Loading summary
Transcript8 lines
- [00:01]
A
We got to talk about the most important aspect of marketing your voiceover business.
- [00:07]
B
You're a voice actor. You're an entrepreneur. You're a Veopreneur. Welcome to the Everyday veopreneur podcast, your guide through the business of voiceover.
- [00:17]
A
What happens after you send the first email? What happens after you get a positive response? What happens after the first booking? Do you have a strategy in place for following up in all of these different scenarios? If not, you need one. Follow Up Academy is a two hour masterclass that is going to give you just that. Strategies for how to continuously keep yourself top of mind with your leads, prospects and clients. It's available for purchase and instant viewing@veopreneur.com click on the store button. That's veopreneur.com click on THE Store button and look for Follow Up Academy. The Veopreneur Podcast hey, it doesn't suck.
- [00:56]
B
Not as funny as Conan, not as cute as Seth Meyers, not as smart as Colbert. But he's one of us and that counts for something. Here's Mark Scott, the original Everyday Veopreneur.
- [01:09]
A
There's something we've got to talk about when it comes to achieving any level of success in your voiceover business, and it's something that I have talked about for a decade and you know, lord willing, I will continue to be talking about this for a decade or more into the future as well. I think it is one of the most important aspects of marketing your voiceover business, but it is also consistently one of the most underlooked aspects of marketing your voiceover business, which is why I'm going to keep talking about it. And I say this coming from a place. As someone who has literally coached thousands of voice actors on their marketing efforts, I know what is being done and what isn't being done from those conversations, from those coaching calls. And there's one thing that just comes up over and over and over and over and over again that is getting overlooked. I've talked about this in the past on podcasts, but the reason why I wanted to touch on it again today. Recently I listened to a couple of different podcasts that I enjoy, entrepreneurial type podcasts and I'm a huge podcast listener. Probably spend a few hours every week whenever possible anyway, listening to podcasts. One of them was an interview that Lewis Howes did on his show the School of Greatness. And one of them was an interview that Steven Bartlett did on his show, which is the diary of a CEO interviewing two different people. The basis of the interviews were two Totally different subjects, but one thing came up in both of them. And as I was listening to them talk about it, I was like, you know what? I'm going to do this in an episode again. I'm going to bring this up again because it's something that needs to be brought to the forefront again. And it is the idea of the follow up. Now, in both of these cases, Stephen and Lewis were speaking with guests who are incredibly successful multimillion dollar entrepreneurs running incredibly successful companies. And both of these interviewees touched on something very similar when it came to email marketing. Now, keep in mind, when you get to a certain point, when you get to be a multimillion dollar CEO or running a multimillion dollar company, you're gonna get a lot of marketing emails on a daily basis. And you know, some of those are obviously gonna be better than others. And you've gotta be pretty choosy about your time. It's the one thing that you can't get any more of. And so you have to guard it. You have to decide who gets your time, who doesn't get your time. And so when it came to filtering through these marketing emails and trying to make decisions about who might get a response or who might not get a response, who makes it past, I don't know, phase one of the inbox or whatever their system is, who gets past the assistant and into the actual inbox of the CEO. There were two things that were brought up in each of these interviews and by each of these multimillion dollar CEOs. First and foremost was the importance of personalization. When you send me a generic message that looks like it could literally be sent to any other person on earth, I'm going to ignore that message. And this is basically what they're saying in the interview. And this is something that I've been saying for years. I recently did an episode called Rest in Peace Generic Marketing where I literally talk about the death of generic marketing. And this is what I'm talking about when you're sending out those emails. The idea with generic messages is that you can do it at scale. If you are sending generic messages, you send them out to enough people, then the hope is that the law of averages says, you know, if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, some will stick. And what these CEOs were saying was, you're not getting into my inbox. If you're sending me these generic messages, like, you're never going to get my time. The ones that I took the time to read, the ones that I took the time to respond to were the messages that actually proved that you had done a little bit of research, that you got to understand my company, that you got to know something about me, that you were able to find out an interesting factoid or, or something. But the point is that you put the effort in to tailor the message. This is something that I've talked about for years. It's something that I teach in voiceover Marketing Playbook. It is something that I teach in my email workshops. I've taught it from conference stages as well. The importance of making that initial contact a more personalized contact. Can you do it at the same scale? No, but you're going to put yourself in a position where you're sending fewer emails, but you're actually getting a higher conversion rate because you are taking the time to tailor the messages. It makes a big difference. So that was the first thing that came up in both of these interviews, the importance of personalization. The second thing that came up, both of these interviews, spoken as truth by both of these multimillion dollar CEOs was the importance of follow up. Now one of the CEOs actually went so far as to say that sometimes he uses it as a test to find out who really truly wants it. And what he was saying was, you know, if you send me one email and then you give up, you never send me another email. And that sends a message, maybe you don't really want it that bad. Like you're obviously not willing to work that hard for it. If you're going to email me one time and then give up. But if you email me two or three times, that speaks to your commitment, that speaks to your professionalism. And so I think that there's something to be said for that. And I have quoted ad nauseam for years, success is in the follow up. If you do not have a follow up strategy for your voiceover business, you are going to struggle. If you do not have a follow up strategy for your voiceover business, you are going to leave money on the table. I guarantee you're going to leave money on the table because your clients are going to forget about you and they're going to hire someone else. Your prospects are going to forget about you and they're going to hire someone else. And the leads that you've reached out to are going to forget about you and they're going to hire someone else. You have to have a follow up strategy. So this one particular CEO, again, he said he used it as a test and I thought that was actually pretty insightful. To get that kind of information. And I also think that it gives a different