Iron out your branding!
Learning how to effectively market your voice-over business is critical to your future success in the industry. Although it feels like a less productive part of creating voice-over success than auditioning and vocal training, creating your business and marketing plan is an extremely important part of becoming the busy, booked, professional actor you want to be!
Back in January, I wrote a different article about how we can create a voice-over business plan for ourselves. If you haven’t read that already, definitely refer to it here. As an individual voice actor, you are a business, so you need to treat yourself as such! Setting specific business goals for yourself is a big part of this. Give that article a read for a better outline of how we can start this process, and use it concurrently with this one. Today, we’re going to hone in on best practices for marketing ourselves, and go through a few other tools at your disposal to do this well!
1. Branding, Building a Website, and Business Cards
Before we dive into any marketing platform, we want to establish our brand. Who are we, as an actor? How do we portray that with things like our logo, font, color scheme, and tagline? Think about other businesses – for example: Barbie, or John Deere. Both have very clear branding that differentiates them from others. Barbie is frilly, pink, and girlie, whereas John
Deere uses more bold and deep colors to give off a strong, manly vibe. That’s going to give you a good idea of what they’re both selling! We’re selling our voice, our personality, and our professionalism. We want to construct our brand to help potential customers get a feel for what it would be like to work with us!
All professional voice actors have their own website where new clients can learn more about them. A good website will have your demos, your training history, clients you’ve previously worked with, details about your home studio, and an easy way for people to contact you. These things are essential – but you can take it further and add extras like client reviews, a blog, or anything else to make your site more uniquely you. A good place to get an idea for what your website should look like is other actors’ websites. Here’s a few examples of some of my favorites:
Can you tell how strong their branding is? You can almost hear these people’s voices without even needing to click on their demos. Their branding is excellent and consistent.
Finally, when you have your branding down and website set up, it might be a good time to order business cards as well. That way you have something to hand to people in person as you talk about your career and network with others! Make sure the branding is consistent on these.
2. Social Media
Do not shy away from social media! These platforms are being used by actors daily to find new work and expand their influence in the industry. It is essential to meet clients where they’re at – which is most likely social media! We want to make a professional profile on these platforms. Specifically, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram – which are the most popular and helpful tools for us as actors.
When you’re making or updating your profile on any site, be sure that your branding is consistent, and you’re completely filling out all the profile information that you can.
On Twitter, we can find lots of new work, speak directly with our peers, clients, agents, and casting directors, and engage in community dialogue about voice-over. Twitter can be relatively casual, and is a great place to start to meet new people and new clients! Best practices for Twitter are to tweet regularly, involve yourself in discussions about voice-over, support and uplift others’ successes, and update your audience whenever you book new roles!
LinkedIn is a much more professional space compared to Twitter, so we need to post accordingly here. Be sure to update your LinkedIn with information about your role as a voice actor. I also recommend connecting with potential businesses or individuals you’d like to work with! It’s a great place to reach out to your targeted clients and try to pick up new work.
Instagram is, in my opinion, slightly less powerful than Twitter and LinkedIn, but should still be used when you can! Instagram is heavily photo-focused, so we need to think creatively about how we post there. Things like pictures of our home studios, images and videos of work we’ve been doing, or photos of us while we’re in the booth are a good place to start. Being consistent both in how much you post and in your branding across these sites is going to help you stay top of mind for potential clients!
3. Cold Outreach
As you build out these social media platforms and collect new potential clients to contact, you’ll want to stay organized. Set yourself up with a database of contacts that you want to work with. Excel or Google Sheets work just fine for this! Write down the contact’s name, number, email, website, and any other important information you know about who they are or who they work for. Then, I recommend sending out a polite message or email telling them a bit about who you are and why you think you’d be a good fit for future projects of theirs!
Keep track of how often you contact potential clients. Be respectful of their time, and don’t overload them with information or messages which make you seem unprofessional or spammy. Cold outreach on LinkedIn or organically is a powerful way to book new gigs when done correctly.
All of these things together, along with your amazing voice, are going to help you get to the next level in this industry! Stay ahead of the curve, stay top of mind, and dedicate the time to helping your business grow through these marketing techniques.
Check out our free PDF with pro-tips from real working voice-over actors here!
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