The 2 Sides of the Marketing Coin

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Bill Dewees: Hi, I’m Bill Dewees and today I’m going to talk to you about the two sides of the marketing coin. But first allow me just a moment to introduce myself. I’m a full-time working voice over talent, also a voice over coach. But also I’m a former media programmer and broadcast talent coach. I’m also a former corporate learning services executive working for an instructional design firm. I’m an MBA, a former college professor of business as well as business and marketing consultant.
All of that to say that I’ve worked in a broad variety of contexts and understand not only the performance side of this business but have a very deep understanding of the marketing side of business. Now the good news is you don’t have to be an MBA. Not even a marketing expert to be effective as a businessperson. And make no mistake, as a voice over talent you are a businessperson and if you don’t think and act as a businessperson well the truth is you’ll never move out of having voice over as a hobby into having voice over as a profession and as a career.
There are a ew principles though that you must understand. Once you understand them they’ll guide your thinking, your planning and finally your business execution. In other words you’ll start to move in the right direction and make progress. Again today I’m talking about the two sides of the marketing coin.
First I want to share with you my personal definition of marketing which is this. Creating and maintaining awareness of you, your product and/or service within the mind of your target audience. Again it’s creating and maintaining awareness, that’s the gist of marketing.
So what are the two sides of the marketing coin. Well I mentioned both of them in the definition, creating and maintaining awareness. Creating and maintaining, the two sides of the coin. Most people that I know and work with have at least a vague idea of the creating part. But rarely do I meet someone who’s effectively executing the maintaining aspect of marketing. The idea that we’re working with here is awareness. Now awareness is precious, it’s so precious and very valuable. Why, because there is so much competition for it. I mean, think about it, kids, friends, spouse, neighbours, employer, work, media, we are bombarded on a daily basis for attempts to get our attention if only for a brief moment.
So how are you creating awareness of your voice over services to your target audience. Well, first of all who is your target audience. Let me just broadly define that as anyone who uses voice over talent. And let’s be honest, that list is very long and with the growth and proliferation of media it’s getting longer every day. That’s the good news and by the way this isn’t rocket science and there’s not one correct answer. There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to get someone’s attention. If you have a really big budget you could do skywriting, you could do national TV ads and the list goes on. But that probably wouldn’t create the return on your investment that you need. Now many people send postcards, that’s great. Phone calls, personal visits, email, video email, agents, services like voices.com, there are many, many ways to economically get your voice in front of the right audience.
Now the next thing to keep in mind is that marketing is not a one-time activity. Just because you sent some postcards out six months ago and nothing happened doesn’t mean, well, really much of anything. Let me introduce you to the idea of the sales funnel. So while you must have quality of course in your talent, your demo, your website, you also have to market using quantity. For example, it may take 100 auditions to get a job, it may take 50 phone calls to get the response that you’re looking for.
So the idea of the sales funnel is that you’ve got a lot going in the top and as you look into the large end of the funnel at the top it gradually works its way down to a very small opening. So you put a lot in at the top and get a little bit out of the bottom. But if you’re only putting a little bit in at the top and not doing quantity in terms of contacting prospective clients you may get nothing or next to nothing out of the bottom. So to summarize, we need to create awareness of ourselves to the right people and a lot of the right people which again is the sales funnel idea.
Now next is the other side of the marketing coin and that is maintaining awareness. One similar trait of most human beings is that we have limited brain capacity. We constantly have to filter information to keep what we perceive to be important easily accessible in our memory. What happens during the marketing process is that you briefly generate awareness with a person. Now most times you’re low on the priority list and you’re quickly forgotten. Occasionally the person who receives your marketing message will listen to your demo and hopefully be positively impacted and maybe make a mental note that you’re good and they may want to contact you at some point in the future.
Now if you’re lucky they’ll remember you but most times they won’t. Plus you may not be the only good talent they hear from. So you almost have to envision it as their radar. When you’re creating awareness you show up on their radar but you have to understand that you quickly disappear from the radar. So maintaining the awareness makes sure that you continually keep that beeping or flashing dot on their radar which is you so that when the time comes they’ll remember you.
Now how do you do that. Frequency, frequency is key to maintaining awareness. Now general marketing wisdom is that six marketing touches per year, by touches anytime that you generate awareness, anytime that you touch your prospect and they recognize your existence. If you do that six times a year in theory you’ll maintain awareness, you’ll stay on that client’s radar. For some maybe less, for some maybe more.
Now let me share with you a real story, my story of something that happened that really drove that reality home for me. I started an email campaign actually working with a company that, I subscribe to a service where they actually send out my email correspondence for me, marketing email correspondence to what I consider to be warm prospects as well as my current clients. And I do that on a monthly basis. And the first time that I used this service within, I’d say within an hour or two I received a phone call from a client that I had been out of touch with for years. And the interesting thing was the gentleman was excited that I had sent him the email because he said “I was just thinking about you, I couldn’t remember your name. I used you and it must have been at least two, maybe three years ago.” And he liked the work that I did but hadn’t, not had a need to use me since then. And he said “I’m so glad you sent the email so that I could call you because I have a job for you to do.”
So it drove home the reality that as much as I would like to think that people remember me, as much as you would like to think that people remember you, the truth is within the reality and the lives of our prospects we’re really not all that important. So by frequently bringing ourselves into their field of awareness is the only way that we have any hope of being contacted when it’s time for them to hire voice over talent.
So again, it’s create and maintain awareness. They don’t function well apart from each other, you must consistently generate awareness to a lot of people. You should have a plan to stay in touch, I call it a marketing communication plan. And again there is not one correct answer, there is not one right method. The methods and the ways of doing this are limited only by your creativity. But a few ideas, newsletters can be a good way to stay in touch. Something as simple as email that I just mentioned. Making a personal phone call and sending out a handwritten card or letter every now and then is a very nice touch. Also video email can be very effective.
So remember if you want to build your voice over hobby into a voice over business you must recognize and execute both sides of the marketing coin and that is creating and maintaining awareness. I wish you great success in your voice over career. And for resources to help you I invite you to visit voice-over-training.org as well as my YouTube channel Bill Dewees where I have about 160 video voice over tutorials.
Now a few times a year I leave the studio to conduct my voice over revolution workshop. It’s a two-day event to teach you the performance and business skills you need to succeed. To find out if I’m coming to a city near you simply visit voice overrevolution.com. Thanks for listening and I hope to talk to you again very soon.
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