Trigger Events

Have you ever used a freemium product for years and then suddenly decided to upgrade to premium?

Or you’ve heard of a product over and over again, and finally you decide to buy it?

Those moments are the most important to dive into as a founder or marketer.

They’re called Trigger Events. A trigger event is an event or set of circumstances that triggers someone to be interested in or take action on purchasing a product.

People will often suffer through painful problems for a long time before they finally have a trigger event that pushes them to relieve it.

Momentum is powerful. You need an external jolt to change direction.

You want to tailor your copy and your marketing in general to your product's and audience's trigger events.

Let's dive into how.

You want to dig into:

1. The common trigger events for your product.
2. The emotions customers feel at that moment.
3. The job the customers are hiring the product to perform.
4. How you might be able to target them and speak to them at that moment.
5. Whether they’re random, recurring, or caused by macro events. More on this below.

A few examples of trigger events in action

1. New Year, New You (Seasonal) At the start of the year, people reflect on their year and decide to make changes. Gym memberships and career changes spike.
2. Weather/Sports (Seasonal): In a three-day period, four people asked me if I skied. I felt ashamed to repeat that I never had, despite living in Vancouver with five ski hills nearby. So, I signed up for lessons that night.
   1. The trigger event was caused by it being the beginning of the season, when everyone is excited about skiing.
   2. The pain I experienced was being 30, not knowing how to ski, and having to admit that to people. The trigger event made that pain more acute. The job of the lessons was to make me less ashamed. If I had waited a few weeks, fewer people would have been talking about skiing, and I would have found a new pain to focus on.
3. Flush with cash (Random or yearly): A startup just raised money and is now looking to ramp up marketing and hiring. Or someone just had payday or got their tax refund
4. Keeping Up with the Jones': Someone buys a Tesla because their neighbor did. An example from Branding That Means Business: In a 2007 survey, Prius drivers said they bought their hybrid car mainly because it “makes a statement about me” and “shows the world that its owner cares.” But in reality… “one of the strongest predictors of whether someone buys a hybrid is whether the people in their same neighbourhood own one.”
   1. So much for caring about the environment 😂
5. Macro: A recession is starting, and companies are laying people off. People are either looking for increased financial security, side hustles, or new jobs.

You can identify Trigger Events by

1. Talking to customers. Surveys. 1:1 calls. Casual DM or comment thread convos.
   1. Ask them what was going on in their lives before they purchased.
   2. Ask them why they purchased.
   3. Ask them when they decided to purchase.
   4. Just be wary, the reasons they give are not necessarily the true reasons. Dig deeper.
2. Observing customers. Reddit posts. Social posts. Quora questions. Look at both the original post and the comments.
3. Observing competitors: Does your competitor’s marketing change throughout the year? Has it changed recently? What do they say in their ads? You can use the Meta Ad Library and Archive.org to dive into the past.
   1. For this, a competitor doesn’t need to sell the same product. It needs to target the same audience.

Speak to someone’s pain and emotional state at the moment they're most likely to listen, and you’ll have their attention.