Trigger Events

by Syrup | Jun 28, 2022

So I was checking my inbox this morning and opened up Stacked Marketer, which is a newsletter that I get every single day. If you’re not subscribed to it and you’re in the marketing field, you really should. They do a great job over there. No affiliation, just, they do a great job, but inside that newsletter, they had a little section that reminded me of one of my favorite stories to help get the brain working as to thinking about your customer and how to create messaging and marketing & sales positioning that matters to them, that’s helpful to them. And this is the story. There was a lawnmower manufacturer and they hired some consultants to come in and try and help figure out a marketing strategy for them.

Why do people buy these mowers? When do they buy them? Why do they see these just varied spikes over time? You know, you’d think in the lawn mowing world,  that these mowers, they’d be very seasonal, right? Heavy spikes in the springtime, maybe a drop off Q3, Q4,  very seasonally based. And while that was true, they noticed that there was still very inconsistent data, even in the peaks. And so,  they hired some consultants to come in and try and figure that out. Why is this happening? And so the consultants, they’re looking at all the data that they can analyze. And after a, a few weeks of looking at all the different sales data,  something started to show up. To their surprise, it wasn’t, you know, seasonality as much. 

The one trigger that spiked lawn mower sales was actually rain. Because rain makes grass grow, right? And so they noticed that when they could look in these different markets and when they would see these spikes in lawnmower sales, they could go back and see that it actually rained a couple days before. And the rain would cause the grass to grow.

The grass growing would trigger the customer to say, “oh, I need a new mower. I need to go out and get that.” And so they started wrapping their advertising spend around rain events and saw an incredible growth in their marketing ROI. And I always loved that story, because it was something that maybe you wouldn’t really think of all the time.

And that’s what they were talking about in this newsletter – these trigger events. Why do people buy from us? What are they thinking? And they asked this question that said, what would have to happen in my life for me to purchase this product? And I’ll add service. You know, we focus a lot on B2B, so,  I’ll throw the word service in there, but that’s a great question to ask.

If you had to put yourself in your customer’s or prospect’s shoes and ask yourself the question, what would have to happen in my life for me to purchase this product or service? Get out a piece of paper that this is what they talked about in the newsletter. Get out a piece of paper, open a Google Doc and start to write those situations out.

And I think you’ll be surprised at the clarity that a question like that brings to your content ideas and your content strategy. It’s actually thinking about it from your buyer’s perspective and what they might be dealing with in their life, in that moment to finally make the decision that they need to do something.

It’s a great question. Thanks to Stacked Marketer for reminding me of that story of the lawnmowers. Thanks for producing the content that you do, but for all those that watch this, that’s,  that’s the challenge. Sit down and ask yourself that question. If you were on the other side of the table, if you were in your prospect’s shoes, what would have to happen in your life to make you want to purchase their product or service? And start to generate some ideas around how you can communicate better your product or service to those people. So I hope that was helpful!