Launching a business in India: How to reach target Indian customers -Tom Chalmers

I have previously written about the need to research and understand a market before entering it, followed by creating the right product and services and then building the necessary infrastructure for delivery and distribution.

Over the last six months, we have developed our products and services for the Indian market, firstly our book products from our traditional publisher companies, Legend Press and Legend Business. Secondly a new venture offering self-publishing services and global print and distribution to Indian writers – www.create-publishing.in

This, however, is still part of the preparation stage as the next task is essential to whether the business endeavours succeeds or fail – reaching the right customers in India. To achieve this, we have broken it down into four steps:

1. Hiring local staff– As I’ve mentioned before, without a base in India with local staff who understand and can react quickly to the market, we have little chance of success. Each market is simply too unique in culture and trend to manage it from several thousand miles away. As a result, we are currently completing the process to recruit several local employees to be based in our initial Mumbai base.

2. Choosing the right partners– In addition to the right local team, it is vital to work with the rights partners in the country, usually key organisation with knowledge, activity and contacts in the country. Since visiting in January, it has been great to begin working with Repro, All About Book Publishing, Penguin Random House, Amazon, FICCI, IPO, DIT and other partners.

3. Choosing target areas and tailoring our services– Target areas can take many forms – geographic, languages through to demographic. This is particularly the case in India, with a huge population, diverse large states and multiple local languages. Having decided on particular target customers we have then factored this into our products and services and their pricing.

4. Targeted advertising and content–Having put the above in place, the next key is to make sure our information reaches these customers through organic activity, such as free content, webinars are about to launch, social media, SEO and events. Secondly, we need to reach these customers through paid advertising such as through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, AdWords and other platforms. A believer in always working with experts, we will again be working with local partners to implement an agreed strategy.

As a result of the above, we can target, reach and look after our customers – then all that’s left is for the product and services to be strong enough to achieve customer satisfaction and repeat business. We are very excited by the potential in the India market and our progress to date and are looking forward to a fascinating second half of 2018 ahead!

Tom Chalmers is the Managing Director of Legend Times, a group of five publishing companies. He started his first company in 2005, Legend Press, focused predominantly on mainstream literary and commercial fiction. Chalmers subsequently acquired Paperbooks Publishing, and later launched Legend Business, a business book publisher, followed by self-publishing and writer workshops companies, New Generation Publishing and Write-Connections, respectively. He also founded IPR License in 2012, a global rights licensing platform, which after two rounds of funding he sold in 2016, and is the founder of new content curation venture AIContexx.