Making the Most of Your Message

Stephanie Ciccarelli

July 10, 2007

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Join Voice Over Expert Bettye Zoller as she discusses “Making the Most of Your Message”. Bettye reminds us that the voice over biz is about more than just having a great voice, it’s about branding, marketing and serving your clients.

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Tags:

Bettye Zoller, VoicesVoices.com, Elevator Speech, Self-Promotion, Sales, Marketing, Voices.com

Links from today’s show:

Bettye Zoller Voices.com Profile

Transcript from Making the Most of Your Message

[Intro music]
Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voice Over Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voice-over marketplace. Voice Over Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom, and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voice over.
Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voice over talent. It’s never been easier to learn, perform and succeed from the privacy of your own home and at your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
This week, Voices.com is pleased to present Bettye Zoller.
Bettye Zoller: I’m Bettye Zoller. Let’s talk about making the most of your message. You’ve heard about elevator speeches. That’s when you have about 30 seconds to tell your story to a perspective client.
This is a world of instant messages, sound bytes, text messages. You only have about five seconds to make your message matter to your audience. That’s why some people call it the elevator speech. You keep your message highly audience focused.
What are the benefits of knowing you to your customers? How are you delivering the best product for your customers? Remember, you need to start thinking from your customer’s perspective, not yours.
Your perspective is something like: I need to make more money. Or, I want to leave my day job and do voice work. Or, I want to show the world how wonderful I am and how beautiful my voice is. Those are all the wrong messages.
Your message, to catch and keep your target customer’s attention, needs to be on their needs. Back up your key messages with everyday language. If you say you deliver excellent voice overs, that’s fine, but can you make it more personal? Can you create a message experience for your customers and prospects?
What is your company’s message? Remember, you are your company. What is your company’s message, regardless of if you’re new or trying to keep a career going or trying to rejuvenate an older career?
Getting your audience’s attention is over half the battle, but remember to save some energy for talking to them once you have it. Catching their ear is great, but holding onto it is even more important.
So say you’ve been in the business for awhile. What do you do now? How do you keep their ear? How do you remind them that you’re here? How do you get them to hear a new side of you?
I believe self-promotion never stops. When you’re new, self-promotion is everything. When you’re in mid-career, self-promotion is everything. And when you’ve been in the business 34 years like me, self-promotion is everything. What else is new? Self-promotion. Once they know you, you’ve got to keep them wanting more.
So what do you do to put things in the client, the customer’s perspective? You talk about what you do for them. You talk about how you can voice their job in a way that makes them a winner. It makes them a hero. Always remember everybody wants to be a hero and it’s your job to make them.
When you’re networking and meeting people in person to hand out your demo, or you’re mailing your demos out and you’re enclosing a short cover letter, focus on what you can do to meet your customer or your client’s needs.
Talk about how you make things easier. Talk about your expertise areas and how you can help them simplify the job and simplify their life.
Online, when you answer a potential job, don’t talk about how great you are. Wouldn’t everybody say how great they are? What are they going to say, “I’m terrible”? No. The clients expect everybody to say, “I’m great. I’m wonderful.” Forget that; that’s a waste of time.
Talk about why you should be the one to voice this job, why they need an audio engineer with your capabilities. Oh, and by the way, don’t answer the jobs that you really aren’t suited for. That just will cause problems for everybody concerned, most of all you.
Talk about why you are the best person for this job, because you are the most suited for it. Your audio engineering skills are what this person needs for this job. Zero in on your customer, your client’s needs, and business will come your way.
When someone asks you why they should hire you, switch it around. Don’t say, “Because I’m wonderful.” Switch it around to why you need me, why you will be happy now that you have me, and you will return to me again and again because you enjoy working with me. I make it easy. I satisfy. Client-centered messages.
You are a business and your business is you. If you think you are not in sales, you better get out of the business. Because sales make the world go round, and selling yourself is what makes a successful voice over talent.
[music]
Julie-Ann: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about this special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voice Over Experts show notes at podcasts.voices.com/voiceoverexperts. Remember to stay subscribed.
If you’re a first-time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes’s podcast directory or by visiting podcasts.voices.com. To start your voice over career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.
[Closing Music]

