If you feel like your efforts aren’t hitting the mark or are irregular at best, you can get proactive! You can build your roster of clients in several ways in addition to just auditioning. Although responding to casting calls is an important part of the job, so is marketing.
Creating a well-defined marketing plan can help you build a client base faster than auditioning alone.
Must-Have Demos to Showcase Your Voice Acting
- Commercial: These demos last 60 to 90 seconds, and they’re usually a montage of four to five snippets from radio and television ads. They should highlight a full range of emotions, selling styles, moods, and characters.
- Narration: These demos last 60 seconds to five minutes, and they usually are a reading excerpt that gives your listener a taste of the narrator’s style. With this type of demo, you want to demonstrate your ability with narration, characterization, and consistency in tone and pace.
- Animation: These demos last one to two minutes that demonstrate a wide range of characters. You want to showcase your ability with humor, characterization, accents, and comedic elements.
- Promo: They should last one to two minutes and promote a comedy, a drama, a news intro, and a movie trailer.
- As a voice actor, you need to have recorded demos that indicate your abilities and skills to prospective clients. Voice-over demos fall into four main categories, each having their own purpose, style of performance, intended audience.
- Voice over marketing is critical to your success both short term and long term. This post is part of our series on how to become a voice actor.
- Why is voice over marketing so important? The answer lies on the internet. Increasingly the way clients source talent is online. Of course, clients might have a roster of existing voice over talent, but many will either top that up or look for new talent online. Of course, this all depends on the different parts of the voice-over industry.
- Voice over marketing is not like consumer marketing. Consumer marketing is where large companies market goods or services to the general public otherwise known as consumers. Companies like MARS, Nestle, Nike and many other brands mass market to consumers.
- Business to business (B2B) marketing is the term used for when a business buys services off another company or business. In general B2B marketing involves people to people buying. As an example it a buyer might be a voice-over casting director who buys services from a voice-over actor. In larger more complex organizations B2B marketing can involve large contracts, diverse teams of people who each have specialist skills.
- Because voice over marketing is more like B2B marketing you need to think more about the person, the client. This means that you have to be careful not to spam people, not to ‘beg’ for business, not to shout at them on social media (because you can even though they don’t know you!).
- There is a fine line to tread between making potential clients aware of you and being seen as a bother/spammer. Always reflect on how you might react if you were receiving the same communications as you send out.
The Best Voiceover, Ideas, and Tips on Marketing
- Every so often I like to take a moment to recognize how vast the voiceover universe is. So many articles, ideas, and tips on how to succeed in voiceover….I have come to realize that we all have a niche within this niche here. For voice actors, your niche might be the professional conversational guy nailing down those corporate narration auditions, or you could be a warm and friendly mom-type, booking up all those national network spots for Cheerios and Kleenex. For coaches, the niche is a bit different. Good known niche(s) are audition preparation and proven techniques for the commercial voice actor. I am grateful for those out there who have made a niche out of voiceover marketing. It truly is an entire universe of information, strategy, and work for those ready to take it on. The important thing to take note of here is that the majority of you out there competing for voice work absolutely cannot avoid this part of the business. You don’t have an agent, you’re not in a live-casting market, and you need to find your own opportunities every single day. And there’s more beyond the marketing alone. There’s keeping up with voiceover trends and the future of the voiceover industry. Thanks to the online presence of voiceovers nowadays, things are changing entirely from the way they used to be. Joe Schmo in Nowheresville can now make money with his voice. From his closet. Wow. OK, back to marketing. These are the must-do basics to begin your voiceover career and pursue work:
The Must-Do Basics To Begin Your Voiceover Career
- Get professional voiceovers coaching. Learn. Grow. Improve. It is a good idea when the students get trained by at least two different people and more importantly, two people with different perspectives such as a coach like me with a background in Casting, and then from a successful voice actor currently working and booking jobs. Two perspectives double the possibility of improving and collecting useful techniques and strategies. Do your research, get second and third opinions. Vet everyone you are considering paying money to.
- Make your demo. DO get your training first, and without upfront payment for a demo. DON’T sign up with a school or coach that also takes your money for the demo as part of the training package before you have even discovered whether you have the talent or not.
- Get your demo up, on your website. Oh, yes, and then MAKE a website if you don’t have one. There are more than likely thousands of experts out there to help you with building a simple website, so I don’t have any references that would be useful. That’s another universe entirely. I will say that you need a very simple site and that you should probably have your demos right there on that first page or else super easy to find, along with some powerful descriptive words for what kind of voice range you have. For example: smart, conversational, witty, warm, real, etc. Your demo is your calling card. This is how you prove to the voiceover community that you possess skills that are valuable and necessary to bring the copy to life.
- Pick a pay-to-play site and try it out for a year. The two biggies are voices.com and voice123.com. There will be compliments and complaints about these sites always. Glance over them both and see which site’s functionality looks better and give it a try. You are casting a wide net and this is your first throw.
- Begin making your cold calls. Yes, they’re freezing cold, but they do sometimes work. How about just one a day? So easy, but that means you are making 365 cold calls a year! Call your local businesses. Call video production companies, advertising agencies, recording studios, TV and radio stations, talent agencies. A big one according to savvy voice marketers is mandy.com. This is a comprehensive listing of film and TV production resources all over the world. You could say it’s one-stop-shopping for your marketing plan. But – don’t stop. Craigslist has been another place for voice actors to shop for audition possibilities. Search under jobs and also gigs and get creative with your digging in there.
- Make an effort to get listed on multiple voice talent sites. This means those that are self-represented (by the actors themselves) and also those that are talent agencies. This means that you are actually trying to get representation by these agencies. Many of them will not ask for you to sign an exclusivity contract so the more the merrier. This is a quantity pursuit folks. Get noticed more, get more representation, get more answers to your calls, get more auditions, and get more voiceover jobs.
- Stay organized. During all of these marketing, pursuits keep carefully lists of whom you’ve called and what was covered so you don’t repeat your efforts. Think outside of the modern internet box as well – send postcards to clients you’ve already booked work with or that you’re pursuing. Familiarity breeds comfort.
- Don’t forget to replenish the well. This means stop and smell the roses. Don’t get burned out. Schedule time for yourself to actually grow as a person and this will grow your range as a voice actor. It will also make you more likely to enjoy the time spent marketing as a pleasurable challenge and not an exhausting chore. You have nothing to offer the voiceover community if ALL you are doing is marketing all day long. You will eventually lose the person you are marketing, yourself. Keep yourself interesting as a performer by being interested in life outside of this business.
