Join Voice Over Expert Frank Frederick in his podcast "The Year of Personal Branding".  Adding the personal touch to your marketing efforts this year can really pay off. Begin with writing letters - not emails to prospects, customers, and clients and build great relationships in 2009.

Download Podcast Episode 78 »

Tags:

Frank Frederick, The Voice, Niche Marketing, Branding, Personal Branding, Chinese New Year, Year of the Ox, Voice Overs, Voice Overs, Voice Acting

Transcript of The Year of Personal Branding

[Opening Music]

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It's never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won't find anywhere else.

This week Voices.com is pleased to present Frank Frederick.

Frank Frederick: According to the Chinese zodiac, this is the year of the female earth cow. Each year, the Chinese horoscope is designated by one of 12 animals and one of the yin yang elements of metal, water, wood, fire and earth. If your lucky element is earth, then you will have a very good 2009 year. If earth represents your money, then your money luck will bring you a big fortune. When earth is related to your job, then you will have good career luck in 2009. This is Frank Frederick, The Voice. And what does this have to do with voiceover marketing? Nothing. But for those who are into the "year of" scenario, last year was the year of the brand. Have you crafted your love notes for your business? Copies of the book Love Notes: Branding and Marketing for Voiceover Artists are still available.

At 2009, brings you the year of personal marketing. This is the year for building personal relationships. As the economy is changing, voiceover clients want to make every purchase a safe one which means producers and other voiceover clients will rely on talent or brands they know and trust. Closing the sale will require attention to techniques which allow you to relate with your customers one on one. It has never been more important to model a set of effective marketing communication letters which may be customized for individual prospects. Writing a great letter takes a bit of time and skill. Whether you use it to follow up a lead, close a hot prospect or introduce your services, a well-crafted personal letter will be one of your most powerful marketing tools this year.

This is the formula to help you write letters which motivate your customers, clients and prospects. Here is now to begin. Convey an individual message. Have you ever received advertising junk mail from competing companies with extremely similar offers? Chances are you toss them out because you could not tell one company's message from the other. Take a look at one of your old marketing or advertising letters. If you could simply replace your competition's business name with yours on these advertising and marketing messages and the intent does not need to be changed, then it is time to redesign your method. The message, pricing and offers contained in the letter must be unique to your business and tie in to your brand. Have a strong, attention-grabber.

Immediately grab the reader's interest with your marketing letter or it will be the discarded as junk mail. Depending on the type of voiceover business you desire and what you are marketing, your attention-grabber can be a special offer or a lead communicating a unique benefit. When your letter follows a phone call, highlight the benefits your prospect desires in the first paragraph. Set quantifiable goals. Every good letter should be composed to make something happen. Concentrate on the objective of the benefits you'll receive before you begin writing and decide what information the letter must contain to produce the desired results. Make reading your letter worthwhile for your prospects and it will reward you by advancing the sales process. If you are sending letters to clients and customers just to provide more information about your business, you are wasting your postage and opportunity to move them to the next level.

Write about you, the customer. The marketing letter you design should focus on the benefits the customer will receive and not the services you promise to bestow. Spotlight the benefits you offer up front and center. Use the body of your letter to describe the features. Summarize the key benefit or benefits once again and close with a call to action which gives the prospect a reason to move to the next step in your sales process. Talk with, not to the customer. Imagine you were face to face with your prospect, reading your letter aloud, would you be comfortable or would you letter sound too proper or too stodgy. Your letter is a personal communication with a real person. Do not come on too strong or over-promise. Use simple, direct language, not flowery prose or an impressive vocabulary. Since you will not really be face to face with your prospect, the look of your letter alone must convey your professionalism so double check for errors and have a third party review the content. Make responding easy. No matter what type of voiceover marketing letter you are writing, close by providing a clear and decisive next step.

In some cases, the responsibility for that action such as sending a written proposal or contract will rest with you. When a special offer has been made, your letter should make it quick and easy for the prospect to take advantage of it via phone, e-mail or postal mail. The fewer hurdles your prospect must jump, the more likely you are to close the sale. Listen to a sample letter which might be sent to an auto dealership in your local market.

