Marketing with Kim Handysides
Whether you’ve been able to tune in to our Clubhouses the past few months, fellow professional female voice talent and voice over coach Diana Birdsall and I have been spending A LOT of time talking about marketing in our weekly club “Ask the VO Coaches.” Why? As working creatives, we wear a lot of hats, but we have to run our business like a business, which means building lasting relationships with clients. The best way to do this is with marketing. This week, we were fortunate to have the amazing Montreal based talent, coach, and demo producer Kim Handysides join our panel! Kim is a true inspiration and a wealth of knowledge. For those who don’t know, Kim happens to be in a weekly accountability group with me and Diana, so we know her quite well. Kim has blazed a path for women in voice over, pushing the boundaries of what women can earn, where women can work, and proving just how much one woman can do! Kim has done it all through smarts, fierce determination, creativity, and oodles of talent. So, if you sadly missed hearing her wisdom, here is just a taste of what you missed out on from the great one.
How Kim Started Marketing
Kim has always had a uniquely creative approach to marketing. In the early 1980s, when Kim launched her voice over business, she created a demo tape and marketing campaign all themed around a coffee break. She hired an actor to go with her, dressed in makeup, and around break time at 10:15 Am, they would approach potential clients like ad agencies. They were able to get into and actually talk to 90% of the companies they approached. While there was an initial investment of about $700, which in that time was even more money than it is today, Kim started her business with this campaign and still works with many of these companies today.
Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing
We spent a lot of time talking about this with Kim. Kim talked about how when you seek clients, research them, create a list, and reach out, that is outbound marketing. If you are looking for experts in outbound marketing, coaches like Mark Scott and Jonathan Tilley focus on outbound marketing.
Inbound marketing, in contrast, is when you draw clients in to your website, whether it’s through blogs, videos, or stories. You make your website a place clients want and need to come. Kim referred to marketing experts like Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. Kim advised that sharing infographics can triple your traffic and including instagram stories and tik tok videos is another strategy to yield huge results. Kim explains that inbound marketing is 59% better on leads and 61% less expensive!
A new voiceover talent, David Jacobs, asked a common question that has been coming up a lot in our weekly Clubhouse. He wanted to know how to position yourself when marketing when you genuinely don’t have a body of work. He asked if “fresh” is the way to go? Kim reminded us that 90% of what we bring is our own unique personality. We spent time talking about how we differentiate ourselves from other talents, and what we bring to the table that makes us unique. Another new talent, Ben Ekres, was concerned about having a tag line to market himself. We all assured him that none of us have a tag line and we are all thriving in our business marketing endeavors. Kim explained to Ben that it is far more important to spent 50-100 words to say who you are and what you do so that google can find you.
How Our “Storefronts” Should Attract Clients
Kim did a thoughtful analysis of how to sort out what our clients are interested in. Whether you want to blog, do a podcast, do or videos, there are a lot of ways to present great content to position yourself as a problem solver for those who might cast you. Kim gave the example of saying you are an anime guy and staking your claim through a targeting marketing approach. She suggested a thoughtful blog about the art form, or perhaps doing a review of a video. Kim suggests coming up with a list of different topics within the main category of anime so that you can appeal to people in that field. This example can be applied to other genres.
How Do You Know Which To Do?
Kim advised that you should consider what makes you happiest. She also said to think about what you are good at. Lastly, if you try both, you should see what yields better results in your target market. Kim happens to prefer nurturing existing relationships, inbound marketing, and pay to plays for herself. Kim also reminds us that if you have 15-30 regular clients who send business all the time your business will thrive.
There’s So Much More…
The summary ends here. If you missed it, I suggest booking a business and marketing coaching session with either myself, Diana, or Kim to catch up! We can help you come up with a strategy for your business. Our Clubhouse with Kim covered so much more, including what to put in your bio, common mistakes talents make like imposter syndrome, and who to target when looking for contacts. Kim talked about finding areas you want to focus on and become an expert in a field. Even though we only chatted for an hour, the blog could go on and on. Kim is brilliant and we are so thankful to have had her with us!
I have to admit, that when Diana Birdsall and I got Jonathan Tilley to come on our weekly Clubhouse, I got a little fan-girled out for a quick minute. If you don’t know Jonathan, he is quite fabulous. He runs a genius marketing course for voice actors and other creatives called League of List Builders to teach about direct marketing to clients. Diana and I both took his class years ago, and as full-time professional talents and coaches, have used his methods with great success to build our own businesses. Jonathan also teaches about specialty topics like Instagram marketing, selfie techniques, lighting….so basically he is a marketing g-d and everything that comes out of his mouth is pure brilliance plus he is lovely and kind and so fun. See why I was excited to have him on our panel? So in case you missed it ( and I don’t know why you would miss it but if you did…) here is a recap based on my notes from Jonathan Tilley’s panel with us:
Jonathan recommends monthly follow ups.
