Leading authority in the digital creation space, Neel Dhingra shares the secret sauce that scaled his business by 1000%. His proven methods built the foundation for his company, Forward Academy, which empowers entrepreneurs around the world to create immensely successful, transformative brands.
In 2009, Neel Dhingra entered the real estate finance industry, and ten years later, he saw an opportunity where no one else did. Connecting with your audience online by creating meaningful content that tells a story was a strategy growing in popularity. Yet large companies were too busy to notice.
Neel Dhingra
With an ability to adapt to new trends in lightspeed, Dhingra started creating content online, educating consumers about homeownership and financial opportunities. As a result, he grew his mortgage business by over 1000% in under three years.
Today he is the founder of Forward Academy, a business consulting firm that gives clients from different industries the tools they need to build a powerful personal brand. Through Forward Academy, he hosts live workshops and online events where he shares his blueprint for creating engaging content, and how to leverage it to grow your business.
Dhingra is also the mastermind behind Forward Event, an annual and exclusive convention in Las Vegas, Nevada for real estate, mortgage, and sales professionals. Here are three things he teaches his client’s that have worked to massively scale their businesses:
1. Market Instead Of Advertise
When you’re in audience building mode, Dhingra says that you don’t necessarily want to be advertising. Instead, you want to be marketing. “A lot of people confuse the two, but marketing is about providing informative content, while advertising is just pitching sales,” he says.
“In the beginning, a mistake that a lot of creators make is they basically just run an ad. That’s not going to reach as many people as it would if you were creating content that informs them about your product or service,” he says. “If you give more and sell less in the beginning, that’s going to work out better for you in the long run,” he asserts.
But how do you do that?
2. Give Before You Take
“The key is to give before you ask,” he continues. “I think the problem with most people in sales is the customer is on the left end of the spectrum and then the closed sale is on the right end of the spectrum. And they’re asking the customer to go from left all the way to the right in one step.”
“They’re saying, ‘hey, if you’re ready to buy, let’s work together.’ And many consumers, especially younger consumers, aren’t quite sure about moving forward. They’d like to have a middle step where they get information. And so that middle step is your content. It’s your YouTube channel, it’s your social media, your ebook, whatever those digital assets are. It’s your personal brand, for example. People like to follow along and learn from you,” he explains.
If you build a platform where you educate your audience about your product or service, they will in turn become more comfortable asking you their questions, and engaging with you. From there, you’ll build trust, network, and as a result, have much more business.
“Instead of trying to just focus on the bottom of the funnel, which are people who are ready to transact right now, this strategy allows you to reach people who may be six or twelve months away from transacting, but now you have a way to reach a lot of these people at scale,” he says.
3. Repurpose Your Content
If you take a look at one social media platform, let’s say for example Instagram, you’ll notice that the vertical video content you create for it can be used on other platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, and LinkedIn. What Dhingra suggests is that you create one piece of content and post it on multiple platforms to get more of a squeeze and opportunity out of it. Genius isn’t it?
“For more long form content, like the stuff I post on YouTube, I can even chop those long videos into shorter clips and repurpose them as YouTube Shorts, Instagram reels, or TikTok’s. It looks like you’re posting a lot of different things, but really you’re repurposing the same content to be omnipresent,” he says.
Now, a lot of people feel like they don’t have the time to create content. But just remember that you can create content in batches. For Dhingra, he spends one day, you could do it monthly or even biweekly, where he creates a ton of content which lasts him for the entire month. It’s a great strategy to use if you have a busy schedule but are looking to build your platform online.
“At a certain point I was only following traditional methods that had been the tried and true ways to get business in real estate and in finance. But then I thought, ‘I have to take a risk and try something new,'” he tells us.
“I know a lot of people think that a risk is a risk, and there is a possibility it could go the other way, but in hindsight, I figured that it was actually risky to not try something new. The risk to me was not taking a risk,” he concludes.
When you’re trying something new and innovating in your niche, you may not be able to track your progress right away. But it’s worth it because the yield is disproportionate, meaning you can get a lot more upside. So if your business needs a major upgrade in 2023, you know what to do. Try out these three methods, and connect with Neel Dhingra on Instagram to let him know how they worked out for you.