Dear, insert name here, auto dealer, you can increase the number of cars sold each month by building trust with your customers and by using a branded voiceover talent for your dealership. Customers buy from people they trust to deliver the best price or service. In other words, dealer ads need to build relationships with their customers. Trust makes customers come back time and time again and even better refer their friends. Obviously, building trust takes a lot more than good TV and radio ads. Good products and honest transactions cannot hurt but advertising which sells the dealership, not the deal are an important piece of the puzzle and a very professional voiceover will enrich a strong impression with your customers. Frank Frederick, The Voice delivers the comfortable trustworthy image with the urgency you desire and the sound your customers will soon hear as a friend. To find out how Frank Frederick can help fashion the brand of trust for your company, please call me at my telephone number or you may reach me by e-mail at my e-mail address. Together we can build the personal touch for your business this year. I will be calling within the next week to discuss any questions you might have regarding your audio brand. Sincerely, Frank Frederick, the Voice.

Sending a hard copy letter in today's internet world may seem a little old school and I admit it is but as we continue down the path of internet communication, the personal touch in our business is disappearing. Writing and sending letters to prospects, customers and clients should be a big part of your personal marketing plan this year. Have you created your marketing plan for 2009? I have produced an e-book titles Marketing for Voiceover Made Easy with templates and suggestions for composing personal marketing plans. You will learn simple techniques to draft and implement your marketing goals, the same way the big corporations do with 90-day and one year goals and dreams and just for fun, I have included the Ten-sentence Tiger Marketing Plan. Oh, tiger is the Chinese zodiac sign for next year. So get prepared for a roaring year yet to come. The Ten-sentence Tiger Marketing Plan is a straightforward way to define your marketing goals and reach them in 2009. If you would like to purchase a copy for $14.95 each by PayPal, contact me personally at my e-mail address.

Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.

If you're a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes Podcast Directory or by visiting Podcasts.Voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.

[Closing Music]

Links from today's show:

Frank Frederick
Frank Frederick

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Expert Frank Frederick

Frank Frederick, The Voice (TM), is a voice over artist, creator of the exclusive iSpeek file delivery software, and author based in Park City, Utah USA. Frank's "LoveNotes: Marketing and Branding for Voice Over Artists", have wowed the industry the continent over with his ingenious tips and contagious personality. Frank Frederick's philosophy is that the right voice determines whether or not an audience listens to an audio production, and with his guidance, voice actors will find their own way to brand their voice to meet the expectations of their clients and woo them with their own brand of "lovenotes". To learn more about Frank Frederick, visit his website or read about Frank's lecture at VOICE 2007.

Enjoyed Frank's episode? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

---

Join voice over expert Frank Frederick in his lecture "How to Define Your Niche Voice Acting Market". In this episode, you'll learn how to build a better business by focusing on a particular customer group, your niche. Focused, targeted marketing efforts toward a specific area or areas of an industry may result in increased income because clients and customers will view you as an "expert".

Download Podcast Episode 34 »

Tags:

The Voice, Niche Marketing, LoveNotes, Marketing, Niche, Voice Overs, Voice Overs, Voice Acting

Transcript of How To Define Your Niche Voice Acting Market

[Opening Music]

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It's never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won't find anywhere else.

This week Voices.com is pleased to present Frank Frederick.

Frank Frederick: This is Frank Frederick and once again I'd like to offer my thanks to Voices.com for the opportunity to share a little information about the business side of the voiceover industry in the Voiceover Experts series.

Recently I established the need for determining your niche and how niching might help your bottom line. To find your niche you need to know your customers and potential customers. I often see unique expressions on the faces of students in the Small Business Marketing Strategy classes I teach when I ask, "Who are your customers? Who buys your services?" Voiceover professionals and new artists alike often answer, "Everyone," or answer with a broad image of the voiceover industry and assumptions such as everyone can be my customer, may lead to wrong decisions, wrong pricing, wrong marketing strategies and ultimately business failure.

