Big companies aren’t always known for being trend setters – they usually just follow someone’s lead and all do the same thing until the market demands something else. But sometimes there’s a unique idea that pops up within the big company circles that revolutionizes the way a company, big or small, finds customers and keeps them. Mistakes are much, much more costly on the big business scale than they are on the small one, so looking at what they do in some ways can save you a lot of cash and time developing some of your own strategies when you can just borrow them (this doesn’t mean, of course, you shouldn’t keep developing your own campaign – just don’t waste your resources on figuring out you should do the things below).

Get a mobile app going. For some reason, small-screened mobile devices have become the Internet’s biggest fan – there are over 6 billion mobile connections worldwide when there are only 2 billion PCs, which means you should be scrambling to make sure you have a mobile version of your website or, at least, that your website shrinks down appropriately and can be viewed easily on a smartphone.

Even when it sounds silly, plan and track. It may not seem like something you really want to do, especially since media changes so quickly and your market always demands something new, but planning and tracking is truly essential when it comes to the Big Point: closing sales. You can bring all the traffic you want with fancy marketing techniques, but if you don’t make any sales, it’s all for naught. There’s this great set of free tools – Google Analytics – that will help you track and you can plan according to that data. Analytics will tell you who’s visiting, what they do, what they buy (and if they buy) and how much time they’re spending on your site. This can give you an awesome rundown of what you need to improve to drive the sale home.

Don’t just know your market, research it. You, as a small business owner, have the unique opportunity to connect with your audience on a personal level. Because big companies tend to have to detach from customers to grow, usually they have to go an extra mile or ten to figure out what their customers want, which means spending big bucks to look at their market and analyze it accordingly (which, ironically, just takes them further away from their customers).

What you get to do is personally ask folks what they need, want, and would like to see improved. You can just use yourself and your voice to figure out what people want, and you can even appreciate them in ways that big businesses can’t -  like hosting a ‘customer appreciation day’ that includes free drinks and food and lots of talking to get information about what your customers expect.