If you don’t know who Marc Scott is, you should. The VOpreneur is helping Voice Artists around the world navigate the nightmare that is marketing your Voice!

This week, we have him on the show to talk about everything from emailing leads to the Red Socks…

Find out more about him and his great services here:

https://www.vopreneur.com/

A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn’t partner with them unless they were), so please, if you’re in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em “Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you”… As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth…

https://tribooth.com/

And if you’re in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They’ve got a great range of top-shelf gear..

https://austrian.audio/

Hunter S Thompson

  
Summary
On this episode of Pro Audio Suite, voiceover and marketing coach Mark Scott is featured. Mark shares how he started his career in marketing out of necessity to make it in the voiceover industry. Now, he helps other voiceover artists navigate their own marketing journey. Covering a range of topics from social media strategy, dealing with rejection, the power of micro habits, and avoiding distractions, Mark provides valuable insights on how to set yourself apart in a saturated market. He also emphasizes the importance of continually bringing in new prospects to maintain success. The episode also dives into his experimentation with affiliate marketing and his innovative use of national days for promotional sales. He shares his approach to gifting clients, stressing the importance of showing appreciation. The discussion also touches on techniques for enhancing creativity, a crucial skill for both voiceover work and marketing.

#VoiceoverMarketingGuru #ProAudioSuitePodcast #MarketingInAudioIndustry
  
Timestamps
[00:00:00] Pro Audio Suite Introduction
[00:00:39] Guest Introduction – Marketing Guru Mark Scott
[00:01:27] Mark Scott’s Journey to Voiceover Marketing
[00:03:21] The Challenge of Offline Marketing for Voiceover Artists
[00:08:49] Pros and Cons of Social Media in Marketing
[00:10:37] Cultural Influences in Marketing Strategies
[00:11:42] The Power of ‘No’ in Building Relationships
[00:13:55] The Impact of Micro Habits on Growth
[00:17:05] Distraction – The Enemy of Marketing
[00:20:56] Tailored Marketing Advice for Voiceover Artist Andrew
[00:28:49] Mark’s Recent Marketing Endeavors
[00:31:48] The Danger of Complacency in Successful Businesses
[00:33:04] The Art of Gifting in Business Relationships
[00:34:27] Capitalizing on Unconventional Sales Opportunities
[00:36:36] Sparking Creativity for Social Media Content
[00:42:30] Pro Audio Suite Closing Remarks
  
Transcript
Speaker A: Y’all ready be history.,Speaker B: Get started.,Speaker C: Welcome.,Speaker B: Hi. Hi.,: Hello, everyone, to the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional. They’re motivated with tech.,Speaker C: To the Vo stars George Wittam, founder of Source Elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo Austrian audio making passion heard. Source elements. George the tech. Wittam and robbo and AP’s. International demo. To find out more about us, check thepro audiosuite.com line up.,Speaker B: Learner. Here we go.,Speaker C: And don’t forget the code. Trip a P 200 to get $200 off your tribooth. This week we have a guest. He hasn’t as many kids as Robbo, not as cute as Robert, not as smart as George, but he’s one of us, and that counts for something. Would you please welcome the marketing guru, Mark Scott. How you doing?,Speaker B: Mark, I see what you did there. I totally caught what you did. Somebody’s been listening to my podcast and playing off my opener.,Speaker A: Who would do that?,Speaker C: Exactly.,Speaker A: Really?,: Cheeky monkey.,Speaker B: Look at you guys doing your research.,Speaker A: I appreciate know we go out of our way. We do work hard.,Speaker C: We do indeed.,: Don’t speak for yourself. I just show up.,Speaker C: Actually, I was lying before. I’m the same. Yeah. So the question I have to get the ball rolling. How did you sort of end up being like the voiceover marketing guru?,Speaker B: Because I needed to make money in voiceover, and I had to figure out how to do it. I’m one of those voice actors, show of hands, who’s been ceremoniously, dumped from their radio career, right. And defaulted into voiceover. And I wasn’t making any money when I first started in Voiceover, and I was like, I know I can do this. I know there’s a way to make money. Casting sites will only take me so far. And so I started figuring out, at first by accident and then with a little bit greater intention, how to actually market myself. And I remember I read a book that Gary Vee wrote. Everybody knows Gary Vee in the marketing space and in that book, Gary Vee said, you should write a blog. And so I thought, all right, well, if Gary Vee says I should write a blog, I should write a blog. But I didn’t know what to blog about. So I just started blogging about all of the marketing stuff that I was learning while I was on this journey. And I guess the end result of that was people thought that I was a marketing guru. And so I just roll with it.,Speaker A: Is that how you see yourself?,Speaker B: I mean, now I do see myself as a voice actor and a marketing coach for voice actors. And even though that was never the original intention, voiceover was obviously the original intention. The coaching thing was just one of those things where I guess you get to a point where the market kind of dictates it when you start getting a lot of people emailing you saying, can you help me with this? Or do you offer coaching? Or I got invited to speak at a couple of conferences and I was like, man, maybe there’s something to this, maybe I should roll with this. And I think the best part of it is that