Niche Marketing for Voice Actors

Stephanie Ciccarelli

January 1, 2008

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Join Voice Over Expert and author of “LoveNotes: Marketing and Branding for Voice Over Artists”, Frank Frederick in his lecture “Niche Marketing”. Learn how to differentiate yourself from others, especially when marketing on the internet by developing a niche marketing strategy. By defining your target audience and focusing your efforts in their direction, you will reap greater benefits, work for better clientele and make more money with less work.

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Frank Frederick, The Voice, Niche Marketing, LoveNotes, Marketing, Niche, Voice Overs, Voice Overs, Voice Acting

Transcript of Niche Marketing for Voice Actors

[Opening Music]
Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It’s never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
This week Voices.com is pleased to present Frank Frederick.
Frank Frederick: This is Frank Frederick. I’ve written a book, “Love Notes, Marketing and Branding for a Voice Over Artist” and look at the business of voiceovers. I’d like to share with you a bit of information on how to differentiate yourself from others especially when marketing on the internet. My thanks go out to Voices.com for hosting this Voiceover Expert series.
Now, let’s get started. As you develop your voiceover identity, it is important to find the niche where you fit. When just starting out on the voiceover business, often times the marketing efforts are the shotgun approach. Point the advertising and marketing in the right direction and you’re bound to hit something. By defining your target audience and focusing your efforts in that direction, you will reap greater benefits. You will be working with better clientele. Knowing whom your brand targets will get you the customers you want. You do not need to wastes time and effort chasing the low paying job because your marketing is focused on customers who already understand the value of your services and they’re willing to pay a fair price.
You will have more money-making time with a focused niche market. When you know the needs and wants of your customers, you will spend less time chasing work and more time working with class. By focusing your brand identity to a niche, you may customize your brand to a targeted audience allowing you to address the needs of your clients. This means you will acquire stronger responses for you marketing efforts.
There will be a greater income opportunity, more money-making time added together with better clientele means higher income. There is nothing wrong with making more money with less work. You will build your customer list by integrating yourself within a specific market. Your benefits will be almost enumerable. Once you have established your market and begun cultivating clients, your perceived value will grow. Customers will refer your services to their friends and partners in their niche market when you have developed seed relationships. Do not be afraid to ask for referrals.
A niche is nothing more than a specialization. It can be a broad specialization or a very specific one. A niche can be formed around a product, a specific group of people who buy that product or service or the way you sell a service. A niche is really just a variation on what has been called market differentiation. The concept here is, why would I use your voiceover services instead of the services from one of the other thousands of people who are telling me they have a similar sound. When it comes to the internet, the term niche has come to mean finding keywords which target the desires of a customer when searching for a product or service. Find the right words to describe your services to an audience and by applying a simple formula, you can guarantee business success, right? Wrong. It is not nearly that simple nor that limiting.
This concept my sound easy but there are a few catches to niche marketing. People who need what you have may not know how to describe your business or service. You’re fledgling clients, maybe searching for your business services under the same terms as everyone else who uses the same specification for a boarder category and this term is not necessarily meeting their needs.
For example, your potential customer maybe searching the internet for voiceover artist. The likely prospect will find more than four million websites, dealing with everything from voiceover artist to Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP. What your clients are really looking for is a spokesperson for their business who is unique and will represent the qualities inherent to the possible plans (company). How do your search terms for your website make you typical or different?
In the virtual business environment we call the internet, it is nearly impossible to develop a website which does not have competition. If your website does not have competition, it would likely not have a good demand either. That is the nature of marketing. So niching, my own word creation is only a solution to more accurately target potential customers and clients and help find people who need what you have. Niching is how to means of eliminating competition. Your keywords have to target what you actually have to offer clients and customers.
Here’s an example. Ashley W has a website on which she gets the number one search engine placement on a specific phrase. She uses the phrase in a unique way. Patrons find her website and do not find what they want and then they leave. She gets lots of natural search engine traffic on the one phrase but she does not get customers. Possible clientèle are not finding what they want.
Ashley’s website holds the top position of the niche but Ashley is not able to get customers because searchers are expecting something different than what she offers. You have to market where your potential customers are and you have to market to what they want and need. If you’re using a large net in the ocean and you’re trolling randomly, you may catch a fish or two but you won’t do very well. If on the other hand you search out the schools of fish that are clustered together, you can dip in your net and bring up a great haul. People are not fish but they do tend to congregate in predictable groups.
Find a way to market to groups of people who need what you have and you’ll do much better than if you just blast ads at random. Targeting to a niche market is more than just picking keywords or deciding that you want to do a specific thing for a specific group. It is reflected in everything you do, from the design and layout of your website to the wording of your marketing materials to the packaging of your service and the way you interact with your customers and clients.
Market differentiation or niching has some strong points. You can form a niche around any uniqueness. Some potential niches are unique services, higher value. Price point is not a good choice here. Better customer service, more hand holding with technical issues, knowledge of specific topics or interest or specific personality types, humors, academic, legal et cetera are some of the examples. You might setup a website targeting a broad niche with individual pages which target specific elements of your niche market. You can build multiple websites or have specific pages on one website each with a slightly different focus.
I have a website design for corporate voiceovers, another with specific information on radio commercial copy writing, another website has the objective of reaching the radio and television industry for promos and topicals and there’s a series of website on marketing, web design, branding and business tactics for voiceover artist. Each one of my websites focuses upon a specific niche within the broad topic of voiceover. Customers and clients who view one website are likely to look at another internet location of mine if they do not find what they want on the website where they’re looking now. Each website is cross-linked with my other relevant web locations.
This concept applies no matter what you have to offer. You have to find a way to convince your prospective customers they want to buy from you, not from anyone of your competition. Learn what makes your voiceover services unique and yes, even this is not a enough. You as your own individual company need to find a way to set yourself a part from other voiceover artist especially if you intend to market online. No matter what type of voice you have, no matter what you do whether you sell products, services or information, you have to find a way to make your voiceover business unique and fetching and to get your services found by people searching the internet. Targeting customers, marketing where they are likely to be and providing something special is what sets the wannabes apart from the professionals.
Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover 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 Podcast Directory or by visiting Podcasts.Voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.
[Closing Music]

Links from today’s show:

Frank Frederick
Frank Frederick

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Expert Frank Frederick
Frank Frederick, The Voice (TM), is a voice over artist, creator of the exclusive iSpeek file delivery software, and author based in Park City, Utah USA. Frank’s “LoveNotes: Marketing and Branding for Voice Over Artists”, have wowed the industry the continent over with his ingenious tips and contagious personality. Frank Frederick’s philosophy is that the right voice determines whether or not an audience listens to an audio production, and with his guidance, voice actors will find their own way to brand their voice to meet the expectations of their clients and woo them with their own brand of “lovenotes”. To learn more about Frank Frederick, visit his website or read about Frank’s lecture at VOICE 2007.

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