My client took her family on an overseas holiday – which is all well and wonderful, except that they were on a payment plan with me – which I’d introduced to help them pay off the multiple thousands in invoices that they’d accrued for my company’s marketing support.
This was a trigger event for me – “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
This trigger event instigated another massive round of changes to my business.
A trigger moment is really important in sales – as well as in marketing. Unique to each business and their ideal client group, it’s the key events when your prospective client is actively deciding to do business with you – or your competitors.
Once we know what our ideal clients’ particular trigger events are, then we use these to drastically increase our sales. Here’s how.
My business’s trigger events
Marketers love talking about funnels, and trigger events are often related to these. For example, someone opens your emails, clicks on a link, visits your sales page, visits this page multiple times, and then clicks through to the checkout, but doesn’t buy.
All these things can be tracked and – ideally – should be tracked. But these are not what I’m talking about.
Instead, I’m talking about the key events in someone’s life which form a pattern in many of your clients.
Let me explain by way of illustration of what my prospective clients’ trigger events are:
- Business owner is given a ‘hard talking to’ by their business partner, accountant, financial advisor or spouse that they’re not earning enough money in their business
- Business owner realises that they need to raise their prices – but they’re scared to do so
- Business owner is experiencing ‘out of control’ growth without enough support and systems around them, and is having trouble sleeping
- Business owner has had a big life event – such as a divorce, the death of a spouse, children starting school or moving out, etc – and decided it’s ‘now or never’ with going after their big business goals.
How do I know this? Because I always ask prospective clients and new clients – whether in conversation or through a form. These trigger events are recurring patterns from a lot of data I’ve collected over time.
Trigger events in marketing
More talk on funnels! (Excuse my marketing speak.)
Marketers love to talk about ‘top of funnel’ marketing (that attracts new people to you), ‘middle of funnel’ marketing (that builds trust, rapport, and consideration) and ‘bottom of funnel’ marketing (that converts people from browsers to buyers).
While trigger events are more suited to ‘bottom of funnel’, they can be used in all three. For example, ‘identifier content’ is a type of content that asks people to call themselves in. (I teach this as one piece of my Storyflow Framework, inside my Ignite Visibility Accelerator.)
Examples of identifier content hooks
- “Raise your hand if _____ has ever made you feel _____.”
- “If you’ve ever been told ____, but knew deep down that ____ was your thing, you’re in the right place.”
- “If you’ve ever struggled with ____ while trying to ____ , then keep reading.”
- “If you’re ready to stop ____ and start ____, then let’s be friends.”
- “You’re not alone if you’ve ever felt ____ about _____.”
- “If _____ is your superpower, welcome! This account is for you.”
Identifier content can be used to ‘call people in’ at the top of your funnel – by describing your trigger events in surprising or insightful ways. (The easiest way to be insightful? Stop overthinking things and tell the truth.)
But using trigger events in your marketing is most effective for ‘bottom of funnel’ content – when people are about to make a buying decision.
Content that converts
First, a warning. Focusing solely on creating marketing content that ‘converts’ people tends to be the most expensive and ineffective method, if you haven’t already done the hard yards of growing an audience online and building trust and rapport. That’s because it’s most crowded, with lots of competition.
For example, running digital ads to book sales calls is expensive if your audience doesn’t already know you, like you and trust you, through digital content that’s designed to nurture these relationships.
Anyone can claim to be “Australia’s best” or “Sydney’s favourite”, but few are believable.
If you’re bidding on ads for “lawyer Los Angeles”, then expect to pay through the nose for the privilege – as these Google searches signify ‘buyer intent’ (apologies again for the marketing jargon).
But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine you’ve done the hard yards of creating educational, inspirational, relevant ‘top of funnel’ content that’s useful and valuable to your specific target market.
Let’s imagine you’ve built trust and rapport with behind-the-scenes content, skilful storytelling, and sharing your vision, values, mission, purpose. People know who you are and they’re listening and watching. They may have opted into your emails, or be lurking your socials.
So, you create a marketing campaign that focuses on provoking people to take action. Alongside key ‘bottom of funnel’ content such as reviews, FAQs and addressing barriers to purchase, you describe your prospective clients’ trigger events, in great depth and detail.
It’s so scaringly specific, the colour and detail you paint in other people’s mind, that they can’t help thinking you’re some kind of a witch, seeing as how you appear to be telepathic. This specificity is what, ultimately, makes you the best choice for them.
Specific is genius
The more specific your marketing and communications are, the more powerful. The more uncertain you are, the more you tend to default to vague, generic marketing that becomes the elevator music of the internet.
Trigger events are a powerful opportunity to harness this specificity. So much about effective marketing is about timing – the right message at the right moment to the right person.
Knowing and describing your clients’ trigger events is a powerful tool to call in prospective clients and dramatically increase your sales, while making people feel seen, heard, and understood.
Want to learn how? Join us inside Ignite Visibility Accelerator.