it helps to keep me sharp. I can’t get complacent because I’m helping other people and having to stay on top of what’s going on and having to pay attention. And so that keeps me sharp too.,Speaker A: Because marketing yourself is a hell of a job, isn’t it? It takes a lot of time.,Speaker B: It is.,Speaker A: Is that something that you sort of, as part of your coaching, you’re teaching people, is how to best use their time as well, to fit all this stuff in, to run a database and to do prospecting and to send emails and are you sort of helping them with their time on that as well?,Speaker B: Well, I mean, the thing that I always joke about is people ask me, how many marketing emails should I be sending? And my response is what you’re really asking me is what is the minimum amount of marketing that I can do and still get away with it? Because this is not what voice actors want to do. Right. They sign up to be in the booth and do the recording, but the reality is, if you’re not in the booth and you’re not doing the recording, it’s probably because you’re not doing the marketing. So it takes time. Yes, but for me, it’s like, what else am I going to do if I’m not recording? I might as well be spending my day making new connections, getting in front of new people, so that I can open the door to do more recording down the road. Right?,: It’s probably better than obsessing on whether you have the best microphone for voiceover.,Speaker B: Yeah, I think so.,: It’s much better use of your time, I can tell you.,Speaker A: Yeah, because marketing is something that I mean, I’m basing my assumptions here on the Australian market, but 20 years ago, a voiceover artist marketing themselves was unheard of because you had an agent and they pretty much did all that for you. So it’s only a sort of recent thing. Do you find that maybe that’s part of the issue is that voiceover artists in general have only just recently been thrown into this situation and they’re madly trying to figure it out without really anyone to sort of base their marketing strategy on or whatever. Do you find that maybe we’re all a bit new to this?,Speaker B: It might be an oversimplification, but I think looking out at the macro level, I think there’s probably three different classes of voice actors. There’s the voiceover veterans who were around in the glory days of voiceover when it was all agents and in studio, and your agents did everything for you and they brought you in studio and obviously the industry still exists like that in certain areas, but not in a lot of areas anymore. Then there was a group of voice actors who kind of came in during what I call the glory days of online casting. And so for them it meant signing up for a Pay to Play membership, submitting auditions on Pay to Play and maybe they had an agent or two as well. And for voice actors that have come in, we’ll say the COVID era voice actors, the glory days of online casting are over. It’s not really a sustainable way to build a full time business. Obviously the agent model has shifted a ton and so I think those voice actors are more in tune with the fact that marketing is how this gets done. And I think that voice, like, I came in the glory days of online casting and I was in denial for a while, but when I started seeing things change on the Pay to Play, I knew, okay, I got to figure out a better way. And I don’t happen to live in a New York or in La or a Chicago where the full agent model may still work for some people. And so I do think that for a lot of voice actors, they’re creatives. They operate from the creative side of their brain. They want to be in the booth doing creative things. And marketing, I think, comes from the other side of the brain and so it’s not a natural fit and that’s why they don’t think about it initially, it’s why they don’t necessarily want to do it. Can’t blame them for that either. But it opened up the door for somebody like me to be able to come in and help them with it because I’m actually not a creative. So I operate from the business side of my brain first.,Speaker C: Yeah, it’s interesting though, because winding the clock back, I remember when I like, you finished my radio career and moved to Melbourne 25 years ago. I got into voiceover, got an agent and I was sort of started working, but it was a slow thing. And I walked into a studio one day and I remember sitting and waiting to go in. They had no idea who I was, they just had a name on a piece of paper that I was coming in to do a voice. But I watched the way they communicated with the talent that was leaving and it was like, hey, see you Matt, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It was all like face to face. They knew each other, so I thought there’s got to be a way of shortcutting this so I can actually become visible to them as opposed to just being a name on a piece of paper. So I went out and found a photographer and I got a whole bunch of shots taken. And the brief was there were certain colors that I wanted to do, but I wanted to make it look like I was releasing an album on a CD. And I was the singer, so I was the artist on the front cover, which I did. And so I produced all these videos, which in those days was VHS for on camera stuff. I did a bunch of CDs with this picture on it and it was an immediate shortcut because I just did every studio, went to every studio, dropped these kits off with my demo and all that kind of stuff, and it was amazing. When I walked in, they knew who I was because on their desk was my photograph on the CD and everybody else just had their name and a contact number.,Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say at that point in time, probably nobody else was doing that. So it makes it so much easier for you to stand out. Right. That’s how you get noticed.,Speaker C: Yeah. And it worked. It was like, it