You can build a better, stronger voiceover business by identifying and serving a particular customer group, your niche market. Sending the commercial demo to a producer who works most often with long-form educational programs is not productive. By crafting marketing materials which focus on the specific style or type of work, the client or potential customers work with is how you focus on a niche. Before we step out of balance on this subject, remember there is nothing wrong with having more than one niche. Defining multiple niche markets is a good idea. Qualifying the overall market place will be a good investment in your voiceover business. Making money from more than one segment of customers who need your services is ever better.

Okay, let me help define a niche. A niche is a narrowly defined group of customers which include all of the following, customers who have the same specialized needs and interest, clients or prospective customers with a strong desire for your services, prospects for which you have created or can create a compelling reason to do business with you instead of someone else, customer prospects which can be reached easily with your targeted message and businesses and industries large enough to produce the volume of business you require. Niche marketing is all about appealing to a smaller group of people with a direct message.

Why do you need to define your customer and find a niche? Once you have determined how your customer sees you and your business, you can design your sales messages with great precision. The more narrowly you define your niche, the easier it is to cater to the specifically-defined interest of businesses in the industry. Niche marketing is a calculated, laser-guided approach to matching up prospective buyers with your services. By taking a narrow focused approach to marketing, you can most effectively reach and appeal to the specific audience which will most likely become a sale, lead or other action.

The shotgun approach to marketing where one message is sent to a broad audience may not fullfill a specific customer group's needs. For example, Alyssa C. from Chicago, Illinois faced a dwindling client list. She had drafted several proposals to potential clients with a zero percent success rate. The jobs had gone to other voiceover talent even though the proposals were less creative and were quoted with a higher cost estimate then she had proposed. Alyssa kept with her approach and finally a prospective client took the time to talk with her about his perceptions. "We thought your voice was good and you were talented but your emphasis was too general for our needs. Now that we know more about you, we understand you are definitely capable of delivering the company messages for our medical companies. We are introducing a new product line soon and we will be in touch."

Alyssa was stunned as she realized she had been presenting herself as being a jack of all trades and master of none, as the saying goes. Her marketing efforts were too general and concentrated on generic voiceovers and commercials rather than her specialty of medical words and pronunciations. She had failed to target the niche market or established her distinctiveness in this arena. Alyssa had been marketing to everyone and potential clients viewed her as best at nothing. Armed with this knowledge and inspiration, Alyssa refocused her marketing efforts toward the niche market. After a short six months, Alyssa is now the top choice for medical narrations in this fast-growing regional market. She started by creating an identity statement, targeting a specific market. She defined her customers, promoted her brand solidly and grew her business as well.

Throughout the book, Love Notes, Branding and Marketing for a Voiceover Artist, I suggest you do some research. Well, a lot of research and some market analysis to determine which segments of the voiceover industry can support your financial goals. Determine who your customers are, how they spend their money on marketing and how to reach the potential customers in your chosen market. What are you doing better more of or developing more than your competition? To find a unique and authentic premise and voice which differentiates you from others, you will need to do the research and analyze the date acquired.

The first step to defining your niche is to review your current customers. If you already have a client list for your voiceover business, you have the first pieces to your niche puzzle. Take a look at your client list and your income from each client last year. Determine the category of business for each customer and the income for each group of businesses in each category. You will likely find a distinct class of clients from which much of income has been derived. The portion of your clients in this now defined group of patrons is a niche.

A few key areas you need to learn about your niche or target customers include, what are the demographics of your customers, age, gender, occupation, general income, geographic location, business industry, how much money you spend annually for advertising and marketing, which categories of advertising do clients buy, how much is spent in each advertising area and more. How big is the niche market right now? This might include the annual revenues your competitors are currently generating or your projection of potential customers and markets size, if you're new to the voiceover business. Are there specific segments or niches within your target market which you want to focus some special marketing attention on and will this specific market meet my financial goal requirements?

One way to get the answers is to survey the market place. Current customers and potential clients will give you ideas about your niche, if you ask. You can spend a lot of money to get professional help creating market research surveys but if you do not have the cash don't worry. Design a survey yourself. Think about the composition of the questions in your survey. Only you can decide the information you need or want. You might choose to ask open-ended questions which can provide abstract or unscientific answers. With open-ended questions in your survey, you will not receive real significant data but you will acquire a variety of opinion. Chose concentrated multiple choice questions to provide specific and quantitative answers.

