Getting great at direct marketing to potential clients is one of the most important areas of your voice-over business. As a marketing professional with over 30 years’ experience as well as a professional voice-over actor, an axiom that has served me well is, “the more focused you are, the more money you make.”
As a voice-over actor your demos are your most important calling card for getting your product out to market. Your website is your most important content and distribution platform for providing the context around your demos and engaging with prospective clients. Getting started with a basic website to get up and running is a smart move early on in your career. However, as you gain experience and understanding of niche areas that you consistently book work in or want to expand into, creating a more advanced approach to your website strategy is the logical next step.
Before I dive into a couple of ideas on how to level up your niche marketing with your website, let’s review a few of the ‘table stakes’ elements of website development for voice-over professionals.
- Demos above the fold: Make it super easy for visitors to find and listen to your demos. Place your demos on the home page and above the fold so they easily stand out and can be accessed with one click.
- Make sure your demos are downloadable: Always provide a download option for your demos so that a prospective client, agent or casting director can easily pull them down to save and share.
- It’s all about them: Create messaging and language directed to your customer. Share how you solve their problems vs. simply telling them you are a great voice-over actor.
- Easy to contact: Be sure to provide an easy to find contact form for interested prospects that is also easy to complete. Keep it short and sweet to ensure a higher conversion of form completion.
As you grow in your voice-over business, specific genres will resonate more with you than others. Getting hired in the niche areas that you enjoy the most is a wonderful benchmark, and your website can really help you expand your client base. Here are a couple of ideas to consider when focusing on specific genre marketing.
Create pages for specific genres
Writing for the web means having a basic understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and how people look for information on the internet. The way search terms are typed into search engines such as Google or Bing are dependent on a person’s specific needs, questions, and expected outcome they hope to pull up from their search. For example, the Director of Training and Development for a corporation will not necessarily search for “voice-over talent” or “voice-over actor”. They come from their own professional situation, so more than likely they will use terms such as “eLearning voice-over” or “female voice-over for eLearning projects”.
As you up level your website game, create specific pages on your site that speak to how you solve specific problems for niche voice-over areas. If you are already consistently booking eLearning projects, consider adding an eLearning page to your website. Along with your eLearning demos, add content that addresses the problems of the eLearning buyer, how professional voice-over can solve these problems and the value hiring a professional will bring to their projects.
An example of a professional voice-over talent that does this exceptionally well is Kim Handysides’ website. Along with having specific pages of her individual genres, she also goes one level further and provides specific industry pages under that genre as well. 
This attention to detail provides some wonderful context for the search engines as well as easy navigation for the visitor once they arrive on her site.
Create an entirely separate website
Another approach to using your site to reach a specific niche market is to create an entirely separate website directed to a target audience. This can be a powerful digital strategy if you are going deep with a niche and really want to build your client portfolio in that one area.
A great example of this is how voice-over pro Anne Ganguzza approaches the specific market of automotive commercials. By creating an easy to navigate website targeted to creative directors and marketing specialists for automotive dealerships, she offers up a very focused approach to engage her target audience and provide them with her specific automotive demos. Whether through email marketing initiatives, outreach via social media or simply following up, she can offer a link to a site that is created just for this prospect.
Your voice-over site is the digital property you own. Create a user experience that is easy to navigate, user friendly and provides solutions your audience is seeking. When ready, go deeper on your niche marketing so that you too can realize how the more focused you are, the more money you make.
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