was an immediate shortcut. I probably saved about six months of traipsing around the studios.,Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.,Speaker A: Is there an online equivalent of that today, do you reckon, Mark, or is it just a slow slog?,Speaker B: I mean, social media is I wouldn’t call it a shortcut. Can you get lucky on social media if you find the right audience or hit the right niche or do the right thing? Of course, I’ve seen many voice actors who have gone viral on TikTok or on YouTube or on Instagram, and that has led to opportunities. I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the norm for it to happen quickly, but I do think that if you use some of those tools consistently, over time, you start to build a following, you start to get recognition and people start to notice who you are and pay a little bit more attention.,: Yeah. I can tell you from someone who’s started his business at the beginning of social media, it’s been a very long slog because you do just spend time building up the brand and the name recognition and establishing yourself as an authority on the subject of something. So, yeah, it’s a way to do it. It’s definitely not the fastest, I would say.,Speaker B: Yeah, I would say now, I don’t know that I would release the VHS, but I would say that there’s a full circle coming around. Like I’ve had some success doing things like postcards because everybody else is doing email and inbox and social media and nobody’s sending anything through the mail anymore. And so that’s one of the ways that you stand out. So walking into a studio today and dropping off a package, nobody’s doing that again now because everybody’s doing email and social media, so there might be a full circle opportunity to kind of jump the line a little bit in that regard.,Speaker A: Will that be the next episode of your podcast, Mark?,Speaker B: Yeah, maybe I’ll bring you guys on the show and we’ll talk through that one.,Speaker C: As far as countries are concerned, do you find the attitude towards marketing changes depending on which country you’re marketing yourself into?,Speaker B: I don’t know if the attitude changes as much. I think maybe the platforms change a little bit. Like for example, I’ve got some clients in South America who don’t do email at all. Everything happens on WhatsApp. And so if you’re emailing them and they’re not responding to you, that’s why. Because they don’t actually operate on their inbox, they operate out of WhatsApp. And so that’s a little bit different. I think the whole North American 24/7 hustle culture, I don’t think that necessarily plays the same way in certain European markets where they actually take time off and leave the office and end their workday. And so if you’re dropping marketing emails in their inbox at eight or 09:00 at night or whatever, I don’t know that that necessarily lands. So I think there’s little things, little nuances maybe from country to country, region to region. But at the end of the day, we’re all trying to accomplish the same thing. We want people to hear our voice and if our demos are great, then hopefully that does the selling for us.,Speaker A: Yeah, well, talking about email, I’ve heard you mention a couple of times that no hearing no is actually a good thing. Do you want to explain that to people who maybe haven’t heard you talk about this before?,Speaker B: I think that when we’re sending out our marketing emails, obviously we want everybody to say yes and we want everybody to hire us and we want every email that we send to be a potential opportunity. And so when we get that rejection, our natural instinct is to take it as know, I might not be any good or maybe my demos aren’t good enough or maybe my studio stinks, I need to call George. Whatever. Right. We start to go into all of this negative spiral of everything that’s wrong with us when the reality is maybe they don’t use voice actors or maybe they’ve already got a full roster or maybe there’s just nothing that fits your voice or whatever. Right. There’s 1000 reasons why they don’t need you. Only one of those reasons is they didn’t like you. But by them just telling you no straight up now, you know, so you don’t have to put any more effort into building a relationship with that person going forward. And so much of marketing is building relationships. I would rather devote my time, my effort, my energy to building relationships with people who are potentially going to hire me than spending it on somebody who was never going to hire me in the first place. So the sooner they tell me no, I’m not interested, the better it is for me in that regard because I can devote more time to better prospects.,: Yeah, kind of the same thing as like unsubscribes. Like whenever I send out an email campaign, there’s a certain percentages of unsubscribes, maybe a half a percent, but I used to be like, oh man, people don’t want to hear it. And it’s like, no, that’s good. Now you’ve weeded it down. Now the ones that are left are the ones that really do want to hear from you. And that lets you know people that’s true from you, because they’re telling you they don’t want to hear from you. It’s not a bad thing.,Speaker B: When I started building my email list, I took it so personal. Like, I wanted to call up every person who unsubscribed and be like, did I say something wrong? I’m so sorry. Right? You don’t want that rejection, right? But now the unsubscribe is a gift in that sense, because now you know that’s somebody who was never going to work with you anyway, so focus your attention somewhere else.,Speaker A: I want to take a bit of an off ramp here and head in a different direction, just for a second, because you and I have one thing in common that I know of and we’re a bit of a fan of a book called Atomic Habits from a gentleman who I’ve been lucky enough to