When you write questions for your survey, write clear, precise and short questions. Simple questions will not confuse those who participate or run a risk of biasing the answer of a respondent. Keep it short. Ten minutes is the maximum anyone should spend completing your survey. These translates to approximately 15 questions at most. Ask for just one piece of information with each question on our survey. Who do you survey? Good question and the answer probably will not surprise you, current customers, customers of your clients, prospective customers and past customers are the target audience for the information you require to find your niche.

Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.

If you're a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes Podcast Directory or by visiting Podcasts.Voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.

[Closing Music]

Links from today's show:

Frank Frederick
Frank Frederick

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Expert Frank Frederick

Frank Frederick, The Voice (TM), is a voice over artist, creator of the exclusive iSpeek file delivery software, and author based in Park City, Utah USA. Frank's "LoveNotes: Marketing and Branding for Voice Over Artists", have wowed the industry the continent over with his ingenious tips and contagious personality. Frank Frederick's philosophy is that the right voice determines whether or not an audience listens to an audio production, and with his guidance, voice actors will find their own way to brand their voice to meet the expectations of their clients and woo them with their own brand of "lovenotes". To learn more about Frank Frederick, visit his website.

Enjoyed Frank's episode? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

---

Join Voice Over Expert and author of "LoveNotes: Marketing and Branding for Voice Over Artists", Frank Frederick in his lecture "Niche Marketing". Learn how to differentiate yourself from others, especially when marketing on the internet by developing a niche marketing strategy. By defining your target audience and focusing your efforts in their direction, you will reap greater benefits, work for better clientele and make more money with less work.

Download Podcast Episode 29 »

Tags:

Frank Frederick, The Voice, Niche Marketing, LoveNotes, Marketing, Niche, Voice Overs, Voice Overs, Voice Acting

Transcript of Niche Marketing for Voice Actors

[Opening Music]

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It's never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won't find anywhere else.

This week Voices.com is pleased to present Frank Frederick.

Frank Frederick: This is Frank Frederick. I've written a book, "Love Notes, Marketing and Branding for a Voice Over Artist" and look at the business of voiceovers. I'd like to share with you a bit of information on how to differentiate yourself from others especially when marketing on the internet. My thanks go out to Voices.com for hosting this Voiceover Expert series.

Now, let's get started. As you develop your voiceover identity, it is important to find the niche where you fit. When just starting out on the voiceover business, often times the marketing efforts are the shotgun approach. Point the advertising and marketing in the right direction and you're bound to hit something. By defining your target audience and focusing your efforts in that direction, you will reap greater benefits. You will be working with better clientele. Knowing whom your brand targets will get you the customers you want. You do not need to wastes time and effort chasing the low paying job because your marketing is focused on customers who already understand the value of your services and they're willing to pay a fair price.

You will have more money-making time with a focused niche market. When you know the needs and wants of your customers, you will spend less time chasing work and more time working with class. By focusing your brand identity to a niche, you may customize your brand to a targeted audience allowing you to address the needs of your clients. This means you will acquire stronger responses for you marketing efforts.

There will be a greater income opportunity, more money-making time added together with better clientele means higher income. There is nothing wrong with making more money with less work. You will build your customer list by integrating yourself within a specific market. Your benefits will be almost enumerable. Once you have established your market and begun cultivating clients, your perceived value will grow. Customers will refer your services to their friends and partners in their niche market when you have developed seed relationships. Do not be afraid to ask for referrals.

A niche is nothing more than a specialization. It can be a broad specialization or a very specific one. A niche can be formed around a product, a specific group of people who buy that product or service or the way you sell a service. A niche is really just a variation on what has been called market differentiation. The concept here is, why would I use your voiceover services instead of the services from one of the other thousands of people who are telling me they have a similar sound. When it comes to the internet, the term niche has come to mean finding keywords which target the desires of a customer when searching for a product or service. Find the right words to describe your services to an audience and by applying a simple formula, you can guarantee business success, right? Wrong. It is not nearly that simple nor that limiting.

