Marketing teams rarely struggle to gather feedback. The real challenge is interpreting and prioritizing it correctly. People say they want clean, quiet, interruption-free digital experiences—yet they consistently respond to tactics they claim to dislike. The result is a constant tug-of-war between stated preferences and actual behavior.
People don’t think how they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say.
David Ogilvy
When marketers rely too heavily on what audiences say, or on surface-level analytics, they often end up optimizing for the wrong segments. The most successful brands break this cycle by focusing relentlessly on the customers who matter: the people who engage deeply, convert reliably, and drive long-term value.
Table of ContentsListen to Your Visitors?Don’t Listen To What Visitors Say; Watch What They DoStop Assuming All Customers Are EqualStop Assuming All Visitors Are Real ProspectsStop Assuming Feedback Will Improve Your ProductStop Assuming Interruptions Drive Visitors AwayStop Assuming You Understand Why Customers BuyThe Real Challenge: Marketing to the Right SegmentA Lesson Learned FirsthandA Better Way Forward
Listen to Your Visitors?
A recent user experience (UX) review of my site yielded a result many marketers will recognize immediately: people genuinely appreciate my content, find the layout intuitive, and navigate Martech Zone without difficulty. Simultaneously, they express irritation with our advertising, especially when formats slide or pop into view. The evaluation validated most aspects of our experience design, yet it also surfaced a friction point that clearly bothered visitors.
As a result, I built an ad-free membership with a single, low-cost lifetime membership. What required dozens of hours of development and optimization has resulted in only a handful of members. Simultaneously, engagement on my site continues to grow along with returning users. I listened to a few vocal visitors… and then watched as they ignored the new feature and kept visiting… and clicking on ads. Ugh.
This contradiction captures one of the central dilemmas of modern marketing. Businesses depend on revenue, and revenue often depends on tactics audiences say they dislike but still respond to. Every marketer must balance these competing truths. And while listen to your users is sound advice, following every opinion, preference, or complaint can slowly—and sometimes catastrophically—undermine a business.
Don’t Listen To What Visitors Say; Watch What They Do
What people say and what people do rarely align. And what appears in analytics dashboards often hides more than it reveals. Over time, we build assumptions around these inputs and treat them as certainty. Many of those assumptions damage performance, distort decision-making, and distract teams from the audiences who actually matter.
Below are some of the most common disconnects and flawed assumptions businesses make—patterns that continue to mislead marketers across industries and strategies. Here are five assumptions that will cost your organization money and lead your marketing astray:
Stop Assuming All Customers Are Equal
Brands often treat every follower, subscriber, and visitor equally. Yet the motivations behind those actions vary dramatically. Some people engage only for discounts or short-term incentives, while others identify with a brand’s values, aesthetic, or mission. The former group may interact more frequently, but the latter usually drives greater lifetime value. Without recognizing the difference between high-value affinity and low-value opportunism, marketers risk prioritizing the wrong audience and diluting their brand in the process.
Stop Assuming All Visitors Are Real Prospects
Analytics platforms display traffic, time on page, and bounce rates as if every visit represents a potential customer. Much of that activity is meaningless. Automated systems, scrapers, competitive monitors, and non-human behaviors can inflate or distort nearly every engagement metric. When businesses react to these inflated numbers, they often make misguided changes to architecture, content, or design. What truly matters is not raw traffic but qualified engagement—visitors who explore, stay, return, and convert. Those behaviors are far more indicative of real demand than any volume-based metric.
Stop Assuming Feedback Will Improve Your Product
Feedback is useful, but it is often anecdotal, contradictory, and rooted in personal preference rather than real need. When companies treat every suggestion as a required improvement, products become bloated, complex, and difficult to maintain. Asking people what they want also triggers a search for flaws rather than a reflection of actual usage. The better signal comes from observed behavior—what people use consistently, what they avoid, where they struggle, and where they succeed. Data from real interactions tends to reveal needs more accurately than any list of requested features.
Stop Assuming Interruptions Drive Visitors Away
Visitors routinely say they dislike pop-ups, slide-ins, and other interruptive formats. Yet those same formats continue to drive engagement, subscriptions, and conversions. The contradiction lies in human nature: people dislike being interrupted but respond to prompts that clearly communicate value. When implemented thoughtfully and sparingly, interruptive experiences can guide visitors toward actions they would otherwise overlook. The key is balancing visibility and relevance—not avoiding the tactic entirely because of what people say.
Stop Assuming You Understand Why Customers Buy
Companies routinely misinterpret why customers choose them. Price, convenience, features, and service all play a role, but rarely the role businesses imagine. Attribution models can show what happened, but not why. Customer interviews conducted by internal teams often yield unreliable explanations because respondents aim to offer helpful answers rather than truthful ones. Third-party interviews and persona research provide far better insight into motivations. Businesses are frequently surprised by the disconnect between their internal assumptions and the actual reasons people purchase.
The Real Challenge: Marketing to the Right Segment
The fundamental difficulty is that analytics platforms do not distinguish between high-value prospects and everyone else. Marketers are forced to make decisions that prioritize the audience most likely to convert, not the loudest, most numerous, or most vocal.
A website should not aim to delight every visitor. Its purpose is to attract, engage, and convert the subset of people who are likely to become customers. That requires resisting the temptation to personalize the experience for tire-kickers, one-time visitors, non-buyers, and casual observers whose preferences may conflict with the needs of long-term, high-value prospects.
A Lesson Learned Firsthand
I’ve experienced this friction in my own business. For too long, I listened to advice from people who would never buy our products or services. Their feedback, while well-intentioned, pushed us toward changes that weakened our positioning and nearly derailed our growth. The turning point came when I stopped making decisions for people who would never become customers and instead focused entirely on those who valued our expertise and needed our solutions. What works for them is not necessarily what works for us—or for you.
A Better Way Forward
Your brand earns loyalty by understanding the people who actually buy from you, not the crowds who browse, critique, and drift away. When you tune your decisions to the behavior of real customers—rather than the noise that surrounds them—your marketing becomes clearer, more efficient, and far more profitable. Build for the audience that converts, and you’ll create an experience that strengthens your business instead of steering it off course.
Watch their behaviors. Study their patterns. Build for the people who convert, return, and advocate for your brand. When you refine the experience for the audience that matters, everything else becomes clearer—and your decisions become far more effective.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | DisclosureOriginally Published on Martech Zone: Listen to Your Customers? 5 Costly Marketing Assumptions That Lead Brands Astray