interview for an hour or so. A guy called James clear. And his book talks about how micro habits can actually change our lives. Just little things that we do every day that become a habit, can actually change our business, our family life, anything that you want to change, really. And I was wondering if you, in your time of reading James’s book and sort of thinking about the things that he’s spoken about, if you might have like three habits or so that a voiceover artist should get into in terms of their marketing if they want to become more successful.,Speaker B: One of the things that I talk about all the time with email marketing is send ten emails a day, which is not a big number when you break it down. Ten emails a day, that’s not a big number. That’s something that realistically, you could probably do in about an hour. It doesn’t seem like a lot ultimately, but if you do that five days a week, you just sent 50 emails. And if you do that consistently for a year, that’s 2500 emails. And if you get a ten or 15% response rate, that’s 200 and 5275 prospects that are now in your database. After a year of just sending ten emails a day, like just focusing on one simple, small task that’s an hour out of your day at most, but can create an exponential growth opportunity for you if you do it consistently for a year. And so I think the same applies to social media, though, too, right? Like if you post once a week or twice a week, but you just do it consistently, you get into that habit of doing it consistently, not sharing an update when you’ve got an update and then falling off for 30 days and then coming back. And now you got to start all over again with the algorithm, and you’ve got to retrain the algorithm, right? I think some of those simple little things that you can break down into daily tasks that you can accomplish in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour to send those emails or whatever, it does make a big difference, and it’s important. I work with voice actors. There’s a group of voice actors that I coach for an entire year. Every year, I build out a mastermind group, and in December, we meet. I meet with each of one of them one on one, and we set the big goals for the entire year. Like, when I get to the end of the next year, these are the things that I want to accomplish. And then the next step from that is breaking it down into, okay, what does that look like over individual quarters? What does that look like over a month to month basis? And then, what does that look like on a day to day basis? So that you don’t just focus on the great big overarching goal for the entire year, but you’re breaking that down into more bite sized pieces, right? It’s the whole idea of eating the elephant one bite at a time. And I think that’s the concept, basically, of the micro habits. And that’s why I love that book. I think everybody should read that book.,Speaker A: It’s a ripper, isn’t it?,Speaker B: It really is.,Speaker A: What do you think’s the biggest enemy of doing? Easy to for me, it’s so easy. If I’m getting on to do my socials, it’s so easily to get distracted and go, oh, look what my mate Sean posted last week. And look at this, look at that. Do you reckon distraction is an enemy of our marketing?,Speaker B: 100%. There was a study that came out, and I know I’m going to get the numbers wrong, but it was something like, for every time that we allow ourselves to get taken off focus, it takes, like, 26 minutes to get back on track or something like that, right? And so one of the things that I say with social media, and I teach this to voice actors, like, okay, you’re going to use LinkedIn because you think that that’s a really good platform for you based on the type of work that you want to get. One of the things that you got to do on LinkedIn, if you really want to gain traction, is you’ve got to be consistent. Okay, what does that look like? And I say set a ten minute block in your calendar every morning and use an alarm. And when that alarm goes off after 10 minutes, get off. Because social media is designed for the endless scroll, right? Like, they’ve literally engineered these sites to keep us there as long as humanly possible. And so you have to be intentional about getting off and moving on to the next task. Otherwise it is 2 hours later and you’re still flipping through reels on Instagram or whatever. And so I think you’ve got to be very careful about stuff like that.,: Yeah, I had to come up with a hack for me, I am one of those keep many tabs open in Chrome, people, all the things I use to run my business, all the different software websites, everything is like tabs, right? So what I do now is I check Facebook and then I close the just that one little thing keeps it from looking at me and taunting me to click on it because it’s just not there. And that’s my little hack.,Speaker A: James Clee would be proud of you mate. That’s an atomic habit.,Speaker B: So often during the day my phone is not in my office because it’s too easy, right? It’s too easy. Apple lets you set up the custom focuses in the operating system and so I can set a custom focus that the only people that can text me or get a call through to me during certain times of the day. When I’m in that focus is like my wife and my kids, right? Everybody else can wait at that point because I don’t want one ping on your phone. One notification is never just let me just check that one text or let me just answer that one email. It’s always 25 minutes later and checked the weather and checked the stock market and went on Twitter and had to look at Instagram or whatever, right? And so it’s too easy to lose the time.,Speaker A: Is that a thing for you if you’ve got that set up on your phone? Does that mean that there’s a time of the day, I guess given outside of voiceover sessions and stuff but is there