By British Male Voiceover Artist Chris Tester
A call to action or CTA is a direction or an instruction that you give to a potential customer to end up purchasing from you. You are calling them to make a specific action that will make their circumstances better. But though we understand this concept in voice-over copy itself when we try to apply it to our marketing correspondence.
The messaging often gets muddled if we don’t have a clear call to action in everything we send. Then we risk two things:
Wasting people’s time by confusing potential collaborators about what we want from them
Causing ourselves anxiety because we don’t have clear expectations about what the response is that we want, and this will have a huge knock-on effect on your marketing as a whole
As a result, the more you reach out in such a muddled way, the more demotivated you’ll get by the subsequent silence. And the more you’ll be willing to speculate about whether or not you’re not good enough or your outreach isn’t good enough, or your demons aren’t good enough that you’re terrible. And that you’re being blacklisted when the reality may be is that you’re exceptional.
But because you’re not being clear in what you’re asking, people don’t know how to respond, and therefore they save time by not doing so. Let’s get into the habit of always checking that your marketing has a clear call to action. Now, most of the time for voice actors, the ask itself won’t be that avert you’re not asking people to buy or hire now because voice-over artists and voice-over work doesn’t operate in that kind of workflow.
It could be,
“Could I be added to your voice roster, or could I be considered for any future projects”
But this is assuming that you know that they deal with voice-over talent. If you’re reaching out to a video production company and you’re not sure whether or not they do deal with voice-over directly, you can modify your ask, quantify it and have it in two sections.
So, for example,
“Do you deal with voice-over talent directly, and if so, could I be added to your database.”
Apply this filter to all of your correspondence. If time is money, then you want to make sure that all of your correspondence is as frictionless as possible so that you can distill it all down and value your prospect’s time.
The sooner you get into the habit of really distilling down your correspondence and asking those specific questions, the sooner you’ll start getting direct answers back. And if they’re positive and people do want to work with you, then great, but if they don’t, at least people have responded to the question you’ve asked, and you’ll know to move instead of as ever; thanks for checking out this video
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Naturally RP - British Male Voiceover