By Chris Tester - British Male Voiceover Artist
Diversifying your income streams is crucial as a freelancer, and if you've been watching this channel for any amount of time, then you should be aware of the following ones:
Working through agents
Work through pay-to-play auditions
Work through direct marketing
Work through SEO
But when it comes to social media, our thinking can become a little muddled. People will tell us that creating content to establish and reaffirm our reputation is incredibly important but being clear about how the process actually works can be very Vega best when it comes to social media. Now I've been experimenting quite a lot over the past six months on a variety of different social media platforms to work out exactly what I should be posting but, even more importantly, why, and what I found most useful to define is that social media works in two clear ways:
In the first place, it's part of your outbound marketing strategy to use social platforms to contact potential leads or clients to make them aware of you and essentially augmenting your direct marketing.
The second way is through social selling or inbound marketing, which is all about getting people both inside and outside of your social circle to know, like, and trust you to reaffirm your status as a preeminent professional in your field.
So in this video, I wanted to explain and demystify slightly what my approach is to this latter aspect. Now, of course, I have to confess that in a hopefully quite short video, this is a very superficial impression of what social selling actually is all about. You need to optimize your profiles on social media. So it operates a bit like a website so that you're as clear as possible about what your value, proposition, and services are. And you still need to incorporate essential things like calls to action and have a system of logging that is engaging with your content. So you know how warm a lead could potentially be!
Problems of Direct Marketing
So when we look at direct marketing, there are two very clear problems:
Lead Generation
You have to spend time actually identifying the people that it is that you want to reach out to contact.
Nature of That Contact
If you're reaching out to someone for the first time with no previous dialogue at all, then it's a cold contact, and therefore it's going to be more likely to bounce off someone than a warm lead.
How to Overcome These Problems?
Now, these factors shouldn't be an excuse not to do direct marketing. It is something that takes time, but it's also the surest way of being able to build relationships with clients that are yours and not platforms. But especially if you're a voice actor who's very familiar with the commercial copy, you'll understand that people don't like being sold to. They like to know, like, and trust the people that they're engaging with, and the selling itself is actually very subtle. And social selling is a way of doing that in marketing terms.
So the concept behind social selling is ostensibly quite simple on paper. The first thing you do is that you create content on your platform of choice so that people get to know, like, and trust you by you entertaining them or educating them, or a combination of the two. And then, through the quality of your content, people get to engage with you. They choose to connect with you, and they begin to know, like, and trust you. And as your network grows organically so the size of your audience will increase on a platform like LinkedIn. For example, when you connect with someone, the people that they are connected with which you did not have a greater chance of actually being able to see your content. Those second and third-degree connections as the platform label them, and you can even do this in a quite specific conscious way.
So, for example, if there's a company that you really want to work with, there's the direct marketing way of approaching that, which is identifying who the decision-maker is and then reaching out to them directly. But an alternative way of doing this would be to connect with multiple people who are not decision-makers and who don't deal with voiceover. For example, people that you can connect with, and then through the process of connecting with these people and then creating content that they engage with then, the people who in that same company do make decisions about voiceover will start to see the content as well.
So they'll begin to hopefully know, like, and trust you. Over a longer period of time, this then essentially becomes a social numbers game. The more people that are in your network, the more people that are engaging with your content, and the more that there's a chance that you will come across the right person at the right by time who may be thinking that they actually might need your service. And the crucial thing is that, unlike direct marketing, you might not even know that these people exist in the first place. The crucial aspect of social selling that I really needed to get my head around is that you really need to think about the social as well as the media.
So the media to start with the end is obviously the content that we create in order to get as many people as possible to engage in your media. Then you have to actively be social on these platforms. In other words, you need to engage. You need to offer a value and rather than just saying,
"Oh, yeah, that's great!"
And throwing a few likes around, you need to start actually having conversations and bringing value to those interactions instead. And this is not something that's going to result in overnight success and immediate job offers, but it's something that, if done well, can really expand organically a network of people who potentially might be able to use you in the future.
Some Valuable Recommendations
I recommend looking at the likes of people like Leah Turner or Nick Rayburn, or Ashley Leeds, who all have been able to master ways of creating good engaging content that continues conversations and gets your brand and your skills, your knowledge, your values, all out there. Whether you're saying the right thing or not doesn't really matter so much; instead, what your emphasis is on is proving your worth, showing your tastes, your likes, your dislikes, and your passions, and basically being able to catalyze people's decision-making process about you so that they can identify you as a creative who is worth engaging.
I'm just trying to shed some light on this process if you're spending a lot of time on social media at the moment now, but you don't really know what it is that you should be doing in order to get some results from it. It is a much less direct sales approach to direct marketing and, therefore, can be a much more enjoyable experience. And I'll confess myself I am still very much in the early stages of my journey on social selling, but one of the things that I really enjoy about it is that content creation is a creative act. It's not just thumping out the same emails and giving someone a compliment, and it also doesn't work in isolation. If a particular piece of content that I create gets a lot of traction, then it's something that I can also incorporate into my direct marketing workflow.
So as a follow-up email, for example, rather than just boring people with my availability or what microphone I use, which is all still kind of valid but kind of what people are already doing in the space. Anyway, if your job is essentially to stand out to add value, and to be memorable in some way, then actively participating in content creation is a great way of doing that. Being only five to six months into this process myself, I am seeing results, but I'll admit it completely slowly, but they are happening. For example, a game Dev posted a casting call which I was totally unaware of, but because people within my work knew me and liked and trusted me. They were in a position where they felt that they could recommend me because they thought that I fit the brief, and this resulted without any audition in a day's work on a title with the developer that I very much admired from playing his games when I was a boy, and this was only very possible through this inbound marketing method. It didn't involve me just reaching out at the right time and hoping that I'd be chosen.
Last Words
In a future video, I'm going to try and look at some of the different forms of content that you can make as a freelancer and as a voice-over artist in order to be able to entertain and engage potential audience members. And that's going to both looks at things that I'm doing myself and what I'm seeing that's effectively working that other people in the same space are doing. Thank you so much for watching. If you found this video of any use, then please like, subscribe, and spread the word about this channel. And I look forward to seeing you next time!