a particular time of the day that you do this sort of work?,Speaker B: When it is available in my schedule because my days are very unpredictable but I try to leave certain parts. Like you can’t schedule a session with me before 11:00 a.m. So the first couple of hours of the morning, that’s time when I can really just focus on my business and you can’t schedule a session with me after 04:00 in the afternoon and so there might be an hour or two after 04:00 where I’m focused and that’s where I’m going to do my things. But then if I have spare time in a day where somebody hasn’t booked me for whatever reason, phone goes into the focus and it lets me settle in to do whatever the task is that I need to do. 30 minutes of deep focused work is so much more productive than 2 hours of periodic distracted work in between checking socials and text messages and getting yourself into a.,Speaker A: So let’s let’s, let’s get a little bit micro on know, let’s take Andrew as an example. Andrew’s got an agent here in Australia. He’s got an agent in the States. He does work that he drums up himself out of Singapore and Dubai. What should a media strategy for someone like Andrew, and I’m not asking you to give him a freebie here, but in general terms, what sort of things should Andrew be thinking about if he’s going to go out there now and market himself and drum up some more work?,Speaker B: What kind of work is Andrew looking for?,Speaker C: That’s a very good question.,Speaker B: Probably particular genre.,Speaker C: I’m just kind of thinking the things that I probably do mainly, which is promo work, TV promos, radio imaging.,Speaker B: Then.,Speaker C: I do quite a lot of mainly commercials, long form stuff. So I do like everything really. But I guess the main thing is what I’m booked for is the imaging or promo and also the soft sell sort of luxury product kind of voice.,Speaker B: So one of the things that I think you could be doing is looking at you got a great voice, you got that you sound like a TV promo documentary.,Speaker A: God, don’t strike his ego anymore, please.,Speaker C: Oh, come on, someone’s got two.,Speaker B: You have the kind of voice that people will sit and listen to on TikTok. You do. And I think there’s one of two things that you could do. I think that you could either just do it straight and record yourself reading promos imaging, stuff like that, make some videos in the studio of you doing that as just a way to demonstrate, but also give people the opportunity to hear your voice. Or I think there’s an opportunity to go in a completely different direction. The person I’m thinking of in particular is Christopher Tester. He’s a voice actor out of the UK who is a classically trained British RP theater actor. And he goes on TikTok and reads monologues know, plays and historic books, different things like that, right? And he’s created this whole niche with videos that constantly are going viral, but then people are also constantly writing him and saying, hey, do this one next, or do this one next, which keeps the audience coming back, keeps them watching, keeps the videos going viral. But it was a demonstration of his acting ability and so people end up booking him for voiceover work specifically because of that, because they’re seeing his acting abilities. So I think if you could come up with a fun way to do some social media content that highlights your voice but demonstrates your skill, I think that’s one of the things that could be done in a relatively short amount of time every day, dedicate 30 minutes to it. Making videos for social media doesn’t need to be a complex task anymore. If you’ve got an iPhone or whatever, you’ve already got a superior camera and you’ve got a studio, so you’ve got great audio, so that’s really easy. And I think that would be one thing that I would be looking at. And then the other thing is, I would set a target for myself of I’m going to connect with whatever it is, five radio station program directors every day. And maybe that’s going to be through LinkedIn, or maybe that’s going to be through email, but it’s just getting yourself in front of a few new people every day, and that number is going to change. Right. For a successful working, six figure talent who doesn’t have a lot of time, right? They can contact 2025 people a week and just keep some new, fresh people in the pipeline. For the voice actor who doesn’t have a whole lot of work right now and is still trying to build their business, you’re going to contact ten or 20 people a day and work at filling up and creating that pipeline. But those are two things that I think that you could do to open up some opportunities for yourself. And that one’s okay. That’s okay. It’s on the house.,Speaker A: There you go. And I’ll be expecting to see the first video tomorrow. Andrew? Yes.,Speaker C: I wonder what I’ll do on TikTok. I dread to think we’re going to.,Speaker B: Premier it with the podcast episode.,Speaker A: So you know what’s interesting in hearing you talk about that, Mark, is that how niched our marketing needs to get. Then? If we’re aiming for a TikTok audience, do we really need to niche it down to, okay, I’m going to do it about acting, or I’m going to do it, or is there any scope anymore for just that I’m a voiceover actor and I can pretty much do everything? Or do we need to niche all our marketing down?,Speaker B: I think that it’s possible to do a niche that has absolutely nothing to do with voiceover whatsoever. If it is a niche that you have a skill in or a passion in, and you can connect with an audience in. The best example of that is Stefan Johnson. So he’s an American voice actor who does food reviews on TikTok, and they’re hilarious, irreverent, fun. And the guy’s got I don’t even know at this point, he’s probably got ten or 11 million followers on TikTok. Every