Key Takeaways

• Stop chasing engagement metrics; likes and shares are a dangerously poor measure of commercial intent.
  
  

• Frame your content's purpose around the customer's "Job to be Done" (JTBD), not your company's marketing goals.
  
  

• Create content that functions as the best tool for a specific job, out-competing all other potential solutions.
  
  

• Ditch demographic personas and build content around "Job Stories" that capture a user's context, motivation, and desired outcome.
  
  

The scene is familiar in countless glass-walled conference rooms: a marketing team celebrates.

A graph points sharply up and to the right, a hockey stick of triumph. A blog post, a video, a clever tweet - it went viral. It’s a storm of likes, shares, and ecstatic comments. The team high-fives over the geyser of "engagement," yet a week later, the sales needle hasn't twitched. The victory was hollow, a celebration of digital confetti. This team fell for the most seductive lie in modern marketing: that the roar of the crowd is the same as the ring of the cash register. It’s not. The applause is just noise if nobody buys a ticket.

This obsession with engagement is a symptom of a deeper, more fundamental misunderstanding. We have become so fixated on measuring the reaction to our content that we’ve forgotten to ask about its purpose. We are meticulously tracking the echoes of what we shout into the void, assuming that loud echoes mean someone is walking toward us with their wallet open. But the real question we must grapple with is not "How do we get more likes?" but rather, "What job was our customer trying to do when they found us, and did our content help them do it?" The answer to this question separates content that merely entertains from content that truly converts.

The Engagement Trap: Why Likes and Shares Are a Dangerous Illusion

Let's be brutally honest: chasing engagement is a sugar high. It feels fantastic, provides an immediate rush, and delivers a chart that looks great in a presentation. But it offers zero nutritional value to the business. This endless pursuit forces creators onto a content hamster wheel, churning out material designed to provoke a fleeting emotional response - a laugh, a nod of agreement, a moment of outrage - because those are the emotions that algorithms reward. The result is a vast ocean of content that is loud, popular, and commercially impotent. It’s like a comedian who gets a standing ovation but can’t convince a single person to buy his book after the show.

The core of the problem is a simple confusion between correlation and causation. We see that popular brands often have high engagement, so we assume that creating engagement will make our brand popular and profitable. But we have the cause and effect backward. People don’t share a company’s clever video because they intend to buy its enterprise software. They share it to look smart or funny to their friends, to signal their membership in a particular social tribe, or simply to kill two minutes of boredom. These are all valid human motivations, but they rarely overlap with the complex, anxiety-ridden process of making a purchase decision.

Engagement, in this context, is a surface-level interaction - a click, a like, a share - that signals social approval or momentary interest, but it is a dangerously unreliable indicator of commercial intent.

What is the "Job to be Done" Theory?

To understand what truly drives conversion, we must look past these flimsy metrics and ask a more profound question. A number of years ago, my colleagues and I were asked to help a fast-food company figure out how to sell more milkshakes. The company had tried everything. They’d done the classic marketing playbook: they’d created detailed customer profiles, held focus groups, and asked people what would make the milkshake better - thicker, chocolatier, cheaper? They got feedback and implemented it, yet sales remained stubbornly flat. The data about who the customer was told them nothing about why they bought a milkshake.

Frustrated, we spent a day simply observing the restaurant, and a surprising pattern emerged. Nearly half the milkshakes were sold before 8:30 a.m. to people who were by themselves, got in their cars, and drove off. When we interviewed these customers, we uncovered the real reason. They had a long, boring commute and needed something to make it more interesting. They weren't "buying" a milkshake; they were "hiring" it for a specific job: to be a simple, clean, one-handed companion that would last the entire drive and stave off mid-morning hunger. Seen this way, the milkshake wasn’t competing against other milkshakes. It was competing against a banana (gone too quickly), a donut (too messy), or a bagel (required two hands to apply the cream cheese). This insight is the core of the Job to be Done (JTBD) theory: customers don't buy products or services; they hire them to make progress in their lives.

This framework is not just some quaint business school parable; its implications are ruthless. Your content isn't just competing with your direct competitor's content. It's competing with everything else that can do the "job" your customer needs done. When a user is trying to solve a problem, your beautifully produced brand video is competing with a quick Google search, a text to a knowledgeable friend, a YouTube tutorial, or simply giving up and taking a nap. If your content doesn't do the job better than those other options, it will be ignored, regardless of how "engaging" it is.

How Does Understanding the "Job" Fix Your Content Conversion Problem?

When content fails to convert, it is almost always because it was created without a clear understanding of the "job" it was meant to do. Most content is made to fulfill the company’s job, not the customer’s. The company’s job might be "increase brand awareness," "generate leads," or "get more followers." But customers don’t wake up in the morning hoping to have their awareness increased or to become a lead. They wake up with problems to solve and progress to make. Your content converts when it becomes the tool they choose to hire for that progress.

Imagine a homeowner standing in her kitchen at 10 p.m., a puddle of water slowly growing around the base of the sink. She pulls out her phone and searches, "how to fix a leaky faucet."

In this moment, she has a very specific, urgent job to be done. She is not looking for a 3,000-word article on "The Ancient Roman History of Indoor Plumbing." She is not interested in a clever TikTok about #LeakyFaucetLife. She needs a tool - a clear, step-by-step video, a simple diagram, or a concise checklist - that she can hire to stop the dripping. Any content that doesn't help her make that immediate progress is not just unhelpful; it's an obstacle. This is the moment of truth where content proves its worth, and it has nothing to do with likes or shares. It's about utility.

