is not a one-time research project. It's an ongoing practice of listening, learning, and adapting.
Set aside time monthly to review new conversations and update your understanding. This keeps your marketing relevant as your market evolves.
The Social Media Expert Trap
This is where most startups, coaches, consultants, and small businesses fail. They watch one reel or TikTok from a marketing guru, see something that looks like a gold mine, and immediately try to replicate it.
The pitch is always attractive: 'I made $100k with this one Facebook ad.' 'This email sequence converted at 47%.' 'Copy this landing page formula and watch sales roll in.' It sounds simple. It looks proven. So you try it.
Then reality hits. You spend money on ads that don't convert. You build landing pages that get traffic but no signups. You send emails that go unopened. Within weeks or months, you're in the negatives, wondering why something that worked so well for someone else failed completely for you.
The answer is simple: what worked for them was built on understanding their specific audience. The tactic you copied was the output. You missed all the research and evidence that made that tactic work.
A high-converting Facebook ad works because the messaging matches what that specific audience needs to hear. Copy the ad without understanding the underlying customer insight, and you're just throwing money away.
This is especially dangerous for startups and early-stage businesses. You have limited runway. Every failed campaign eats into resources you can't afford to waste. Following generic advice or copying what worked for someone else in a different market with a different audience is not strategy. It's hope disguised as action.
The businesses that succeed are not the ones following the latest TikTok marketing hack. They're the ones who understand their specific customers deeply enough to create campaigns that actually resonate. That understanding requires evidence, not inspiration from social media.
Common Objections
When advocating for evidence-based marketing, you'll hear pushback. Here are the common objections and why they're wrong:
"We don't have time for research"
You don't have time NOT to research. Building campaigns that fail wastes more time than spending a week understanding your audience. Fast decisions based on wrong assumptions just get you to failure faster.
"Our customers don't hang out online"
Everyone is online somewhere. The question is whether you're looking in the right places. B2B buyers discuss problems on LinkedIn. Technical users are on Reddit and Stack Overflow. Even niche industries have forums and communities.
"We already know our customers"
Maybe. But if your marketing isn't working, something you know is wrong. Markets change. Customer priorities shift. Competitor offerings evolve. What you knew last year might not be true today.
The Practical Benefits
Moving to evidence-based marketing creates immediate, measurable improvements:
Better messaging: Using customer language makes your marketing instantly more relatable. People see themselves in your copy because it reflects how they actually think and speak.
Clearer positioning: Understanding what makes alternatives fail helps you position effectively. You can speak directly to the specific frustrations that push people to look for something new.
More efficient spending: When you know what resonates, you can allocate budget to messages and channels that actually work. Less waste, better returns.
Stronger product development: Evidence about customer problems informs not just marketing but product decisions. You build features people actually need instead of ones you think they want.
Faster iteration: With clear evidence, you can quickly identify what's not working and why. This makes optimization faster and more effective.
Where to Start
If you're currently marketing based on assumptions, here's how to start building evidence:
- Pick one campaign you're planning to launch
- Identify three places where your target audience discusses problems online
- Spend three hours reading through conversations from the past month
- Document five recurring themes or pain points you observe
- Rewrite your campaign messaging using the specific language you found
- Compare results against your original assumption-based messaging
This process takes less than a day. The insights you gain will outperform weeks of internal brainstorming.
The Bottom Line
Marketing based on assumptions is a gamble. You might get lucky. More likely, you'll waste time and money on campaigns that don't work because they don't connect with real customer needs.
Evidence-based marketing removes the gambling. You still need creativity and strategic thinking. But those creative ideas are grounded in observable reality rather than wishful thinking.
The businesses that win are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest campaigns. They're the ones that actually understand their customers and speak to them in ways that resonate.
That understanding doesn't come from assumptions. It comes from evidence. And evidence is available to anyone willing to look for it.
Ready to Stop Guessing?
If you're a startup looking to validate your ideas, a business wanting to test campaigns before committing budget, or simply tired of marketing that doesn't work, there's a better way.
WeThryv uses artificial intelligence to capture customer insights from real conversations across the web and condenses them into actionable intelligence. Instead of spending weeks manually researching, you get the evidence you need to drive action: landing pages that convert, meta ads that resonate, newsletters that get opened, and messaging that actually works.
Start your free trial and see what evidence-based marketing can do for your business.