The advent of online marketplace has been continually reshaping every business worldwide. According to Google Local Search Statistics 2019, 97% search online to find a local business. From those numbers, it’s easy to assume that nearly every business has gone online to hop on the internet bandwagon and catch up with the consumers who stepped out of the traditional face of business.
Voice acting is one of the trades that are tremendously affected by the rapid advancement of technology. There are hundreds of voice casting sites across the web which has enormously reshaped the career opportunities of voice actors especially the start-up and non-union ones.
It should go without saying that with many prospects moving to the online realm, you, as a voice actor, should evacuate too. Otherwise, you’ll be left out.
Now it’s easy to say, Build a website and presto! You have clients now. First off, building your online presence is not linear, it interconnects with many other activities. Second, it’s not a time-boxed event, it demands constant upgrading as technology keeps on moving.
It’s also equally important to know the timing and order of building your online profile tools. Some startup voice actors make the mistake of launching their business first, followed by building their brand online. This works anyway, but it’s an excellent move to build your brand’s online presence first so it’s already pre-existing and growing.
We’ve put together the effective strategies in building your voice over online presence:
Know your brand and your target audience
This should be a hard rule that on top of anything else, you should have in mind who you want to be the followers of your online profile before you jump into creating a website. What’s your niche? Is it child voice over or video game? By assessing your own skills, it will be easier and smarter for you to tailor your website feel to your target clients’ needs. It will also help you a lot in discovering which channels and platforms you can mostly find your target prospects from.
Build your own website
Now that it’s clear to you the voice over brand you want to establish and expose to the world wide web, you can now create your website or you can employ a web developer.
No matter how small you feel you are in the industry, do not have second thoughts on having a website for it’s one of the primary tools to be one of the big fishes in the industry. Aside from the professional ambiance it brings, it is usually the consumers’ initial deciding factor upon choosing a product or services.
Put simply, your website serves as your digital resume that will bring you to places so whatever your reservations are for not joining the bandwagon, drop them now.
Search Engine Optimization
Once you have a website, the next activity you need to keep up with is the likeliness of your website to appear in google searches. SEO is responsible for this. According to Marketing Statistics for 2019, 89% of consumers use search engines to research for a product or services before buying them. This means you need to have the right knowledge on choosing the words you include in your web pages. For example, you can look at the commonly asked or search result suggestions of people when they type the word “voice acting”. From there, you can study the pattern on what keywords are mostly used for researching voice over topics.
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide gives an overview of the basics and will help you optimize your website.
Utilize Social Media
74% of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes. From that number, it’s needless to confirm the effectivity of Social Media in running your business. Social media is like the enabler of your website. Your website is your main portfolio, and your social media is your channel to market your exposure. There are many social media channels — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. You can optimize the value of each depending on your marketing purpose.
You can deem your Facebook as your main social media account, where everything is interconnected. Twitter, on the other hand can be your digital journal for short musings about voice over and other relevant short contents. Instagram can be your portfolio of photos of your studio, equipments, events, training, clients, etc.; but this can be the least of value. If you have extra time and perhaps want to earn extra income, you can set up your Youtube channel to stream your demos and voice over recordings. This is like hitting two birds with one stone because you are not just exposing your voice over reel but also earning from the views you get. LinkedIn, on the other hand, can be a counterpart of your website if you can’t afford to have one.
There are certain rules on how to nail the power of social media.
Plan and schedule your timely and relatable content
The type of contents you post across your social media channels and how frequent you do so will drive your engagement. Planning what type of content to post and scheduling them, and aligning it to the trends can help you manipulate the viewers and comments to receive.
You are likely to have engagements and interactions if your contents are on trend and are useful to the audiences that you have.
Your frequency of posts is also very crucial. Post too often and you’re annoying. Post too seldom and you’re not worth following. To stay on the safe side, you can have a maximum of 2 posts a day for Facebook, 1-2 a day for Instagram, and 10-15 a day for Twitter. To read more about this topic, check this out How Voice Actors Can Toot Their Trumpet Without Blowing It.
Make use of relevant hashtags
Hashtags play a crucial role in developing interest in your social media accounts and are used on a number of social media platforms, most commonly, Twitter and Instagram. Including a hashtag with your posts helps to categorize content for your audience. So it’s a good strategy to collect the hashtags mostly used about voice over and add it to your posts to create a thread of your posts of common interest and to create more traction.
Have your postings calibrated to all your existing channels
Your audiences on facebook may not be on twitter or vice versa, so it’s good that your postings are synchronized but not a total carbon copy of one another. This way, your audience will get an impression that your social media is active, avoiding potential unfollows.
Participate on online forums and group discussions
You can socially interact and collaborate with your fellow voice actors within or outside your social media accounts. You are free to join facebook pages, communities, and private groups to take part in voice over topics, trends and issues. There are also independent forums to join like Reddit, Quora, Voiceover Universe, etc.
This way, not only you get to e-meet voice actors and extend your network, but your social activity pattern is tracked by SEO, hence, reinforces your presence online.
Subscribe to at least one voice casting website
If you are serious about going beyond just the traditional cycle of voice over agencies, consider being a member of a voice casting site a must. Online marketing aside, this is the middleman that can actually land you real paying gigs.
Action plans based on online marketing results
You can make use of google analytics to track the engagement of your website and for your social media, they have built-in analytics to track your activities. You can plan out ways to improve your online exposure by looking at the results of how you performed over the last few weeks or months. You can look at your strength and what needs more attention. By doing a regular checkup, your marketing efforts are likely to yield to your expected results.
How did you position your voice over exposure online? Do you have other specific strategies that worked for you? We’d love to hear your tricks, share it with us in the discussion below!