How NOT To Use Linkedin To Find Voice Over Work
Welcome back and welcome to how not to use LinkedIn to find voiceover work. When it comes to LinkedIn for voiceover artists, how not to use LinkedIn is just as important. These are my best LinkedIn tips for voiceover when it comes to how to find voice acting clients.
And stick around because I'll also tell you how to correctly use LinkedIn and give you another tool which will save you a massive amount of time and effort in your voiceover marketing.
I get this question all the time: "What's social media platforms should I be on to find voice acting clients?"
The short answer is, if you've got to pick one, the clear winner is LinkedIn. Now, most people don't think of LinkedIn as traditional social media, but LinkedIn is way more than just a professional social media platform or an online resume.
LinkedIn, my friends, is the world's largest database of working people, with roughly 180 million users in the U.S. alone. According to Wpromote 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation and 62% say it generates them leads. That's more than twice any other social media platform.
LinkedIn, by far will be your richest source of leads. It's also an opportunity to build trust by optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Maybe we'll talk about that in another video. Let me know in the comments if you'd be interested in seeing that.
Look, I hear you. You're saying, "Yes, Paul, I understand you can generate leads on LinkedIn, but are they quality leads?" Fair question. Here are some real-world examples of jobs I've generated from leads on LinkedIn.
A national TV and digital campaign for a recent John Grisham novel.
Corporate Work for Mondeléz, the makers of Oreo (Love me some Oreos), Deloitte, Paychex, Delta Airlines and a whole lot more.
An E-learning client which pays me over $20,000 annually.
Medical and technical narration.
And overall a body of proven bookings and revenue, which then led to signing with two prominent agents which led to more and better audition opportunities and more and better jobs.
So LinkedIn is the best source to strategically search for and find targeted leads. That's its strength because almost everybody in the working world is on LinkedIn.
I hear a lot of voice actors tell me they begin their lead generation searches on Google and yes, for example, you can search “video production houses Tulsa” and you will get a list of video production studios in Tulsa.
But here's the problem. Video production studios don't hire you.
People do.
Firing off a generic email or worse yet, filling out their contact form will not often likely get you in front of the person, the decision maker who will hire you or put you on their roster.
And what's worse, it shows you're lazy and you didn't bother to find the right person to talk to in the first place.
It's easy, it's reactive, and it's not very effective.
"AHA!" you say, "But Paulie, I'm smarter than that. I use LinkedIn to generate my leads. I find strategically targeted decision makers and I reach out to connect to them on LinkedIn. And that, my friend, is where you're doing it wrong.
First, let me clarify. I'll give you credit for finding the likely decision makers on LinkedIn.
That's the correct and right way to go. Searching for companies, whether it's on Google or LinkedIn, puts an extra needless step in the process and slows your entire marketing process down. Look for the people, the decision-makers, the folks that are likely to hire voice actors that step number one.
Now you've got a robust list of targeted leads. Congratulations! Great job.
Step number two, yes, you do have to reach out to them. And this is where most voice actors will take the next seemingly logical step and reach out to those folks with a connection request manually and painstakingly, one by one, on LinkedIn.
That's where you're doing it wrong
You could reach out to connect with leads on LinkedIn. And yes, there is some usefulness in that.
But not everyone is active on LinkedIn.
At the time of this video, LinkedIn user statistics show 722 million active users, but only 310 million, or about 43% use the platform even on a monthly basis. And only 40% of those, about 124 million people worldwide use the platform on a daily basis.
Only about one in six people on average are active daily LinkedIn users. And finally, you can only request up to 100 connections per week. Up until 2021, it was 100 per day, now it's 100 per week.
So while connecting on LinkedIn does provide a touchpoint, it's not a timely and reliable way to consistently get in front of likely decision-makers who will hire voice actors.
And when it comes to getting in front of your prospects, consistency is key.
LinkedIn as a communication tool is not very reliable, effective, or scalable, and to reach out to leads in the proper volume, you need to scale your outreach and you just can't do that well on LinkedIn.
So how do you reach out best to all those targeted leads you generate?
Remember, one in six people use LinkedIn daily. How many people do you think use email daily? Answer: Just about everyone. Email is a much more reliable, timely, scalable, and much more importantly, consistent way to get in front of your prospects regularly. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 79% of B2B companies say email is their most effective channel.
Think about that for a minute.
Of all the channels available to business-to-business marketers, email is the most effective and free.
So now you get a great massive lead list and now you need to find the emails of those people. So you start searching manually and painstakingly through their websites and what have you. Spending minutes and minutes looking for a prospect's email online is a flat-out waste of time. Even when you're able to find a decision makers email, this manual hunting process is not efficient or scalable.
One really great tool you can use is called Hunter.io. I've tested a lot of email finder tools and I find Hunter.io to be among the most accurate and efficient. Now that said, no email finder tool is going to be 100% accurate. People move jobs all the time, especially since the pandemic.
But in terms of bang for your buck, Hunter.io is a fantastic investment because it's going to save you a massive amount of time over hunting manually for email addresses online. All that manually searching is going to do nothing but slow you down and diminish the ultimate number of people you're able to reach out to in a day, a week, a month, or a year.
You'll get sick of me saying this, but time once again is your most precious asset as a voice actor and entrepreneur.
Alright, if you found this video helpful, make sure you like, subscribe, and help us get the word out to other voice actors. And don't forget to ring that YouTube bell so you'll be the first to know when we publish a new video every Thursday.
And there are three other big ways to fail in voiceover. Find out what they are here and how to avoid them. We'll see you back here soon. Thanks for watching and reading.