Your Target Audience Is a Trigger State, Not a Demographic.
Ask most teams to describe their target audience and you’ll get some version of the same answer: age range, job title, company size, maybe an income bracket. “Marketing directors at mid-sized B2B companies.” “Small business owners, 35 to 54.” It sounds like an answer, and it fills in the box on the planning template. It rarely helps anyone write a sharper email, a better landing page, or a more specific piece of content, because it describes a category, not a reason. Half the market could fit the description and never once think about buying.
That’s the gap. A demographic describes who someone is in general. It doesn’t describe why any of them would be paying attention to you right now, today, instead of six months ago or six months from now.
Demographics Describe a Category, Not a Reason to Buy
Two competitors can target the exact same demographic and produce completely different results, because the demographic was never the thing driving the purchase. What actually drives it is a situation: something happening in that person’s business or work right now that makes your offer suddenly relevant, when it wasn’t three months earlier. Call it a trigger state: the specific condition someone is in immediately before they start looking for something like what you sell, whether or not they could articulate that condition out loud.
What a B2B Trigger State Actually Looks Like
A trigger state is concrete enough that the person experiencing it would recognize it immediately, and specific enough that most of the demographic category wouldn’t be in it at any given moment. Stone Soup Strategy’s own client profile isn’t built on industry or company size. It’s built on situations: a founder who can explain the business clearly in conversation, but whose website still can’t do it without him in the room. A company whose sales deck, LinkedIn presence, and homepage each describe the business slightly differently. A leadership team that knows the business has outgrown its original positioning but hasn’t had time to rebuild it. None of those are demographics. All of them are moments a prospect would recognize instantly, which is exactly why they make better targeting than “founder-led companies, 10 to 200 employees.”
Places to Find Your Trigger States
1. Sales call language. Listen for the exact words prospects use to describe why they finally reached out, not the polished version they give afterward. That raw phrasing, not a persona template, is the material worth keeping.
2. The moment right before they contacted you. Something changed. A new hire, a lost deal, a board meeting that went badly. Ask what was different about that particular week compared to the six months before it, when the same underlying problem existed but nobody acted on it.
3. What didn’t change for months, until it suddenly did. Trigger states often aren’t new problems. They’re old problems that just crossed a threshold: a founder who could tolerate an unclear website for a year, until a specific investor meeting made the gap impossible to ignore.
Run those three questions against your last ten closed deals, and a pattern usually surfaces faster than another round of demographic research would produce, often within the first five or six conversations you re-read.
Why This Changes Everything Downstream
Once the trigger state is specific, everything built on top of it gets easier to write. A blog post aimed at “marketing directors” has to stay broad enough to apply to all of them, which means it ends up saying very little to any one of them. A piece written for someone whose sales deck and website just stopped matching can open with that exact scenario, because the reader will recognize it in the first sentence and keep reading. The same logic applies to sales conversations, ad copy, and the homepage headline. Specificity in the audience produces specificity everywhere else downstream: the topics get sharper, the case studies get easier to choose, and the follow-up emails stop sounding like they were written for anyone who might be reading. Vagueness does the same thing, in reverse, quietly diluting every piece of content built on top of it.
How You Know You’ve Found the Real One
A demographic description sounds correct to almost anyone in that category, which is exactly the problem. A real trigger state sounds uncomfortably specific, and slightly wrong to people outside the situation, because it was never meant to describe everyone. If your audience definition would make a random person in the target demographic nod politely and move on, it isn’t sharp enough yet. If it would make the right person stop and say “wait, how did you know that,” it’s working.
Sales-call phrasing, the moment right before they called, and the threshold that finally got crossed: those three sources will tell you more about who to write for than any age range or job title ever will. Stone Soup Strategy builds messaging and positioning work from exactly this kind of specificity, because a company that can name the moment its buyer is in has already done most of the work a marketing plan is supposed to do.
David Shay
Founder - Stone Soup Strategy
