It is true that businesses need to advertise to generate revenue and increase profits. Choosing whether to promote oneself over the Internet or by using traditional snail-mail methods is important, but targeting the wrong people will result in wasting time, money and effort.

Do you really know and understand your existing client base? Have you ever profiled your most valuable asset namely your customers? Obviously some things we can guess but guessing isn't always accurate. You need to understand who you are selling to, make the most of your successes so-to-speak, before you can really focus your marketing activity effectively.

For example, you currently sell a widget and you have 100 existing customers. Are there patterns associated with those 100 customers? Are they of a certain age group, marital status, living in a particular part of the country, part of either an A, B, C1, C2, D, E Socio Economic Group? Do they have young children, do both partners work and in what type of professions? You get the picture!

Obviously you need to balance useful fact-finding with just being nosey. The main point of this article is to highlight reasons to look deeper than just accepting orders without analysing who the orders are coming from and what the influencing factors are.

Ask your Business Development Manager or Account Managers to profile each of your customers. They might start with your top 100 then work down from that. Try to look for buying patterns and then focus your marketing activity accordingly.