video he does, I think, goes viral. That pretty much is the way it works. Now, he is not talking about voiceover. He’s just talking about food and snacks and fast food and doing his reviews, who’s got the best burger, who’s got the best pizza, whatever. But because he reaches such a broad audience, so many people are watching his videos, it’s inevitable that somewhere in that audience of millions of people are people who make buying decisions about voiceover for whatever, from the local video production company to the executive producer at a cable network or whatever. And so that has opened up a door for him for tons of voiceover opportunity. And so I think sometimes we limit ourselves by getting too focused on the voiceover box and thinking we have to. Be in the voiceover box. And so is there something that you can talk about, that you are passionate about, that you love, that you have a skill for, that you have an education for? Whatever? Is there a way that you could create content around that that highlights your voice still or highlights your narration skill or your acting skill or whatever? Doesn’t specifically have to do with voiceover, but I think the two tie themselves together eventually.,Speaker A: Now people out there are going to go, it’s all right for you, Mark, you’ve been doing this for a while now, you’ve got it down pat. I’m just a lowly little voiceover artist sitting in my home studio. I have no idea where to start. Would your advice be just bite the bullet and start?,Speaker B: Yeah. Because your first video is not going to be your best video. The first email that you send is not going to be the best email that you send. The first social media, a post that you create is not going to be the best, but you’ve got to get the first one out of the way to get to the next one, which is going to be a little better. And the one after that, it’s going to be a little better. Honestly, if I go back to, let’s say, 2008 910, somewhere in there, when I first started doing a little bit of email marketing, it is honestly an act of God that I ever booked a voiceover at all because I can go back and look at some of those early emails and be like, what the heck? I didn’t have a clue what I.,Speaker C: Was doing, but I was just exactly.,Speaker B: Doing it and then learning as I went, getting incrementally better. And that’s what opens up the door to more opportunity down the road. And so, yeah, I think it’s really easy to get perfection paralysis, right? I’ve got to have everything lined up before I got to have the perfect camera, the perfect audio, the perfect studio, the perfect backdrop before I can make my first video. Or I’ve got to have the exact formula worked out for the ultimate marketing email before I can ever send the first marketing email. And we let that become a crutch or an excuse that keeps us from just doing the thing when the reality is it’s just like voiceover. My guess is, and you guys could probably attest to this your first time in the booth and your hundredth time in the booth, I’m hoping on the hundredth time you were better, you get in your reps and you get better over time.,Speaker A: Yeah. So, George, I know you’re deep in marketing. George, the tech at the moment, is there anything you reckon Mark could I’m.,: Writing virtual postcards on a website right now.,Speaker A: You’re deeply engrossed in this interview then, George, I can see.,Speaker C: Yeah. But I’m thinking that that postcard idea is an absolute cracker.,: Yeah. I mean, I just received a postcard from a consultant who’s doing some financial consulting for me, like a financial planner type person. And I was like, oh, I haven’t gotten a handwritten thank you card in the mail in a really long time. In this case, it looks legitimately. Like, she legitimately handwrote this card and sent it to me.,Speaker B: Yes.,: And I thought, man, if she’s got time to do that, I mean, we have time to do that now. My handwriting sucks. It just does. And I could pay my assistant to write these cards, which I might consider doing. And there’s also these websites where you can do, quote unquote, handwritten postcards and send them out and they mail them for you and they print them and they do all that stuff. So it’s something I’m considering trying in those postcards, having a little coupon code for a please come back. But I have been in absolute, hardcore, full court press marketing mode for the last three months. For George, the tech, you say when you’re not working, you need to be marketing. And sales really slumped in the summer this year for us. And I was like, okay, I can either get really frustrated and figure out ways to just start cutting costs and slowing things down or really just go for it hardcore. With in my case, the thing I’ve been really ramping up is affiliate marketing. And that’s been where I’ve been focusing my energy. And I’ve got some great advisors around me. I talk to my own marketing and strategist person almost every single week. And I need that accountability, someone to follow up with me, someone to tell me, hey, we had that meeting and I told you to do all this stuff, so go do it. Because it’s an insane undertaking to run this business, keep everything functional still, keep my clients happy and on time and keep all the marketing and the biz dev all going. And that’s what I’ve been doing the last few months, actually. I started to realize I’m actually kind of enjoying doing more biz dev. And the shift of my time, of my day is it’s legitimately shifted. I don’t do as much billable time as I used to, but we have other people doing more billable time and that’s awesome.,Speaker B: It brings up a whole other point, though, that I think is important to consider, and that is there comes a point when you’ve been doing your marketing and it has paid off and business is going really well