The day in the life of your customer

Creating what I like to call an “Avatar” of your customer is an important part of any business.

It can start off with some basic information like gender, average age group, income bracket.

That at least will get you thinking about how you can attract your ideal customer.

There is another exercise you can do as well which could give you some useful information about how you can make it easier for your customer to buy from you.

I call it “The day in the life of your customer”.

The object is to get an idea of what life is like for your average customer on an average day.

By having a go at this exercise, you can find out when the best time may be to make an offer to your customer and the best way you to make the offer.

Let’s take a couple of examples…

Male 35, Married with 2.4 kids, middle management.

How do you think his day is going to look?
Up at 6 am or 7 am
Breakfast.
Maybe read the paper.
Help with the kids maybe even get them to school before he goes to work.
Probably starts work around 9am
Meetings and paper work until lunch
Maybe some free time around lunchtime.
Work all afternoon
Probably gets home at 6.00 pm after tea and helping with the kids it is 8.00 or 9.00 before he gets chance to relax and maybe go shopping on the internet for a couple of hours.

What if his wife was your target market?

Wife with 2.4 kids.

Probably up at 6am as well getting breakfast ready sorting the kids out and even getting them to school.
Morning chores finish about 11am (hey I am only guessing!)
She may then get 1 or 2 hours to look on line before lunch and the afternoon stuff kicks in.
After that she could again have no free time or maybe she gets another 1 or 2 hrs in the afternoon before Dad gets home.

Now I am not certain about either of these…I haven’t worked for anyone for 30 years and we haven’t had kids (lots of dogs).

So, these are a guess…

…But if either of these were your target market it would be a good place to start before using techniques to back up or to change your assumptions.

The point is:

If I wanted to attract Dad my strategy would probably be different than if I wanted to attract Mum.

It’s probably pointless sending mum an email out at 6am saying she has 2hrs before an offer ends where it may work for Dad although a lunchtime or evening email may work even better for him.

What if your audience was mainly retired people or collage kids would their day look different?

Another way you can think about it is…

What’s being shown on TV?

Think about what type of TV programs are on when and what audience are they trying to attract?

News, first thing in the morning.
You could argue more female related programs mid morning early afternoon.
News again early evening.
information and Series type programs the rest of the evening.

The TV stations are good at knowing when is the best time is to attract their perfect audience for each show because then they can relay that information to advertisers.

So also look at the adverts being shown at different times of the day.