What is it that acts as the catalyst that initiates the journey a customer will undertake that may end up with a transaction?
If you knew this, you would be in a situation to be very specific about your marketing, both the nature of the offer, the way you make it, and to whom you communicate it.
Customer personas are a great way to focus resources in a manner that delivers productivity of your marketing efforts. The more details and representative the persona the better.
It works, and works well, but is not the whole story.
There are events and interactions that occur in peoples lives that are not logically accommodated within a persona. There is a point in the journey a customer makes towards that purchase not considered with anywhere near enough weight.
That is the situation, the event, the ‘thing’ that acts as a catalyst to create the beginning of the customer journey. The event that suddenly creates an awareness that there might be value in considering options, and that the current solution, whatever that may be is inadequate.
This is a ‘triggering’ event.
A friend is a real estate agent.
She knows the market cycles very well, not just the economic ones, the seasonal ones that tell you that there will be a lull in activity in the market over Christmas, which will pick up again when things get back to normal in February.
Seasonal.
However, over Christmas lots of people will find themselves with family and friends staying over, for the night, for a week, and suddenly, the house they have is too small, the kids no longer can sleep two to a bed, and one bathroom is no longer enough. That becomes a triggering event for some to start the process of thinking that perhaps a bigger house is necessary, or that they really need to do a tree change. As a result they start being unconsciously sensitive to any real estate ads that may pop up, where before they would not have even seen them.
Is my friend better off starting her advertising in February, when all the other agents are starting, in the expectation that the market is waking up? Or should she advertise in January, when there is no activity, nobody else is advertising, but the possible users of her service are in the middle of their ‘triggering event’ and highly sensitive to suddenly relevant messages?
I know where my money would be.
