Have You Identified Your Buyers’ Trigger Events?

These days, we’re seeing an increase in the level of sophistication throughout the content marketing world. Content marketers are putting much more emphasis on solid, up-front strategy, and buyer profiling is a big part of that exercise. In this post, I’d like to dig into the concept of “trigger events”, an often-overlooked component of buyer persona development that helps us identify some very granular pain points and often provides great fodder for content ideas.

Identifying Your Buyers’ Trigger Events

What the heck is a “trigger event”? I define a trigger event as the very specific, often painful event that happens in your buyers’ day that makes them aware of a need and prompts them to start looking for a solution. Said another way…”the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

Think about the last time you thought to yourself, “Ok, that’s it! I’ve had it with this (insert product name here)!” You probably didn’t have to think back too far. These trigger events happen every day. The key, from a marketing standpoint, is to identify the relevant events that may trigger a search for your products/services, either by putting yourself in your buyer’s shoes or by talking to buyers directly.

DivvyHQ Buyer Trigger Event Examples

When talking with potential customers, we actively ask questions that help us identify these specific trigger events that led them to our doorstep. Here are a few that may sound familiar.

“I’m evaluating Divvy because I’m literally getting confused by my own spreadsheet.”

“We’ve had a few situations where different teams are not sharing assets and they’re spending time and money (with two separate ad agencies) creating basically the same peice of content.”

“I’m responsible for producing some of my company’s content, but my day gets swallowed up by having to make constant updates to our editorial calendar spreadsheet and several hours of email conversations explaining what changed on the spreadsheet.”

“Our publishing company is pretty siloed and we’ve tried just about everything, including breaking down physical walls, to get our managing editors to collaborate better and share content assets.”

“Several team members are consistently missing content deadlines and I’m tired of having to babysit them.”

Empathetic Content

When companies go through a proper buyer profiling exercise, we typically see a shift from egocentric content to empathetic content.  This shift can translate to much more relevant content that resonates immediately with your buyers. If you take each need, each pain point or each trigger event and turn it into a blog post, email campaign or social engagement question, don’t be surprised when prospects come out of the woodwork with their checkbook in hand.

Here’s one particular example from our blog that makes me laugh everytime I read it. Note the comment at the bottom from Rebecca Bredholt. “Wow. Are you looking over my shoulder and reading my emails?”

No, Rebecca. But we’ve been in your shoes and we feel your pain.

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