One of the greatest things about the voice-over business is that people come into this line of work from all walks of life and from all stages of life. We have retirees, college kids, stay at home moms, stay at home dads, and side hustlers from every conceivable career: on-camera actors, singers, cable stringers, butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers. The diversity of backgrounds is beautiful.

That also means that the vast majority of voice actors come into this business without any experience or skills in marketing and sales. That’s problem Number 1.

Problem Number 2 is that, while we’re bursting at the seams with technique coaches and gurus to teach you the audio production skills you need to be competent, as an industry we have been glacially slow to teach people how to market their services and find the work we’re so adept at training them to do.

The traditional model of how to find voice-over work looked like this for decades:

You either were union and had an agent and auditioned and booked, or you likely didn’t work a lot.

Over the last 20 years or so, technology has given rise to 2 major changes:

1. The explosion of digital media as a marketing tool. Every company is now a media company. There’s more work for voice actors now than in the history of the planet.

2. Because of that, companies began to work with voice actors directly, develop their own, often smaller rosters, and own the relationships with voice talent.

As a result, we have a very passive industry. We suck at marketing ourselves. We’d much rather sail hundreds of auditions into the ether on the pay-to-plays than sit down and do the work to reach out to people.

Here are the three biggest mistakes you’re likely making in your voice-over marketing

Mistake Number 1: You’re not reaching out to enough people.

In the most recent (2021) State of Voice Over Survey conducted by the Voice Actors of New York City, 73.5 percent of voice actors reported reaching out to market their services less than three times a day.

What business in the world can be successful by marketing to two people a day?

This is a numbers game. Every time I hear a coach tell people, “Oh, you’ve got to reach out to at least 5 or 10 people a day,” I cringe.

Three-quarters of our entire business makes less than $40,000 a year and three-quarters of us talk to 2 people a day. Do you really think talking to eight more people a day will significantly change that?

Mistake #2: You’re not reaching out to them often enough.

I can’t tell you how many voice actors to say, “Well you know, I developed [or god forbid, bought] this list of contacts and I reached out like [300 or 500 or sometimes even 1000] of them, and I didn’t get any results.”

I’ve said this before: one sit-up won’t make you fit. Reaching out to a contact one time is about as effective. Across industries, on average, it takes eight touches to engage a prospect. The odds of reaching out to a prospect at the exact moment they’re casting a project are astronomical-to-none.

Try telling a toddler, “No, don’t touch that, it’s dangerous” one time. See how effective that is. Marketing is the same. It takes repetition over time for people to get the message.

Mistake # 3: You’re wasting time on social media.

I’m not sure how this concept got started, but the idea that following contacts on social media and engaging with their content, and trying to develop relationships on multiple platforms as a primary means of attracting work is, quite frankly, crap.

Traditional social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.), as I’ve said before, is not essential for building your business.

Stalking people on social media is creepy and time-consuming. And it’s not very effective.

So WHY are so many voice actors making these three common mistakes?

Reason #1: You don’t know what you don’t know.

As I said at the top, most voice actors don’t have a marketing or sales background and don’t understand the basic principles of marketing. You don’t know in large part…

• Whom to reach out to (and whom not to reach out to)

• What to say (and what not to say)

• How to say it (and how not to say it), and

• How to follow up (and how not to follow up)

Reason #2: You don’t have a plan and a system.

To reach out to and follow up with people in sufficient volume – remember Mistake #1 – you need a repeatable, efficient system that scales your time and effort.

Everyone thinks they’re organized. “Oh, I keep everyone I talk to on an Excel spreadsheet.” That’s like going into a battle with a plastic Captain America shield. Good luck.

You don’t have a suitable suite of competent and capable tools in place working together to get the job done. You’re under-equipped and under systematized.

My mission is to help people learn what they, through no fault of their own, don’t know and teach them a system that grows relationships at sufficient scale to lead to consistent work and income.