This concept my sound easy but there are a few catches to niche marketing. People who need what you have may not know how to describe your business or service. You're fledgling clients, maybe searching for your business services under the same terms as everyone else who uses the same specification for a boarder category and this term is not necessarily meeting their needs.

For example, your potential customer maybe searching the internet for voiceover artist. The likely prospect will find more than four million websites, dealing with everything from voiceover artist to Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP. What your clients are really looking for is a spokesperson for their business who is unique and will represent the qualities inherent to the possible plans (company). How do your search terms for your website make you typical or different?

In the virtual business environment we call the internet, it is nearly impossible to develop a website which does not have competition. If your website does not have competition, it would likely not have a good demand either. That is the nature of marketing. So niching, my own word creation is only a solution to more accurately target potential customers and clients and help find people who need what you have. Niching is how to means of eliminating competition. Your keywords have to target what you actually have to offer clients and customers.

Here's an example. Ashley W has a website on which she gets the number one search engine placement on a specific phrase. She uses the phrase in a unique way. Patrons find her website and do not find what they want and then they leave. She gets lots of natural search engine traffic on the one phrase but she does not get customers. Possible clientèle are not finding what they want.

Ashley's website holds the top position of the niche but Ashley is not able to get customers because searchers are expecting something different than what she offers. You have to market where your potential customers are and you have to market to what they want and need. If you're using a large net in the ocean and you're trolling randomly, you may catch a fish or two but you won't do very well. If on the other hand you search out the schools of fish that are clustered together, you can dip in your net and bring up a great haul. People are not fish but they do tend to congregate in predictable groups.

Find a way to market to groups of people who need what you have and you'll do much better than if you just blast ads at random. Targeting to a niche market is more than just picking keywords or deciding that you want to do a specific thing for a specific group. It is reflected in everything you do, from the design and layout of your website to the wording of your marketing materials to the packaging of your service and the way you interact with your customers and clients.

Market differentiation or niching has some strong points. You can form a niche around any uniqueness. Some potential niches are unique services, higher value. Price point is not a good choice here. Better customer service, more hand holding with technical issues, knowledge of specific topics or interest or specific personality types, humors, academic, legal et cetera are some of the examples. You might setup a website targeting a broad niche with individual pages which target specific elements of your niche market. You can build multiple websites or have specific pages on one website each with a slightly different focus.

I have a website design for corporate voiceovers, another with specific information on radio commercial copy writing, another website has the objective of reaching the radio and television industry for promos and topicals and there's a series of website on marketing, web design, branding and business tactics for voiceover artist. Each one of my websites focuses upon a specific niche within the broad topic of voiceover. Customers and clients who view one website are likely to look at another internet location of mine if they do not find what they want on the website where they're looking now. Each website is cross-linked with my other relevant web locations.

This concept applies no matter what you have to offer. You have to find a way to convince your prospective customers they want to buy from you, not from anyone of your competition. Learn what makes your voiceover services unique and yes, even this is not a enough. You as your own individual company need to find a way to set yourself a part from other voiceover artist especially if you intend to market online. No matter what type of voice you have, no matter what you do whether you sell products, services or information, you have to find a way to make your voiceover business unique and fetching and to get your services found by people searching the internet. Targeting customers, marketing where they are likely to be and providing something special is what sets the wannabes apart from the professionals.

Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.

If you're a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes Podcast Directory or by visiting Podcasts.Voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.

[Closing Music]

Links from today's show:

Frank Frederick
Frank Frederick

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Expert Frank Frederick

Frank Frederick, The Voice (TM), is a voice over artist, creator of the exclusive iSpeek file delivery software, and author based in Park City, Utah USA. Frank's "LoveNotes: Marketing and Branding for Voice Over Artists", have wowed the industry the continent over with his ingenious tips and contagious personality. Frank Frederick's philosophy is that the right voice determines whether or not an audience listens to an audio production, and with his guidance, voice actors will find their own way to brand their voice to meet the expectations of their clients and woo them with their own brand of "lovenotes". To learn more about Frank Frederick, visit his website or read about Frank's lecture at VOICE 2007.

Enjoyed Frank's episode? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

---