Many talented voiceover artists and coaches who have been at this a lot longer than I have often refer to your voiceover career as a marathon, not a sprint. Which, when translated, means, you have to be willing to put in the time and have the patience it takes to succeed before your career and business are where you want them to be.
That said, even a marathon starts with the first small steps right out of the starting gate. On today’s fourth and final edition of Edge Studio’s Marketing Tips, we’ll look at 8 ways for you to ‘sprint’ off of the starting line of your marathon to voiceover success.
Here are the links to this month’s Edge Studio Marketing Tips if you’d like to review and ‘Get An Edge’ on your voiceover business:
- The Look Of A Voiceover Artist – Part 1
- The Look Of A Voiceover Artist – Part 2
- Promoting Your VO Business? Then Think About Your Clients
~Marketing Tips~
8 Quick Ways To Grow Your Voiceover Business
by: Edge Studio Staff
It’s simple to quickly grow your voice over business.Here are 8 ways:
BUSINESS PLAN
Spend 1 hour writing a Business Plan. Why? Because you are a business, and you need to run your business like a business, and any good business has a business plan.
Writing a business plan will help you succeed by helping you organize your goals and figuring out the steps you need to take to get there.
To write your business plan, write out your goals and work backwards. For example, you may say, “I want to be a $200/hour voice over artist, getting at least 15 hours of voice over work each week”. Then determine the steps to get there. Think about a role model in the industry and determine the steps they may have taken to get there.
Look at sample business plans on-line. Talk to a business-friend. THINK ABOUT THIS from your customer’s perspective. Don’t run your voice over business blindfolded.
TIME-LINE
Spend 30-minutes creating a Time-Line of career goals. Include marketing goals, customer goals, revenue goals, and so on.
It’s important to know that IF you fall behind your time-line, the likelihood of ever catching up is SLIM. So a) add numerous small steps to your Time-Line, rather than adding a few huge steps this way each goal on your Time-Line will feel realistically attainable. And b) assume things will take 50% longer than you think they will, and base your Time-Line on this.
MARKETING
Spend $96 each month getting lots more work!
Hire an intern or a student at a local university, or someone from the local classifieds. Write out the things you SHOULD be doing, and pay them $12/hour to do them. $96/month gets you 2 hours each week. Because you’re paying them, you’ll be forced to tell them what to do. In other words, you WILL move forward. Let them create marketing lists for you, seal envelopes, and so on.
PRACTICE
Spend 30-minutes every other day practicing. And spend 1-hour each week practicing a new genre.
FOLLOW UP
Spend 15-minutes every other day sending out a follow-up email to someone who you should have followed-up with already. Then spend 15-minutes on the other days marketing to a new prospect.
AUDITION RECORDINGS
Spend about $100 to confirm and/or enhance the quality of your home studio. While obviously crucial for paid jobs and demos, this is also IMPERATIVE for audition recordings, because more and more often, the person who selects the voice often does NOT know how to distinguish between poor studio quality and poor vocal performance.
YOUR DEMO
Improve your demo. You’ve spent all of this time and effort growing your career don’t let your demo be the one thing holding you back from getting more.
Re-record that one segment on your demo that concerns you. Add one segment that showcases a new style. Add one new sounding segment so your demo sounds current.
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