and you’re busy and you’re in the booth consistently or you’re doing studio builds consistently, or whatever it is that your thing is that you’re doing consistently. And what’s the very first thing that often gets cut from the schedule? It’s the marketing.,: Yeah, the marketing.,Speaker B: And then complacency sets in, right, complacency sets in because you’ve built a successful business. I’ve got a successful business, everything’s running, firing on all cylinders. But one thing that this industry will teach you over and over again is that clients don’t last forever. And so if you are not constantly bringing new people into the mix, then you don’t have anyone to replace those clients that ultimately fall away. And so complacency is one of the most dangerous things for any voice actor or business owner for that matter, who’s built a successful business. Because it’s really easy to work to get there and then when you get there, to relax and enjoy it. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t relax and enjoy it. Obviously, I don’t market the same way now that I did when I was building a full time business, but it’s important that I never just stop, that there’s always something new coming into the pipeline.,: Yeah, well, the thing that always happens at the end of the year is everybody wants to get out their holiday cards and all that stuff, right? And holiday gifts. And the problem with the holidays is it’s too damn busy to do all that stuff, right. Like by the time you’re thinking about it’s time to be doing my holiday stuff. Now work is like firing all cylinders. You’re really cooking. And that seems to happen almost every year for me. And how do you decide and again, not expecting extremely specific answer, but how do you decide about gifting? Because I know some folks and actors and myself included, some of your clients spent more with you than others this year or over the last five years. Is it a very simple mathematics? You just look and say, okay, someone spent more than X, I’m going to give them X? Is that kind of how you look at it?,Speaker B: Honestly, it’s something that I don’t do a ton of. And one of the reasons why is because there are so many potential pitfalls. And I mean, I guess it depends on where you’re working. I do a lot of work for corporate, right? It’s a lot of corporate and Elearning and stuff. So it’s a lot of corporations. There’s a lot of rules around gifting and you can actually get yourself into trouble doing that. And so it’s not something that I do a lot of, but I do always make sure I make a point of sending thank you cards or letting them know that I appreciate them and all of that sort of stuff. I do think that there’s something to be said for that. I was going to mention too, you got me thinking because you mentioned about the holidays and it’s such a busy time and everybody’s doing marketing over Christmas and New Year’s or Cyber Monday, Black Friday, blah, blah, blah. One of the most successful sales that I ever ran for my coaching was on Groundhogs Day. I ran a Groundhogs Day sale because who the heck runs a Groundhogs Day sale? And so when every other voiceover organization is running a July 4 sale or a Labor Day sale or a Black Friday sale or whatever, I was like, I’m going to do a Groundhog Day sale and see how that goes. And I had no competition on that day. And so that’s a little bit outside of the box when you’re thinking about so can you look? There’s a national day for everything. George and Uncle Roy post them every day. There’s a national day for everything. You need to find a national day for something that is related to audio, sound, studio, microphone, whatever. And let that be your big marketing push day when nobody else is thinking about it or nobody else is doing it. Own that day instead of trying to compete with all the noise on a Black Friday or a Cyber Monday or whatever.,Speaker A: Don’t talk about Uncle Roy around. AP. He’s got huge marketing issues with Uncle Roy.,: But yeah, I mean that whole top of mind, that Uncle Roy thing, that whole top of mind thing that Uncle Roy does with that finding literally a reason to every single day post something, it’s a smart idea, it’s top of mind.,Speaker B: And now he’s associated with it, right?,Speaker A: Yeah, he’s that guy.,Speaker B: So you got to find your thing that you get associated with by default. Find that holiday, find that thing and make that the George the Tech day, the George the Tech event.,Speaker A: So we’re sort of making our own Black Friday, is that the deal?,Speaker B: Yeah, I think that there’s something to be said for that and it doesn’t mean you ignore all of those other opportunities. But doing something special on a day that has some sort of relevance or significance but nobody else is doing it, it is one of the ways that you can potentially stand out.,: Love it.,Speaker A: So just quickly, just to sort of wind this up. Creativity is a big part of what we do in our work, obviously being voiceover artists and audio engineers and George doing what he does and that obviously needs to be reflected in our marketing. Is there any rituals or any sort of thing you do around creativity to sort of spark ideas in terms of what you might post on social media or what you might say in an email? Or do you just open up a blank email and hope the words come out?,Speaker B: Yeah, I spend ungodly amounts of time staring at a blank iPad pro with an Apple pencil in my hand waiting for the idea to hit so that I can write it down because it doesn’t come. Believe it or not, that creative side doesn’t always come naturally to me. But one of the things that I have gotten so much better at over the years and George, this could specifically apply to what you’re doing. I am paying so much more attention to what my audience is talking about. So I have a Facebook group