Marketing Outreach: Scale vs. Personalization

As a newer voice actor, one of the most important skill sets to develop is business prospecting or as many like to call it, marketing outreach. Marketing outreach is the process by which you contact prospective clients (prospects), introduce yourself and your services, and begin to build a dialogue, a relationship, and ultimately a working relationship.I do almost all of my marketing outreach by email. There are three main reasons for this:

1. When I started my business part-time, I had a full-time job in advertising sales. I could not cold call because I was at work, so I used email to reach people who were working normal office hours like I was.
2. Email takes a lot less time because it is scalable (more on this below). Phone calls are not – they must be made one-by-one. 
3. Email is an easily savable and organized record that includes my demo links, contact info, and a brief summary of who I am and what I offer. People don’t save and file voicemails in the same way.

I know a few voice actors who swear by the cold call: to each their own – if cold calls work well for you, great, have at it.

Point number two above is what this post is all about.

Email, unlike phone calls, is scalable, meaning you can write a good prospecting email once and use it to save time in every following email. Even when you personalize the email, having the bulk of the communication written ahead of time is a huge time saver.

Let me be clear: All email should be personalized. Every email should at the VERY least, contain the first name of the person you’re writing to. You should NEVER address a living human being as “Dear Sir, Dear Madam, To Whom It May Concern,” or, “Dear Decision Maker”.

There are those in the business that preach personalization. They will tell you that you should thoroughly research each prospect. Find out who they are, what role they play in the organization, go to their company website, watch their team’s demo reel and comment on it, know where they went to school, their employment history, and so on, so that you can set

 yourself apart from the kagillion other voice actors vying for their attention.

That will likely cost you 15 minutes or so per prospect.

I take the other approach. Kind of.

I do personalize each email and I do not send mass emails like one would with MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc. precisely because they instantly communicate that they are in fact mass emails.

I do research each and every prospect…to a point. When I prospect, my goal is to pre-qualify every single prospect with the question, “Are they likely to buy what I sell (namely: voice-overs)?” So the question becomes, “How do I determine reasonable likelihood?” Which breaks down to two more questions:

1. Does their organization likely hire voice actors?
2. Are they reasonably likely to be the decision makers (or, if not, work closely with them) in that process?

Targeting the right people in the first place is one of the best forms of personalization. Do not blast every person you can find at Company X. You’re just wasting the time of the people not

involved in the process of hiring voice talent.

If you use the tools available to you like Google or LinkedIn to find the right people at the right companies (pre-qualified prospects) quickly and at scale, you now have two choices:

Spend time researching them in-depth, or spend time reaching out.

You can spend 15 minutes researching one prospect’s work history, blood type, and favorite color. In the meantime, I’ve found 50-100 decision makers and reached out to all of them personally.

Deep personalization works, there’s no question. My view is that scale at some point out-performs deep personalization.

Consider the following deeply personalized 1st paragraph of a prospecting email:

“Dear Akeem –

I was doing some research online and discovered that you’re the Head of Production at Company X. I also learned that you graduated from Ohio State University (Go Buckeyes!), and that you enjoy fishing, Bolivian folk dance, and stamp collecting. I checked out Production Company X’s reel and I must say your story-telling is jaw dropping.”

I would submit that you’ve spent 15 minutes and one paragraph wasting the prospect’s time. They’re blowing through that paragraph trying desperately to find out what the heck it is you actually want so they can file or delete and move on with their insanely busy day.

Will you get some sympathetic credit for your research efforts? Yes. 

Will it make up for the additional 49 or 99 people you could have reached out to in the same amount of time? In my opinion, no.

Will some people just be creeped out by your cyber stalking? Probably.

We live in an age where everyone can find endless facts about anyone online. So how does that set you apart from the kagillion? In my opinion, it doesn’t.

What will set you apart is your ability to be professional, concise, smart, human, and empathetic – and to do that at scale.

Consider this intro paragraph:

“Dear Akeem –

I’m reaching out because it looks like you may work with voice actors for your projects.”

Here, you’re upfront about why you’re asking for their attention, and if you’ve prequalified them and targeted them properly, you’ve personalized (in my view) sufficiently.

Will you miss the mark and sometimes reach out to people who are not involved closely in the hiring process? Absolutely (if you’re doing it right), but this will be the exception, not the rule.

Will you get haters and obnoxious replies? If you do it right, very occasionally. The vast majority of people are decent humans. 

Sales is a numbers game, folks. The more people you reach out in a real, human, non-creepy, to-the-point way, the more success you will have. I’m not talking about going from reaching out to 10 people a day to 12 or 15. I’m talking about reaching out smartly to dozens of the right people at the right places a day. 

And I’m talking about figuring out a way that it doesn’t suck up your entire day because it’d be nice to have time to do some actual paid work or the hundred other things you need to do to run your business.

You don’t need to know their mother’s maiden name to get their business. You need to show you can solve their problem, make their work life easier, and maybe even give them joy while doing it.

I wish you all the best.