Fellow blogger and voice actor Paul Schmidt posted on social media recently:
“‘Marketing my VO business makes me feel icky.’
It is perfectly reasonable to reach out to people who need what you provide.
Roll up your sleeves. Get your hands dirty. This is your career.”
Marketing? Ew. Gross.
Paul’s post got me, because for years, I have struggled with the self-marketing piece of this voiceover puzzle.
Even coming from the self-promotional world of theatre and film, and having done marketing for theater companies for years, I have struggled with the idea of cold-outreach marketing required for a successful voiceover career.
I took multiple marketing courses, talked to other voice actors and coaches about their marketing, and tried different methods, and no matter what, I always got to a point where I felt overwhelmed.
It CAN feel icky, if you do it wrong. It can even feel icky if you do it right!
This is going to be gross, but bear with me…
Marketing is kinda like searching for diamonds in a manure-filled pigsty.
Come on in! The water’s fine!
If there was a pig pen, all mucky, full of stinky hog crap (and the occasional angry sow), and your friend told you that someone had dropped a bag of loose diamonds in there (don’t ask why, it’s just an analogy, and a weird one at that)…
Would you be willing to go in and get them if it meant you got to keep them?
No one is asking you to go in there unprotected, but it is NOT going to be pretty.
You might have to get creative with your methods of retrieval. Some methods might work for other people, and not for you. You might have to just keep trying until you find the right method to get those diamonds without getting a face full of 💩.
Would you do it?
Sooooo shiny!
A friend of mine has said to me on numerous occasions, “Well, I’d try it, if I thought it would work. But I need proof….”
And I have said in response, “Are the rewards I’ve gotten for my efforts not proof enough for you?”
Some people just want to focus on the shit and the angry pigs and not the diamonds.
Or they give up too quickly when one method proves ineffective. Or maybe they get an emerald and that’s not good enough.
Last year, I did what I would call an extremely modest amount of cold email marketing over the course of about three months. And my reward for that marketing was somewhere in the realm of $9000.
Imagine what I could have made if I actually did it consistently and followed up!
I’m being fully transparent with you, because marketing has been a struggle for me. But at the same time, I recognize that it DOES have value, and therefore it is something I’m actively working at getting better at. And actively working through those feelings of ickiness to get to the point where they lessen.
(Kinda like exposure therapy for arachnophobics.)
Snow White might have done some housework, but those dwarves did the heavy labor.
Well, one of these days, I’m going to figure it out, and every day, I’ll go to work singing “Hi ho! Hi ho!” like I’m one of Snow White’s seven dwarves (was there one called Stinky? Cuz that would fit), and I will be pulling diamonds out of that pigpen like it was a freaking goldmine!
So, you gonna be in there with me? Or are you scared to get a little dirty?