Most marketing advice assumes your buyer is already looking.
They’re not.
Here’s what I mean. When someone buys a will for the first time, it’s almost never because they planned to. It’s because they had a baby last week. Or they survived a health scare. Or they watched a friend’s family fall apart after a death with no estate plan in place.
Something happened. Then they bought.
That something has a name: a trigger event.
A trigger event is the moment a buyer moves from being completely oblivious that they have a problem, to being in the market for a solution. Before the trigger, no amount of clever copy reaches them. After it, they’re motivated, they’re searching, and whoever shows up first wins.
Most founders spend 90% of their marketing energy trying to convince people who haven’t been triggered. It’s hard, expensive, and slow.
Find the triggers. The whole game changes.
What triggers actually look like
Triggers are not demographics. They’re not job titles or company sizes or age ranges.
Triggers are moments.
They come in four kinds. Situational: starting a new job, signing a new client, hiring your first employee. Biological: being tired, overwhelmed, physically stretched too thin. Emotional: the shame of losing a pitch you should have won, the sting of watching a competitor pull ahead. Social: a trusted peer recommends something, a mentor asks a hard question in a room full of people.
All four have one thing in common. Before the moment, your buyer wasn’t in the market. After it, they are.
I love this example: ButcherBox is a meat delivery company worth over half a billion dollars. Their buyers do not wake up on a random morning and decide to subscribe to a premium meat box. Something shifts in their life first. A baby arrives. The grocery run becomes impossible. The mental load tips over. ButcherBox times their offers around those exact inflection points, not random Tuesdays. That’s the whole game.
Why your targeting is probably wrong
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Your targeting at the channel level is almost always based on who your buyer is, not when they’re ready.
You can target founders at SaaS companies with 10-50 employees. You’re probably reaching a thousand people who are perfectly happy with their current solution, and two people who just got off a nightmare call with their old vendor and are ready to switch today.
You’re paying for a thousand to reach two.
When you understand the specific trigger event that creates buying urgency for your best-fit customers, you can get in front of them closer to that moment. In channels they’re already using to navigate it. With language that mirrors exactly what they’re feeling.
Marketers who build campaigns around trigger events report spending up to 80% less on direct marketing costs. That’s not an optimization. That’s a fundamentally different strategy.
How to find your buyers’ triggers
You cannot guess your customers’ trigger events. Not reliably.
What you can do is interview the people who just bought from you and ask them a single question: what changed right before you started looking?
Not “why did you buy.” Why someone bought is the story they tell themselves after the fact. What changed is the raw truth.
Ask: what was happening in your work or life right before you started searching for something like this? What was the moment you knew you had to do something?
Do five of these interviews. I promise you, two or three trigger patterns will repeat. One good buyer conversation surfaces more signal than a hundred surveys.
The early-stage version
If you have ten customers, you have ten trigger stories you haven’t collected yet.
Go get them. Not to build a persona. Not to fill a framework. To understand the specific moment before the buy, so every piece of marketing you write from now on is aimed at that exact inflection point rather than at a vague audience who might eventually need what you sell.
The founders who grow fast from zero are not always the ones with the best product or the biggest reach. They are the ones who find the moment their buyer’s life forces a decision, and show up there consistently.
Your best customers didn’t find you when everything was fine.
They found you when something changed. Find out what it was.