POWER OF FREE! #7: Disrupt, disrupt in Intelligent Content Marketing: Disrupting Our Market

So we set about disrupting our market. So what I want to do is kind of, you know, talk about our marketplace. And the Hong Kong immigration services market can readily be this split into two market types.

There’s the individual immigration services market, and then there’s the corporate market and the individual immigration services market is 15% of the market by value. So 85% of the market is the corporate space. Now, in going after the Hong Kong immigration services market, as we did, we look to see what it’s really all about. Now, remember, I’ve got, you know, expertise in this. And I know this industry backwards, because I was a founding partner of the world’s second largest global immigration practice. And I was a senior executive for the world’s largest corporate immigration firm for two and a half years. So I understand my marketplace, uniquely. So really, the place that we had was, this was the big gorilla, globally, and the big gorilla in Hong Kong. This is the lesser company, this is the company that I was, then I originally started in 1993.

But that I lost my interest in in 2006. And then these are the big four accounting practices. And then these really are the kind of the larger, real global relocation companies that have a presence here and who practice immigration. And then all of these are the smaller players, one or two person companies very often, people who have worked for me in the past who have interviewed for jobs with me in the past, so so I understood what my marketplace was. But what was so interesting is that whilst it’s widely acknowledged that I was kind of, you know, the first mover and shaker in in a discrete immigration services business in Hong Kong back in 1993, essentially, I know for a fact that everybody in this marketplace is doing exactly the same thing that I was doing in 1993. It doesn’t change at all. So I thought, well, we need to shake this up.

Now. See, in 1996, I wrote the first version of the Hong Kong visa handbook and put it on the internet for free. This was at a time when HSBC had only dial up email accounts, I mean, we were way ahead of the curve. And between 1996 and 2000, it made me Of course, in the 10 years after that, I lost it all because I was stupid. But what I learned between 1996 and 2000, is that if you put your information on the internet for free, you will be very successful. Now, when I was making the decision to build this business model together, the original version of the Hong Kong visa handbook was kind of still gathering dust on the website of the firm that I’d left it with, because they didn’t have the intellectual now to keep it up today in the wake of my departure. So by the time I’m putting this proposition together, I’m looking at my work on the internet, which essentially is ceded to them.

But they haven’t updated it for four years. And what was an asset that was just so valuable, it’s now become a liability. So because that was kind of like the extent of the competition, if you will, on the content phase of a website, sort of internet business like ours, then I knew that really looking at the websites of all the other people that were in the game, if some of them even had a website that dealt specifically with, you know, content that would help people answer the questions and solve their problems. I realized it was wide open for us. It was just a matter of redoing the content and publishing it, and then continuing to learn as as I went. So I needed to think about my content proposition, understanding that in if we’re going to creatively disrupt our marketplace, we have to start on the bleeding edge, right? where essentially people are going to let us get on with it. Now, four years ago, I realized that there was a crying need for up to date, high quality immigration content for these four types of people. Often the executives, and there are some people in this room tonight who are often the executives.

These are people who’ve had immigration status is taken care of by their companies forever and ever and ever. And for one reason rather than no longer with those companies and all of a sudden they have to deal with the problem of immigration and they’ve never had to think about it before. The second constituency for our audience was entrepreneurs, those people that were wanting to come and live in Hong Kong and start businesses or already lived in Hong Kong and wanted to start a business and needed immigration permission to do so. And the fourth considered third constituency was essentially everyone who’s lived there for close to or beyond beyond seven years is a foreign national and wants to become a permanent resident. And then finally, there was always going to be a need for people who have worked visas, irrespective of how they got them to have their questions answered, because people always have problems with work visas. And that information wasn’t available anywhere on the internet.

So so we decided that we were going to publish to this niche recognizing that actually, we’re going after on the 15% of the marketplace. And so four years later, and 10,000 pieces of content later. So this is kind of what we’ve achieved. We’ve got a tribe of nigh on 55,000. Now that regularly visit our websites, we’ve been able to produce content that is bundled up into specific information and do it yourself kit packages for people that speak squarely to the particular problem that we’ve got that we give away generously. We have a business that offers a 200% money back guarantee for customers that we take on our Platinum package. That’s the irresistible offer. That’s what people need to know that actually we’re in the trenches with them when it comes to their immigration application.

We have three particular websites, the Hong Kong visa handbook website, the Hong Kong Visa Center website, which is where we transact and the Hong Kong visa Giza website which holds our idea virus and it’s where I published two, four to five times each week. We’ll do a million US dollars in sales in our first first fourth year, this year, and that was from a standing start of nothing four years ago.

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