There are three primary business types. The first business type is Retail Centric business. By retail-centric, I mean you sell to individuals. Hundreds and hundreds of individual people buy the products that you produce. So whether it’s like a restaurant, or you have something that you sell directly to the consumer, which is like a retail store, or if you’re working with a brand, you sell something straight to the brand, or if you’re an affiliate marketer, and you’re selling directly to people, that’s what retail is.
Three Layers of Products
1. Message
Now, you have a customer. What you need to do is set up three layers of products. The first thing is you need to do is start publishing your message online. What is your message to the consumer? Two ideas are, you write a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post that begins with these words “Did you know that” and “How to”. You’re educating your customers to be more discerning about how to do business in future. So this is the kind of message that goes on and on, and that’s going to attract eyeballs.
2. Core Product
The second thing is your core product, which is the actual product that you’re selling.
3. Consulting-Based Activities
The third thing that you need to have is a community. You need to build community-based or consulting based activities around whatever your core product is.
The first thing is familiarity, which you do by putting your message out. The second thing is trust by doing it consistently and building a little bit of community. The third thing is value. If you are putting a message out, make sure there is something of value over there.
Channel Business
Then you have a channel business. Channel businesses are of two types. You have a business house. The number of customers or the companies that you supply to throughout India, let’s say there are either more than 200 such companies or less than 200 such companies. That means this one is a pretty infinite market. Don’t worry about how many customers are applying; even if they’re like five, it doesn’t matter. But if the total number of such companies that you can supply, or if the total number of potential clients are more than 200, then you follow the same method I taught you here, which is just treat this as a retail model and use either LinkedIn or Facebook targeting. You can actually target vice-presidents, directors, or managers on both these platforms.
You write a message, and it goes straight to them. It seems like because you are putting out all of this content that educates them. They’re like, this person appears to be very nice and honest. So I would like to do business with them. So it builds familiarity and trust.
Target Audience using Facebook
Facebook is as good as LinkedIn. Because there is enough research done in the last two to three years that says people actually take business based on what they see on Facebook and Facebook has better targeting. So, if you put out a paid ad for very little money for less than maybe two, three, or four thousand rupees, you can actually pay the Facebook algorithm to target only the vice president’s in these 200 companies. So it’s pretty targeted. Get the message to where it needs to go.
If you have less than 200 companies or less than 200 potential customers, what you do is go to your competitors. There are other companies who are in the same game, just like you. Let’s say there are 2000 such companies. Then instead of sending a message out here, what you do is you tailor your message to these companies where you can say three things to do to maximize your profit options, four things to do in order to maximize your number of deals to close in a quarter, five things you can do to protect yourself from post slowdown. And then you start building your trust with these people. The first thing you come out with is the course because nobody will hire you as a consultant if you’re a competitor.
You can sell your course for upwards of 990 rupees. The base price is 1999. And the highest price is 9999. This is the stuff that people buy online. Beyond 10,000 rupees, they typically want to meet somebody. So your target market is not your end customer. It is your competition. But the way to do it is you create a course for them that they buy online, and you don’t need to be involved. That’s how you do it.
Now, the third option is imagine your business house that has literally only one or two potential customers in India. So imagine you make something in the space domain. Make some spare parts for spaceships or something. The only customer is like, so, okay. I’m assuming your business will not be impacted. If there is only one such buyer, there are only four or five lacs of rupees, so it’s probably not going to be affected that much.
Follow Your Passion
But if you still want to take your game to the next level and make huge amounts of money and add another maybe 50 lakhs of crores, you need to forget about this and go for your passion. So the thing that you put onto the internet (your message) has to do with your passion. What do you do? I mean, you must have some hobbies like painting, singing, cooking, or something that is targeted towards the retail market and not the business market.
So that is the idea. If you have two customers in all of India, then who do I want to market to? So let your business be ideal. It should be recession-proof. But if it’s not, then you need to relook at what’s the backup area that is an area of passion. Something that drives you, so you don’t get bored out of it. You can do a lot of things for money, but in today’s market, if you do something only for money and it doesn’t resonate with you, then it’s not fun. It’s not good when God has given you so many other options.
Video builds familiarity. So you’re not doing a video to create an impression or to impress people. That’s not the idea. You should have familiarity built up with your audience. People buy from people they know, like, and trust, not from the people who’s the best.