Smart Emmanuel’s Selling Series: The Borderless Industry
Music is borderless. Movies are borderless. Coaching is borderless. Apps are borderless. Business focused on rendering virtual services found favour immediately the internet was invented.
October 29 1969 (the day the internet was created) is the day virtual services got lucky but 2021 is the year the harvest became so ripe; too ripe to ignore. The virtual industry is a multibillion dollar industry. No one knows how big it is. From e sports to music, it’s a very big market.
A musician in New York can sell his music to music lovers in Cape Town. A software developer in Dallas can get users in London without ever stepping foot in Europe. A movie maker in Chicago can get views from West Africa. The possibilities are limitless and we are yet to fully understand how big and powerful the opportunities are.
The big question remains, how do you sell to new markets? How do you convince these people to buy? The sales process begins with product development. The two most powerful words in product development are original and useful/valuable.
The pain of selling a bad product shouldn’t be felt by anyone. Entrepreneurs and creators need to spend time creating original and valuable content. In creating valuable content, creators must understand that value is relative. What’s value to you might not be value to potential users or customers.
To understand what customers consider to be value, study them and study what they are already buying or requesting for. Once you find this, create an original content around this. A simple and attractive online advert targeted at the right audience with an original and valuable service will be an instant hit.
For example, during the peak of COVID19 crisis, people needed to continue to communicate in large groups as events has come to stay but it moved from onsite to online. Zoom, Google Meet and many platforms tweaked their products to meet this need with original and valuable ideas. People also needed to continue to shop at reasonable prices in a safe way, Amazon, Uber eats and many other brands met this need with original ideas.
In Africa, Jumia continued to reach so many people during COVID19. Numerous offline brands moved online to meet this need. Virtual services from the US like Neflix saw a major increase in African subscriptions.
The future is virtual. Virtual is borderless. In the virtual world, the earth is a one big global village.
Written by Smart Emmanuel. Emmanuel is Africa’s leading sales and brand growth strategist and product development expert. He is CEO of The Stralution Company Limited, a sales, brand growth and product development strategy firm.
Twitter and Instagram: @iamsmartemma
