Have you ever used a freemium product for years, and then suddenly decide 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. An event or set of circumstances that trigger 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 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:

1. Seasonal: Signing up for courses or fitness memberships in January. People reflect on their year and decide to make changes. This caused our first cohort of UNIGNORABLE to sell out in 6 minutes.
2. Seasonal: In a 3 day period I had 4 people ask me if I skied. I felt ashamed to repeat that I never had despite living in Vancouver with 5 ski hills nearby. So I signed up for lessons on my phone 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 tell people that. 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. Random: A startup just raised money and is now looking to ramp up marketing and hiring. Or their in the process of raising money and need to show strong growth numbers.
4. Random: Someone decides to buy a Tesla because their neighbor did.  An example from Branding That Means Business: In a 2007 survey, Prius drivers said the main reason they bought their hybrid car was that 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 and people are either looking for increased financial security and side hustles, or new jobs.

And you can do this by

1. Talking to customers. Surveys. 1:1 calls. Casual DM or comment thread convos. 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 right moment, and you’ll have their attention.