Ask Tolani who her skincare brand sells to and she’ll answer instantly. “Women, 25 to 45, Lagos, middle income.”
That describes about four million people, including her own mother, who has used the same jar of petroleum jelly since 1994 and has no plans to change.
Most business owners describe their customer the same way, like a census officer with a clipboard. A demographic tells you nothing about what makes someone buy, what they were doing five minutes before they found you, what they’re actually afraid of, or which two words in your headline decide whether they keep reading.
Demographics describe who someone is. Marketing has to work out why they’d act. Most campaign budgets die in the gap between the two.
Three Questions That Actually Matter
Forget personas with stock photos and invented names like “Busy Bisi”. You need to know three things about a buyer, and everything useful in marketing flows from them.
Clayton Christensen’s famous milkshake study found that a fast-food chain’s morning milkshakes weren’t competing with other milkshakes at all. Commuters were hiring them to make a long, boring drive bearable. Age and income would never have told anyone that.
1. What Triggered Them to Start Looking Today?
Nobody wakes up wanting an accountant. Something happened. A tax letter arrived, a business partner left, or the bank turned them down for a loan because their books were a mess. That trigger opens the buying window. If your marketing describes your service but never names the trigger, you’re invisible to someone standing right in that moment.
2. What Are They Afraid Will Go Wrong?
Every purchase carries a risk the buyer is silently pricing. For a spa, it’s “what if it isn’t clean?” For a school, it’s “what if my child doesn’t settle?” For a B2B service, it’s “what if I recommend this, it fails, and my name is on it?” Marketing that ignores the fear asks the buyer to take a risk you’ve refused to acknowledge.
3. What Are They Comparing You Against?
It’s almost never what you think. A gym competes with the gym down the road, and also with doing nothing, a home workout app and the money staying in the account. If you don’t know the real alternative, your messaging argues with the wrong opponent.
The fastest way to answer all three is to talk to five people who bought from you in the last ninety days, and three who enquired and didn’t. Give it fifteen minutes each, on the phone. Those eight conversations will tell you more than any analytics dashboard, because analytics show you what happened and only people can tell you why.
What to Actually Ask
Good questions are specific and look backwards. People are unreliable narrators of their future behaviour and surprisingly good witnesses of their past.
| Ask this | Not this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| “What was happening the week you decided to look for this?” | “What made you choose us?” | Finds the trigger, not a rationalisation |
| “What nearly stopped you going ahead?” | “Were you satisfied?” | Surfaces the real objection, which they’ll admit after buying |
| “Who else did you look at, and why not them?” | “Are we better than competitors?” | Reveals the actual comparison set |
| “How did you describe this to your spouse or partner?” | “What features mattered?” | Gives you their words, not your marketing’s words |
That last question is the most underrated in marketing. The words someone uses to explain a purchase to a person whose opinion they care about are the words your landing page should use. They’re always plainer than the copy you’d have written, and they usually work better.
The Nigerian Layer Most Research Misses
Two factors shape buying here in ways generic marketing advice ignores entirely.
The recommendation economy. A very large share of purchases here get validated socially before any money moves, through a WhatsApp group, a family member or a colleague who used you before. So the real buyer is often someone other than the person you’re marketing to, someone who has to defend the choice to somebody else. Give them the ammunition, with visible reviews, clear pricing and something easy to forward to the family group.
Reversibility anxiety. In a market where refunds are awkward, warranties are theoretical and small claims are impractical, buyers assume a bad decision is permanent. That raises the evidence bar for everything. It’s also why guarantees, staged payments and “start small” entry points work unusually well here, because each one reduces a real risk the buyer faces.
Turn Eight Conversations Into One Page
After your interviews, write one page. Include the three most common triggers in the buyer’s own words, the top two fears and how you currently answer each, the real comparison set, and ten exact phrases customers used that you never have. That page is worth more than a fifty-slide persona deck, and everyone who writes copy, runs ads or answers enquiries should read it.
Keep It Current Without Making It a Project
- Add one question to every enquiry form. Ask “What made you get in touch today?”, optional and one line. Over a quarter, it becomes a free dataset of triggers.
- Log lost-deal reasons in one field. Use one field in your CRM, filled in whenever a deal is lost. The pattern shows up within twenty entries.
- Read your raw enquiry messages every quarter. Skip the summaries and read the actual messages. The words people use to describe their problem are your next headline, sitting unused in an inbox.
- Interview two customers every quarter, forever. Eight a year is enough to catch a shift in the market before your numbers do.
- Watch what they do as well as what they say. Behavioural data and interviews check each other. When someone says price didn’t matter and the analytics show they visited the pricing page nine times, believe the analytics.
Make the First Call This Week
Pick five people who bought from you last month and ask each of them for fifteen minutes. Ask what made them start looking, what they were afraid would go wrong and what else they considered.
Write down their exact words and put them next to the words on your website and in your ads. Wherever the two don’t match, use theirs. I’d bet your best headline is sitting in one of those conversations.
Use Their Words
Tolani called five of her customers last month. Four of them mentioned the same trigger, a skin reaction to a cheaper product bought at the market. Her new ads lead with that, and “women, 25 to 45” has left the building.
Your messaging might be fine, and the leak might be somewhere else. The free 2-minute diagnostic shows which of your four walls to fix first.
P.S. If your marketing spend runs to ₦1M or more a month, there’s a free 30-minute Leak Check too. We ask a lot of questions, because customer research habits are hard to break.
Tolani’s story is illustrative. This guide reflects established qualitative research practice adapted for small businesses, alongside buying patterns observed in Nigerian SME engagements, current as of mid-2026. Buyer behaviour varies by category and market. This article is general business information, not a guarantee of results.
This article covers one part of a bigger system. Our guide to digital marketing in Nigeria shows how the four walls fit together, and the order to build them in.
