It's a cold, hard fact: A voiceover marketing plan is critical to your voiceover business.

Marketing for voice actors is a fraught subject, and most voice actors don't have a voice over marketing strategy, email marketing strategy or even any vague, faint direction in their voice over email marketing. Most voiceover artists are petrified at worst and nauseated at best over marketing for voice actors.

Today, we're going to get you over that fear. So buckle up, Buttercup.

So years ago, I started to notice that we're losing good people in this business. They're giving up. They’re quitting. And when I say good people, I mean people that have invested in their training, in themselves, in their gear. They have a recording space that is treated and sounds good.

They're talented, they're motivated, they're skilled. And yet they still find it too damned hard to find work in this business.

And to me, that's heartbreaking because voiceover literally changed my life. It saved my mental health and it’s far and away the best thing I've ever done professionally.

And I want everybody to have a legit shot at that.

And this all came to a head for me when I read over a recent State of VO survey conducted by the Voice Actors of New York City. It says, and you probably know this by now, that 75% of U.S. voice actors report making less than 40 grand a year. Also 75% report reaching out to market their services less than THREE times a day.

Coincidence? I think not.

So I set out to find out why. Why are we so passive when it comes to marketing our own voiceover business? What's frustrating us? What's holding us back? What are we afraid of? What skill sets do we lack? What's really going on here? So I made a goal to talk to 50 voice actors face to face, or at least over Zoom.

I talked to dozens of voice actors

I ended up talking to 69 voice actors over the course of about 75 days, and I collected data from 55 of them because some of the folks that volunteered were just too new to have a frame of reference developed yet. One of the things I was most curious about is what's frustrating voice actors in today's world. What do they struggle with?

What did they find vexing? What do they need help with? One of the biggest frustrations for voice actors today is around marketing and developing their voice over business. Of the 55 people I collected data from, 57% of those mentioned this frustration directly. I asked every voice actor,

“What's holding you back”?

Here is a cross-section of responses from my notes.

“Not having a clear direction of where I'm going or what it will evolve into.”

“No clear path on how to build the business. I can record, edit and send, but how do I create the business? The tech in the acting part is the easy part. The hard part is, how do I build the business? I need structure.”

“The process of finding clients and getting comfortable with that. How do I find them? What do I do”?

“The biggest challenge is growing my business on my own and marketing myself. I'm not familiar with it, not knowing how to market.

I have everything else I need. But now what? How to market successfully?”

“I'm trained, but now I have to find work. But I don't know how.” “Finding clients, the marketing. It seems so impossible. When I start with the marketing. It seems so far-reaching.”

“Attempting self-marketing that appears to be going nowhere. I have some experience in marketing and the number of unacknowledged outreaches is unnerving. I try not to cold call because I don't have any luck. I've tried to be more strategic. It's been way more quiet than I expected.”

Again, nauseated at best, petrified at worst.

The thing we fear the most as voice actors is that all this time and effort and money and training and everything that we've put into this will all one day go for nothing. That we will fail. That it will be too hard to support ourselves and our families. That in the end it will be either too hard to figure out or too hard to do.

And we will give up.

That fear is real.

We all know somebody who couldn't outrun the bogeyman and threw in the towel, and sadly, it happens every day. We fear what we don't understand, and the overwhelming majority of voice actors come into this business, by no fault of their own, with no understanding of or background in marketing, sales, or business development.

And as a result, many don't have a marketing, sales, or even a business mindset.

LIMITING BELIEFS

When I spoke to those dozens of voice actors, here's what I heard:

“I'm an actor, not a business person.”

“I'm not a routine person. I don't have discipline.”

“I don't know what to say when I reach out to business people.”

“I don't want to be annoying when I reach out to leads.”

“I tried marketing my voiceover business. It didn't work.”

“I'm uncomfortable talking about myself.”

“I don't like patting myself on the back.

“No one gets back to me.”

“I don't have the time to market my business.”

That last one makes me nuts. Look, I get if you're honest and you tell me you don't like marketing or you're afraid of it, that's normal, and that's okay.

But to tell me you don't have the time to market your business? Really?

Put down your phone, turn off Better Call Saul and stop making excuses.

Wordle can wait.

Most often, the biggest source of the bullshit in our own heads is ourselves. It's the false stories we tell ourselves when we're fearful or frustrated. And it limits our progress and kills our ability to be an agent of change in our own lives.

MINDSET AND MARKETING

Stanford psychologist and noted author Carol Dweck famously said there are two main types of mindset:

1. A fixed mindset, which says that you believe that your talents, abilities, and intelligence are set in stone.

2. A growth mindset, on the other hand, says that whatever I need to do, figure, out, learn, develop, I can do that.

Rather than disempowering yourself by saying, “I'm an actor, not a business person,” empower yourself by saying, “You know what? I'm a trained artist who provides a valuable service. I solve a real business problem for people, and I get paid appropriately.”

Your mindset, more than anything else, will determine your success as a voice actor and as an entrepreneur. More than your talent, more than your training. More than the number of auditions you do.

All those other things are important. Absolutely.

But none more important than mindset.

That's why we spend more time on mindset in the VO Freedom Master Plan than on anything else. It is that foundational and that impactful. I help you reframe those false and empowering limiting beliefs into empowering more powerful ways to look at yourself and your business.

The reason most voice actors don't have a marketing plan or even a business plan is most don't come into this business with the skills and expertize necessary to put together a plan that practically answers, “Look, how do I spend my day? What are the practical tasks that I do to help market and grow my business effectively”?

And when they don't know how to create a marketing plan and when they don't know where to turn for help, they get stuck.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You can't just open the doors to a voiceover business and expect people to waltz in and hand you boxes of scripts and bags of money.

If you just build it, they won't come.

But if you build and execute a plan to market it, they will come.

For more information on the VO Freedom Master Plan, click the link, and to get my Move Touch Inspire Newsletter for voice actors that comes out every Thursday, click that link, too.

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Thanks so much for watching as always. I am hugely grateful for your support. Thanks again. We'll see you back here soon.