Tag: marketing

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Email Marketing

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by Carrie Olsen

Voice actors reach out to me all the time and ask, “How do I book more voice over work?”. It actually makes sense if you think about it. After you get started, learn all you can skill-wise, the next logical step is to wonder how to get a job doing voice over work. If you look around my blog you’ll find all kinds of resources on things that you need to be prepared for voice-over work.

I tackle everything–from areas you need to build up so you can have a solid voice over foundation, a successful business, and make a living doing voiceover work to technical how-tos on how to get a good demo made,  best practices for auditioning, and programs on booking e-learning narration work.

How to Book Voiceover Work: Do Email Marketing

I want to spotlight one specific method for making contacts and turning them into paid voice over work: email marketing.

What is email marketing?

As it pertains to a voiceover business, email marketing is doing focused, targeted, personal outreach to clients or potential clients who are likely to hire you for voiceover work.

These clients aren’t necessarily going to hire you immediately, and that’s okay because that’s not the goal. The goal is to build relationships.

Let’s get this out of the way: This is a long-term process. The idea isn’t to send out 50 emails, book 50 jobs, and be instantly successful. The idea is to use a long-term strategy to build solid relationships so that when these prospects need voiceover help down the line, you already have an “in”. You’re already top-of-mind. They already feel comfortable with you and a partnership comes naturally.

How do you do email outreach so that you can build strong, natural relationships with people who have the potential to hire you? Let’s break it down.

Steps in Doing Email Outreach to Build Strong Relationships

1. Identify your target market.

  • The first thing is you need to know is who it is that you’re targeting. if you check out my Book More E-learning course, you can learn all about how to target e-learning clients. But if you’re interested in commercial work or explainer videos or other corporate narration type jobs, your outreach is going to look different.

Read the rest of the article at CarrieOlsenVO.com…

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Does A Voice Actor Need A Niche? Here’s The Truth…

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by Rachel Alena

I know. You read it online.

A VOICE TALENT MUST HAVE A NICHE! Well, I don’t always agree. Here’s why…. 100% True story… Last month, I met a newbie voice talent and we chatted. Here is how the conversation went down:

VO Newbie: “I’m so excited! My goal is to become a full time voice over talent. I already have my niche. I plan to be a children’s educational narrator.”

Me: “That’s a very specific niche. Would you consider broadening it?”

VO Newbie: ‘Nope. I’ve researched it online. A voice talent must have a niche.”

Me: “Well, it’s just that…with your strong British-Swedish mixed accent…and such a very specific niche…you might be limiting the amount of work you can obtain in the beginning. Broadening your niche might give you more opportunity to reach your goal of working in VO full-time.”

VO Newbie: ‘Nope. I’ve read that you should have a niche and that’s my plan. Children’s educational materials it is.”

Creating a niche is a fantastic way to become an expert by focusing on one area! And, with so many voice acting genres, you’re likely to have natural stronger talents in specific areas. Having a niche is great for marketing, too.

Here’s why not….

Less opportunity in the beginning

A niche such as ‘children’s educational narrations’ has specific clients. There will be opportunities in all genres. As a new voice talent who is playing the audition game you may find yourself waiting for opportunities.

Limited skill set with less to offer potential employers

Here’s a real-life example.

One of my first jobs for Delta Dental was to narrate 2 enrollment manuals…yes…those big thick books about benefits. This type of job was considered ‘industrial’ voice acting, such narrating as training materials.

Then, they asked if I could I narrate commercial material. Yes! Commercial voice acting was in my skill set so I could do those jobs, too. As a result, I now narrate commercial style videos for them.

Read the rest of the article at RachelAlena.com…

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Twitter For Voice Over Actors

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by Anthony Pica

Hello, and welcome to A VOs Journey podcast. My name is Anthony Pica, and this show is all about helping the new and upcoming voiceover artists grow their business and sidestep all of the crazy things that I seem to step on. Well, today was a great day so far, but it got batched up. I was trying out a new service called restream doing my live video, and it did semi-okay, but on the other hand, I wasn’t live in certain places, and I was live on other sites, so I had to go back and do different shows. So to make a long story short, I wasn’t able to get the file that I wanted for the podcast. And you know, I think Twitter is going to serve all of us incredibly, and I’m going to talk about it. All right, let’s do it.

Don’t be afraid to try new things and don’t be scared to fall flat on your face just like I did today because it was interesting if you decide to go live in multiple places using restream, make sure that you have all of the different things figured out. You log out and log back in to make sure that everything is up to date. Um, so I am paying for restream, it is about $50 a month. And uh, I like the service because it’s going to allow me to go live on Twitter, on Facebook, and both my public page as well as the private group and the YouTube page. And then, of course, with my phone, I can go live on Instagram so that, you know, and I want to do that every single day because right now, you know, I go live every day on YouTube, but the other channels not so much. 

And I think for me, creating the content like that every single day on all those channels, it really, really, really, really, really helps so that I’m not going back and forth a million times trying to do all of this stuff. So anyway, that’s what’s going on. As I said, it worked, but I think I have it figured out at least enough to get going for tomorrow at one o’clock. 

But anyway, today I want to talk about Twitter, and I am in with Twitter. Again, it has been a while. I think most of us, we all know about Twitter, but probably a lot of us don’t use it or don’t use it much. Some people have done well on Twitter, but I think because of Instagram and because of Tik Tok and all of these, you know, social sites that are in your face regularly, it’s one of those things where Twitter just kind of is, is there, I mean it has grown. 

Read the rest of the article (or listen to the podcast) at A VO’s Journey Blog…

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The 5 Types of People you Should be Contacting when Marketing Yourself as a VO Talent

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by The Voice-Over Roadmap

As a VO Talent and Self-Marketer, you may know the types of places you should be reaching out to in hopes of landing work (Video Production Companies, Animation Studios, E-Learning Companies, etc…) But do you know who the best people are to contact at these companies?

Sometimes you may find a number of contacts listed on the website for a potential lead, and you don’t want to send a mass email to a bunch of people at the company all at once, but you also want to be sure you make contact with the person most likely to hire you for a gig.

In this post, let’s take a look at the 5 types of people you should be looking to contact when marketing yourself as a VO Talent, in order of likeliness to be the person handling voice-over at the company, and thus, the best one to contact.

1. CASTING DIRECTOR

Many of the production companies and other leads you contact won’t have someone with this title – in fact, most probably won’t. But when you do come across leads in your marketing efforts that have a Casting Director on board, that is the person you want to contact.

This typically means that the company does a high volume of casting talent for their projects and therefore have a dedicated person on board to handle it. A Casting Director is in charge of working with the Directors and other creatives at the company to provide them with talent best suited for roles in their productions. They arrange auditions, are the main source of contact between talent and the company, and also maintain and update the company’s talent roster if they have one.

Different companies have different naming conventions and titles for their employees, below are some alternate titles and similar positions you may come across for Casting Directors.

Alternate & Similar Positions: Head of Casting, Casting Assistant

2. CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Read the rest of the article at The Voice-Over Roadmap…