narrative. The number one reason, hands down, why voice actors don't follow up. And I'm talking again, thousands of voice actors coached over the years, literally multi thousands of hours spent in coaching sessions. The number one reason why voice actors aren't following up is because they don't want to be annoying. And we've adopted this as a mindset. We've adopted this as a narrative of truth. If we are following up with people who haven't responded to us, then we are being annoying. I don't know where this came from. I don't know the origin story of this narrative. But. But I know that by and large the industry has adopted this as truth based on no factual evidence that I have been able to find. So what if you replace that narrative of I don't want to be annoying with the narrative that the CEO is literally laying at your feet, which is I'm looking to see if you're committed, I'm looking to see if you're professional, I'm looking to see if you want it, I'm looking to see if you're going to try again, it's going to tell me about your character. If you're willing to try again, what if you used that narrative instead and let that narrative be a motivating factor for you to actually send the follow ups? The other side of the argument, of course, is, hey, look, there's people running companies, whether they're video producers, creative agencies, instructional designers, whatever it is, filmmakers, game developers, they're running companies. And there's more than you emailing them. I don't know about you, but as my business continues to grow, it becomes harder and harder for me to manage my inbox. I used to be a guy who responded to every single email, often within a few minutes. And now sometimes I can't respond to an email for a couple of days because I just have a massive volume of email coming in. But I've also got a lot going on. And so sometimes that gentle follow up just to remind me that you messaged me, you'd be surprised how many times that message gets the response. Because again, narrative, the common and accepted narrative for why somebody is not responding to an email is they're not interested, they don't want us, we've annoyed them, we've upset them. Right? It's all negative narratives. But what if the actual narrative is they're busy, they got a lot of messages, they meant to respond, but it got lost in the Shuffle. They meant to respond, but they forgot. They wanted to respond, but they couldn't at the time because they had something else going on. And when they came back to do it later, they couldn't find the message or they forgot. And none of those are negative. None of those are negative narratives. Why not adopt those narratives? So the purpose that I really want to communicate more than anything is how essential it is to your success to follow up. If you do not have a strategy in place for sending follow up emails, I guarantee you that you are missing out on opportunities. You are missing out on potential new clients. You are potentially letting previous clients slip through your fingers and into someone else's hands because you are not staying top of mind. Follow up can take shape in a lot of different ways and there are a lot of different follow up strategies that we, that we can talk about. I teach an entire masterclass, it's a two hour masterclass called Follow Up Academy. I teach an entire masterclass on how to get better at follow up. I teach an entire section of voiceover marketing playbook on the importance of follow up and different follow up strategies. So if you get nothing else from this episode, it's time to change your narrative on follow up. It's time to change it from a negative narrative of being annoying or salesy or pushy. And I suppose it could look like that if you're not following up in the right way. But the reality is what you're doing by following up is showing that you care about. What you're doing by following up is showing that you're committed. What you're doing by following up is showing that you are a professional. What you're doing by following up is showing that you pay attention to the details. That's the narrative. That's the mindset that you need to have on this. And you have to build a follow up strategy. Start with a simple CRM. A simple CRM that you can put your leads, your prospects and your clients in. And you can set automated reminders at different cycles that will pop up and say it's time to get in touch with so and so again. If you've got a client in your database that you haven't had communication with in more than six months, chances are you've missed out on an opportunity. Chances are they forgot about you or they went and hired somebody else because that person was there or present or who they were thinking of. That's the name that was top of mind at the time. Hey, we need a 30 second voiceover for the video. Oh yeah, get Bob. Bob just messaged me the other day. So just, you know, reach out to him and get him to do it. Sometimes that's with books. I know this because I've had clients tell me this. You've got to have a follow up strategy in place. It is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated aspects of the voiceover marketing side of this game. You've done all the other things that you needed to do. You've done your training, you've got your professional demos, you've built a beautiful website to house them on. Maybe you're even sending that initial email communication to try to drive traffic to your website, get them to listen to your demos. Maybe you weren't making the email personal. So now you're going to take the time to make the email personal because we've learned that. But you've also got to have a plan in place for follow up. If you're not sending at least a couple of follow ups on every one of those new leads, you're going to convert a much lower percentage. If you're not sending consistent follow up communication to your existing database of prospects and clients, they're going to hire somebody else because they're going to be thinking about somebody else. Always be thinking about how you can keep yourself top of mind. And if you don't want to take my word for it because I'm just a lowly voice actor, take the word of these multimillion dollar CEOs. Twice now in a week I've heard it from two different multimillion dollar CEOs on two different podcasts talking about two different subjects. But both times this point came up and it made me realize we got to bring it up again. I would love to hear two things. First and foremost, I'd love to hear that you're listening to this episode. Second of all, I'd love to hear a follow up success story. So why don't you make a video sharing one of your follow up success stories? Let me know that it was inspired by this episode. Post it on Instagram. Tag me Arkscott. I would love to be able to celebrate your successes with you. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next one.
- [15:07]
B
The Everyday Veopreneur podcast available everywhere. Find podcasts are given away for free.
- [15:13]
C
Mostly we think having your voiceover demos easily playable and downloadable on your website is essential. The VoiceSam player lets you do that across any device and browser. There are also options for adding play buttons in your email signature tracking your listens and even putting videos in your demo player. Sign up now@voicezam.com markscott and receive an instant $25 credit. For full details and to claim this offer, visit voicezam.com markscott and sync.
- [15:45]
B
And that's a wrap. Thanks for hanging in. Thanks for hanging out. Want more? Veopreneur Goodness. Jump online@veopreneur.com.