Shifting from "Audience Personas" to "Job Stories"

For decades, marketers have relied on user personas to guide their work. We create elaborate profiles: "Meet Sarah, she's 35, lives in the suburbs, earns $85,000 a year, and enjoys yoga and organic coffee." This is demographic astrology. Knowing that Sarah likes lattes and Labradors tells you precisely nothing about the struggling moment that would cause her to hire your accounting software. These personas describe attributes but fail to explain the causal driver of a purchase. They are a snapshot of what a person is, not a story of the progress they are trying to make.

A far more powerful tool is the Job Story, which reframes the user’s need around context and motivation. It follows a simple structure:

In the face of [situation], I choose to [motivation] so I can ultimately [expected outcome]."

For example, instead of targeting "Sarah," you would focus on a Job Story: "When I’m a freelancer juggling multiple projects, I want to find a simple way to track my invoices, so I can get paid on time and feel more in control of my finances."

This statement contains everything you need. The situation ("juggling multiple projects") provides the context. The motivation ("track my invoices") provides the functional need. And the outcome ("get paid on time and feel more in control") provides the emotional resolution they're seeking. Content created for this specific job will be infinitely more effective than content created for the vague persona of "Sarah."

What Does "Job-Centric" Content Actually Look Like?

So, how do you create content that people can hire? It starts by diagnosing the forces at play in any decision. For a customer to switch from their current way of doing things to your solution, four forces must be addressed.

First, there is the push of their current situation (e.g., "I'm tired of my invoices being a mess").

Second is the pull of your new solution ("This software looks like it could organize everything automatically"). But battling these are two opposing forces: the anxiety of the new ("What if it's too complicated to learn?") and the habit of the old ("My spreadsheet system is annoying, but I know how it works"). Job-centric content works to amplify the push and pull while diminishing the anxiety and habit.

This means your content must be deeply functional and empathetic. Instead of writing "5 Tips for Better Productivity," you create "The Freelancer’s Complete Checklist for Switching from Spreadsheets to Automated Invoicing." The first is generic chum for the engagement algorithms; the second is a tool designed to reduce the anxiety of switching and directly addresses a specific job. Instead of a mattress company publishing another blog post on "The Importance of Good Sleep," they should create a guide titled "How to Choose the Right Mattress When You and Your Partner Have Different Sleep Preferences."

One is abstract brand-building; the other is a powerful tool hired by people in the middle of a high-stakes, high-anxiety purchasing journey. This content doesn't beg for a "like"; it earns trust by solving a real, difficult problem.

Conclusion: Stop Performing and Start Solving

It's time to stop the performance. Stop chasing the ghosts of likes and shares and celebrating the digital confetti of worthless metrics. Stop bowing to the algorithms that reward spectacle over substance. Your customers are not an "audience" to be entertained. They are busy people wrestling with specific struggles, big and small, trying to make progress in their lives. Your content has a simple, binary choice: it can be a useful tool they hire to help them on that journey, or it can be part of the noise they ignore.

This shift from an engagement mindset to a Jobs to be Done mindset is not a new tactic to be bolted onto your existing strategy. It is a profound change in perspective. It requires you to develop a deep, almost anthropological curiosity about your customers' lives. It demands that you listen not for what they say they want, but for the struggles they can't quite articulate. When you finally stop creating content designed to be popular and start creating content designed to be hired, something remarkable happens. Conversion ceases to be a mysterious puzzle you have to growth-hack. It becomes the natural, inevitable result of being genuinely, functionally, and reliably useful.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does most content fail to convert, even when it has high engagement?

Most content fails to convert because it is designed to chase "engagement" metrics like likes and shares, which are dangerously unreliable indicators of commercial intent. This approach focuses on provoking a fleeting emotional response rather than understanding the customer's true purpose. Conversion failure occurs when content is created to fulfill the company's job (e.g., "increase brand awareness") instead of helping a customer solve their specific problem or "job."

What is the "Jobs to be Done" (JTBD) theory?

The "Jobs to be Done" (JTBD) theory is a marketing framework based on the core insight that customers don't simply buy products or services; they "hire" them to make progress in their lives. It shifts focus from who the customer is to why they are making a purchase by uncovering the specific job they need to accomplish. For example, a customer doesn't just buy a milkshake; they hire it for the job of making a long, boring commute more interesting.

How is a "Job Story" different from a traditional user persona?

A traditional user persona is described as "demographic astrology" that details a customer's attributes (age, income, hobbies) but fails to explain the causal driver of a purchase. A "Job Story" is a more powerful tool that reframes the user’s need around context and motivation. It follows the structure:

"In the face of [situation], I choose to [motivation] so I can ultimately [expected outcome].";

providing direct insight into the progress the customer is trying to make.

What are the four forces that influence a customer's decision according to the Jobs to be Done theory?

According to the theory, four forces influence a customer's decision to switch to a new solution:

1. The Push: The push of their current situation (e.g., "I'm tired of my invoices being a mess").

2. The Pull: The pull of your new solution (e.g., "This software could organize everything automatically").

3. The Anxiety: The anxiety associated with the new solution (e.g., "What if it's too complicated to learn?").

4. The Habit: The habit of their old way of doing things (e.g., "My spreadsheet system is annoying, but I know how it works").

How does creating "job-centric" content lead to better conversion rates?

"Job-centric" content leads to better conversion rates because it is created to be a useful tool that a customer can "hire" to solve a real problem. Instead of being abstract or entertaining, it is functional, empathetic, and directly addresses the customer's struggle. By focusing on utility - such as creating a detailed checklist for a complex task - the content reduces the customer's anxiety and earns trust, making conversion the natural result of being genuinely helpful.