Business Basics for Voiceover Artists : Voiceover and Social Media Marketing

So what’s all this business about social media marketing?  I know some of you have already taken to this wholeheartedly but there are others amongst us for whom social media marketing is a mystery as to what it is and why they should bother getting involved with it. 

So lets start at the beginning.  What is Social Media Marketing?  Essentially, its another marketing strategy – which ,bottom line, is why you should be interested in it, if you’re interested in marketing your voiceover business.  Its a marketing strategy that’s developed out of an intense dislike of hard sell marketing tactics.  Instead of banging people over the head with marketing methods that could be considered bullying ,hard sell , in your face selling. Social media marketing is about creating and maintaining relationships with potential customers so that when they are in a position to buy what you’re selling, they automatically think of you and the service you provide.  And your name springs to mind because of they way you have presented yourself in your social media marketing activities, as an expert in your field, a trustworthy and interesting person, who can deliver on what they promise, and someone that people would like to do business with.  People like to do business with people they like. So through your communications through social media marketing you have positioned yourself as that person. 

In marketing speak, Social Media Marketing is what’s known as Permission marketing, or inbound marketing.  Its developed as a reaction to the traditional forms of marketing.  Traditional marketing approaches have been things like seminars, tradeshows, telemarketing, print ads, direct mail.  The problem has been that more and more people have found methods to block out these marketing messages, making these approaches less and less effective.  Some people don’t answer their phones unless they recognise the number calling them,  many email newsletters and correspondence can get caught in the ever efficient spam filters,  people are able to fast forward their way through the tv adverts, and some ‘watch again facilities’ delete all the adverts for you anyway.  As information has become more and more accessible through the internet, customers really don’t need this type of marketing as they can get all their information they need from other sources.  So social media marketing is way of marketing that avoids all these problems as it encourages customers to find you once they’re ready to make their purchase. 

So how do you do this Social media marketing malarky?

The key is to get Social!!   And you can do this in three ways -  publish, share & network.  Social media marketing sites can be roughly  divided into these 3 categories although when you do investigate them you’ll soon realise that a lot of these do overlap within themselves.  The general rule for all these sites is to join in,