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Expert Bettye Zolle
34 years as a respected university and private educator in voice, speech, theatre, radio-TV, and voiceover techniques along with her award-winning career in voiceovers and jingles has won Bettye Zoller an international reputation that brings clients and students to her workshops and to work in her Dallas recording studio (she’s an accomplished audio engineer/producer) from all over the globe! She is educated through the doctorate (from Missouri University, University of Texas at Dallas, University of North Texas) with faculty positions in the past at Southern Methodist University, University of Texas at Arlington, Dallas County Colleges. She has also studied with famed NYC acting coach Uta Hagen, in Chicago at the “Second City School” and her career began long ago at Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Hollywood studio school (as a child performer signed to MGM).
Her voiceover credits number in the many hundreds (she’s never counted!) and range from voiceovers and jingles for national TV commercials to audio books to cartoons, from toys to podcasts to anime. You’ve heard her for decades worldwide! Clients have included American Airlines,Pepsi, Visa, Lifetime TV Channel, The Weather Channel, Pace Picante Sauce, Lionel Trains, Texas Instruments Talking Toys, Seven Seas Dressings, Pedialyte Vitamins, promos for ABC, NBC, and BBC America. She is a Simon and Schuster audio book author, narrator, and producer. She has won ADDYS, CLIOS, GOLDEN RADIOS, and AUDIE awards over the years. She is the author of eleven audio titles sold worldwide and continues to produce new titles annually. She is known for teaching voiceover techniques including audio book narration and production, and her BUSINESS OF VOICEOVERS workshops are legendary with students who credit her with starting them in their lucrative voiceover careers!
She began as a singer and actor, opening act for the legend, Tony Bennett, touring America with her show group and releasing hit records as an RCA artist and songwriter produced by the late Chet Atkins. Voiceovers entered her life by accident when another jingle singer mentioned her work in the voiceover area. The rest is history! She served as Creative Director of several major production houses in the past, which she credits with “making me the audio engineer and producer that I am today. I sat beside some of the greatest audio pros in our business and learned from them.” Now, her Dallas recording studio is constantly busy cranking out voiceover demos, commercial projects, audio books, and more! “I’m like the shoemaker’s daughter…some days I can’t find a minute to voice the projects I’m supposed to do myself…I’m wall-to-wall with studio clients! But I love it.”
She continues to teach “mass media singers” in her Dallas studio and periodically gives “studio singing workshops” too. “I can’t let singing go away…it was my total life and I’m an excellent coach who knows the business!” But her voiceover career has really taken “over” full time in the past decade or so. “Voiceovers know no age and that’s a big plus. Singing tends to favor the very young…been there, done that.”
“The ‘Internet revolution’ like this excellent resource, Voices.com, is what’s new, what’s fresh, and what’s happening! Voiceover work worldwide is better than ever before and growing exponentially!” We’re fortunate to be able to make this kind of fabulous money without ever leaving home (except when I travel to teach elsewhere by invitation!).
“Always check out my homepage on my website VoicesVoices.com to see where and when I’m teaching. And if you want to come to Dallas to work with me, I always help with travel facts and sometimes even have my staff pick you up at your hotel or whatever we can do to ease your travel.”
With her husband, a professional bassist with major music credits worldwide, and her Chow dog “Sammy,” she loves travel and teaching in other cities. “I love the new sights, meeting new people, learning new things.” Her two adult sons live in NYC and Switzerland with great careers in journalism and computers. She has three young grandchildren.”They still are babies, but I’m going to try to get them into showbiz… it’s my life.”
She’s teaching workshops in Dallas July 21-28. Visit her site for details. She’s in Denver August 3-10. She teaches several university guest professor appointments next Fall and will do workshops again in Dallas and elsewhere. She’s always happy to speak with you via phone or email!

Enjoyed Bettye’s episode? Leave a comment with your thoughts!