It is a fact that all large companies use a marketing system to successfully market their products and services. They follow the marketing system because they know it works and as a small business, marketing your product or service you can also discover the secrets and be even more successful. The secrets of the marketing system will save you time and money and will allow you to focus on retaining your key customers, rather than always looking for new customers which you know costs your business a lot more.

As a small business you will have a system you follow to produce your product or service for your customers and by following each step of the system it makes your business run smoothly. The secrets of big business marketing do not mean you have to have a large marketing budget; in fact you can use the marketing system with any size marketing budget.

The 4 steps of the big business marketing system are:

Step 1- Review Your Market and Business
This simply means you need to know what is happening in your market, whether it is growing or declining, are there seasonality factors etc. Understanding your key point of difference to your competitors is crucial so you can take advantage of their weaknesses and defend against their strengths. Knowing what your customers think, feel and how they behave towards your product or service mean it will be easier to retain them as long term customers. Finally having a good understanding of your business's results in sales and previous marketing activities will mean that you can focus on areas that have worked for you. Big businesses do this review and analysis throughout the year so they can be more proactive with the marketing of their products and services.

Step 2 - Develop a Marketing Plan Each Year
Without a simple and practical marketing plan, as the saying goes it is like sailing a boat without a rudder. In other words if you do not know what you want to achieve for your small business each year how will you know if you have been successful. What is more, you could be wasting your money and time on marketing tactics that just do not achieve anything and in a worst case lose you customers. By completing step 1 you will have a lot of information that makes it very easy to develop a marketing plan.

Step 3 - Implement Your Marketing Plan
This means implementing the marketing tactics you have selected in your marketing plan, which allows you to be more proactive throughout the year as they are pre-planned.

Step 4 - Track Your Results
This is an important step because you must know what is working for your business and want is not working. By tracking your sales results and your marketing activities on a regular basis means that you can be proactive with your marketing throughout the year. Also the key learnings you gain will assist you with future business decisions and of course will make developing a marketing plan for the next year so much easier.

Four easy steps to follow throughout the year are the secrets of the big business marketing system and as it has worked for them over decades it can work for your small business as well.