with 6000 plus voice actors in it. And the questions that they’re asking in that group, the things that they’re complaining about, the pain points that they’re very obviously struggling with, every single one of those becomes a seed for a video, a podcast topic, a social media post, a course that I might eventually create. And so I’ve gotten to a point now and this is one of the perks of building that kind of network and that kind of following is that they don’t realize it maybe necessarily, but they are feeding me my content ideas. And George, I know you could do the same thing. All you have to do is spend 5 minutes in a Facebook group and see there’s a dozen people a day complaining about tech this, tech that, this problem that problem, whatever. Every one of those is a potential piece of content that you could create, whether it’s a video, an audio piece of content, a Facebook post, a blog article, whatever. It’s all content that is right there being handed to you specifically addressing the things that your audience is struggling with. And so that’s one of the things that I do is just I survey my network a lot. What are you struggling with? Or if you could have one podcast interview that you would absolutely love to hear that would change your business, who would the guest be or what would the topic be? And I throw out surveys like that and that helps me to come up with ideas. And then when all else fails, I go sit in the backyard by the fire and enjoy the peace and quiet and hope that if I can clear my head enough and quiet myself enough, a brilliant idea will strike.,Speaker A: They do eventually though, don’t they? That’s the thing. It’s true. I know there’s some science behind this, but it actually is those moments when your brain’s not actively thinking about the next email or the next social post that the ideas actually come.,Speaker B: Long walk always have a way to.,: Write things down or do a voice memo in the shower. In fact, I have an Amazon Echo Dot.,Speaker A: There’s no camera in there that hangs.,: On the wall right over the doorway. And if I’m like in the shower, I can say hey yo Jimbo, remind me to do this while I’m in the middle of the shower because I.,Speaker B: Don’T want to miss. That so true.,Speaker A: Yep, yep, that’s right. Well, I think it was AP will probably correct me on this, but I think it was either Start Me Up or Brown Sugar that Keith Richards wrote literally in his sleep. Keith Richards sleeps with a cassette deck next to his bed. And in the middle of the night, if he has an idea, he wakes up and he sings it into his tape recorder. But whichever song it was, it was one of their massive hits anyway, he woke up the next morning and he didn’t remember waking up during the night, but he looked at this cassette deck and the cassette had been obviously played. It was halfway through the cassette and he played it back and it was Start Me Up, Brown Sugar. Whichever one it was, it was there. And so he literally wrote it in his sleep.,Speaker C: Yeah, I do remember the stories. I think it was a reel to reel and the tape running out woke him up.,Speaker A: Was it something like that?,Speaker C: Spooled off? Yeah. And he’s sort of like, what the hell was that running for? I don’t remember starting played it back.,Speaker A: And there was the song Crazy.,Speaker C: Just crazy.,Speaker A: Our brain is an amazing thing.,Speaker B: It’s one of the reasons why I have so many issues with sleep, because, honestly, that is one of the few times in the day where my brain is completely quiet when I’m in bed at night. And so a lot of my best ideas hit about three or 330 in the morning, and I can’t be upset about it because they’re my best ideas, but at the same time, it’s like.,: I wish this would come during the day.,Speaker A: Well, I’ve had a similar thing because AP and I have just started doing demos together and writing scripts for those falls to me. And, yeah, I’m sort of finding that I’ll sort of jump into bed and I’ll start dozing off to sleep, and then I’m awake and dashing out of the room with my iPhone and dictating a script idea that’s just comes into my head, into the phone. So, yeah, I think we’re all the same.,: Absolutely.,Speaker B: Yes.,Speaker A: Well, mate, this has been a whole lot of fun. Thank you so much for your time.,Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. It’s been fun. Thank you.,Speaker A: If people want to find out more about you, and you’ve got some amazing courses and bits and pieces up for offer, and obviously the podcast as well, what’s the best place for people to go? To find out more about the Mark Scott Experience, shall we call it?,Speaker B: Funnily enough, that was actually the name of an old radio show. Now it is Vopreneur.com. That old Mark Scott experience facebook page might still exist somewhere. I’m not sure if that ever came offline, but, yeah, the website is Vopepreneur.com.,Speaker A: As soon as we’re done here, I’m going to Google that.,Speaker B: Shit.,Speaker A: I was going to say something and now it’s gone out of my head.,Speaker C: It’ll come to you at three in the morning?,Speaker A: Yeah, it’ll come to me in the morning. I’ll give you a call, let you know.,Speaker B: All right.,Speaker A: Best of luck with the Red Sox. I hope they get better for you, mate.,Speaker B: Well, I mean, there’s nowhere to go when you’re at the bottom but up, right?,Speaker C: This is true.,Speaker B: Well, that was fun. Is it over?,Speaker C: The Pro audio suite with thanks to Tribut and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robbo Got your own audio issues? Just askrovo.com with tech support from George the tech Wittam. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic or just say G’day. Drop us a note at our websiteproaudiosuite.com.
    

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