commercial campaign, getting signed by an agent, and seeing an old friend. Why is a new demo so exciting? A voice over demo means opportunity. It is a new moment for us to say here I am, listen to this. This is what I can do for you! As a full-time, professional voice over talent, there are plenty of other female voice over actors booking lots of commercials. How do I make myself get noticed? The demo. So who you do your demo with, the coach and producer you choose to spend your time and money with matters, a lot. I have worked with some of the top coaches in the field, and I can tell you that I have had outstanding experiences and I have had experiences hat should have been better. Now that I am work as a voiceover coach and am on a demo production team myself, I am trying to educate my students along the way, so that they understand what to look for and how to advocate for themselves. Here are some questions you should ask every single time you do a new demo, whether it is a commercial demo or another genre:
that show both your range and are appropriate for your brand. If you have dream VO clients, this is the time to include those scripts. So for example, if you are doing an automotive demos, and you love Audi, you would include an Audi script. If you are doing a commercial demo and you love shopping at target, why not include a target spot? The scripts should not simply descend from above on demo day, be handed to you, and recorded. They should be meaningful to you and they should show both your range and what matters to you. They can be an interesting glimpse into your interests too! So, it is very important that you can easily talk to your voice over coach or demo producer about the scripts that you have.I find it to be the ultimate irony that we use our voice to speak for others, but often, even when we are making investments in our own business, if can be so hard to advocate for what makes the right sense for us. The strength of your demo very much depends on your scripts and you should love them!
This is really important. Demo producers typically send you their preferred order, but at the end of the day the demo is yours to live with and their preferred order matters less than your preferred order. I personally have had demo producers make changes without any fuss, and I worked with others who refuse to make any changes at all and insist that it must stay the way it is.
demo. In a lot of ways its up there in excitement with new jewelry and a new car. For professional voice talents, our voice over demos are our calling cards, and nothing gets us going like a new demo to fuss over. In my small inner circle, it happened just yesterday! One of my VO besties got a new commercial demo back from a well-known demo producer. She was so excited to share the demo with our group, and with good reason! The demo was clever. It did all that will be discussed below, and it was a joy to listen to. She sounded amazing, and we were really excited to ohhh and ahhh over it. So, what is it that makes a voice over demo stand out?
The job of a voice over coach is to teach voice talents to succeed. Whether a coach is working with you on your craft, or on building your business, a good coach can be trusted to help you build a solid foundation for your business. When I work with students, I always work on both professional development as we work with various scripts, but every session also works on business goals as well. Whether you are working towards a demo, or marketing a new demo, voice actors often need direction to help move their business along. The right coach will help you with your individualized goals.
There are talent agents who cast voice actors all over the counts, and they, too, are outstanding for career and rates advice in voice over. A good agent not only secures industry leading rates, they also direct you reads and let you know when you are on the mark and when you need improvement. An agent has both business savvy and a good ear, so if you are lucky enough to be on their roster, work with them! Seek their guidance and build a rapport. You can learn so much for a good agent. Both you and the agent benefit from you learning as much as possible, so they would likely want to help as much as they can.
I have blogged before about my accountability group, but I cannot stress enough how much this group has helped me daily to grow my business and make better choices. They have pushed me beyond boundaries I would have never thought to challenge, and they have made me look beyond. I am so much better because I am in the company of these women.
As voice over actors, daily we play both the role of the talent and the role of the small business owner. Immediately in 2015 I decided that not only would I coach with Anne but I would hire her to help build my brand, as I needed to learn all that I could from her. She hit the nail on the head, working hard to get to know me so that the brand that we built for Laura Schreiber Voice is truly a reflection of the work that I do and what I bring to my clients. As a working creative, we are in a unique role because we ultimately get hired by other brands to represent them, but it is in solidly establishing our own unique brand that we can distinguish ourselves from others in our industry. According to Forbes article from March 2018, “your brand often acts as a function of your reputation and visibility.” As a professional voice over actor, it is essential to establish your brand so that your clients will get to know you as an individual and will trust you as a professional.
As a solopreneur, your brand begins with your website. It is your store front. Clients can listen to your demos, see samples of your booked work, and find out how to contact you. Those are the basics, but the fun begins when you use your website to do two things: show clients how you are different than other voice over actors and how you will best meet their needs. Kristin Wendys of The SelfEmployed.com advises “Think first with the eyes of a client and analyze what he is looking for, what are his biggest concerns, and what problems he needs to solve.” Some voice actors have brief summaries so that clients can quickly learn about their services, but much in the way that I am very chatty, my website is overflowing with long narrative explanations that I hope will help my clients connect with me.
Visual images help create your brand and your logo is very much a part of this. I have both an avatar that I love and a Laura Schreiber Voice Logologo. I use them both differently. My logo is on official correspondences like invoices with my avatar is on my business cards, thank you notes, return address labels, stickers… all marketing materials essential to establishing my business brand. According to Entrepreneur, “Simple branding is best, especially if you can make an association in people’s minds that helps them remember you.” My hope is that the feeling that people get when they see my logo and avatar will help build our connection. Everything associated with my brand is very pink and matches.