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New Year Marketing Campaign Getting Results: Establish Niche Target And Max Your Chances

January 24, 2013

Note: The author's earlier three-part series on VoiceOverXtra, The Art & Science of Self-Promotion, is a road map for promoting your voice overs. And wouldn't it be interesting to learn what the author himself is doing now? Read on ...

 
By Tom Dheere

Voice Talent

Like most people, I like to hit the ground running at the beginning of the year. I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions, but I do believe in missions, goals, and action plans, which tend to be more realistic, specific, and attainable.

So once it’s written out and all shiny and pretty-like on a fresh piece of paper, it’s great to just dive in and bang some stuff out to get that sense of accomplishment -  and also build some momentum.

For me, the challenge is marketing.

A TARGETED CAMPAIGN

I’m pretty consistent with my marketing, but you can always do more, and you can always do better.

So I decided to start off the year with a laser-like targeted marketing campaign to accomplish two things:
  • maximize results by doing my due diligence with the contacts in question, and
  • gather some strong analytics.
APPROACH VARIES WITH PROSPECTS

My marketing campaign was directed toward a very specific niche of the voice over industry, to about 100 contacts. Some were emails and some were postcards.

Why not all postcards, or maybe phone calls?

More and more companies aren’t divulging their locations, so it’s nigh impossible to get snail mail addresses and phone numbers for some of them. The reason is that companies don’t want potential customers to be biased by the geographic location of their facilities.

For example, I checked out the websites of two companies whose websites were equally professional-looking and informative. By looking at them, you had no idea where they were located, but both looked great. One was in Ohio and one was in Pakistan! See what I mean?

And the results of my new campaign? So far, so good! My response rate is about 20% for the email campaign. The postcards went out last Thursday so it’s too early to tell how that one went.

EXTRA TIP ...

What’s a good "batting average” for a marketing campaign? I did some cursory research online and I found that nationally:
  • direct mailings average about 2%-5%,
  • email blasts about 20%, and
  • cold calls about 6%.
How do you maximize your chances?

Be specific. Know exactly what kind of voice over genre you want to focus on, have the right demo, and be sure that the company you contact does that kind of voice over work.

Have a good script. Make sure your speech/script on your email/postcard is brief, informative, brief, not all about you, and brief! Don’t waste their time bragging about your work on products they’ve never heard of. Just quickly tell them how YOU can serve THEM, not the other way around.

Names. Know the name of the person you want to call/email/snail mail. It will greatly increase your chances of getting added to their roster.
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ABOUT TOM
Tom Dheere is a full-time voice over talent as well as a freelance actor, writer, and popular speaker and trainer on voice over marketing. He voices in many genres, and audiobook credits include the Daniele Steel audiobook Amazing Grace. He is also moderator of The Good Karma Network - an online entertainment industry support group.
 

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Comments (1)
Tom Dheere
1/25/2013 at 3:30 PM
Thanks for posting this, John!
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