Well, if you've ever looked for advice on marketing your voiceover business, you've heard this one, right? Make more reels. Uh post every day. Show your personality. Apparently, somewhere between filming a booth tour and the latest voice actor challenge, clients are supposed to start beating your door down. Except that that's not how anything works. You spend an hour or two making a video, you spend another twenty minutes making a caption, you put it out into the world and you discover like seven views. Two likes and a comment from another voice actor asking you which mic you use. Congratulations. Good work. Social media isn't useless, it can build awareness and credibility and relationships, but telling voice actors to just post more without explaining is Whom they're trying to reach or what those posts are actually trying to do is just atrocious business advice. So today in this video, I'm gonna break down why I believe that most social media is a waste of time for most voice actors. I'm gonna break down attention versus opportunity, what your time is worth, and what you should be concentrating on instead. Before we get going, let's get you our free source of the week, our free resource of the week. And this week it's our essential marketing asset checklist for VO Pros. It's your one-stop guide for building a professional presence online that books direct work and keeps clients coming back. It's free, and the link is in the description and show notes. Attention, folks. Ain't opportunity. Sure, a video of you doing funny impressions might get you twenty or thirty or a hundred thousand views, but if those people are other voice actors, other performers, and people that cannot hire you, then what is the point? Now imagine a LinkedIn post that talks about how good narration helps employees understand complicated training material. Now maybe that gets you eighty views, but what if eight or nine of those people are learning and development managers at companies that constantly produce training material? Which post would you rather have? If my goal is bookings, I'll take a handful of qualified prospects over millions of eyeballs every day of the week. Yes, visibility gets you noticed, but opportunity gets you in front of people that have the authority and a reason to To hire you. But there's another problem with social media that I don't think we talk about nearly enough in this industry, and that is that the audience that follows you may not be the audience that buys. Take a look at your followers. Seriously, how many of those people are actually ever going to hire a voice actor? If you're like most voice actors, your followers are probably Mostly voice actors. And that's totally understandable. This is one of the most supportive communities on the planet, and we want to follow people that we're down and in the trenches with, right? But supportive colleagues and prospective buyers are not the same audience. Think about what most voice actors post, right? Audition war stories and studio updates and gear editions and opinions about AI. Absolutely interesting topics for Other performers and voice actors, but are those the things that keep a video producer awake at night? No. A producer is thinking about deadlines and budgets and creative direction and finding talent that isn't going to create more headaches for them. A training manager wants employees to understand the material. A creative director wants talent that can connect with the script and serve the campaign. And when your content Start to address those concerns and problems, you're showing prospective buyers that you understand their business. And that means you need something more than a content calendar. What you need is positioning. Picture a voice actor whose website announces that they're available for commercials, explainer videos, video games, audio books, radio imaging, and anything else that involves a mouth. Keep it clean. They may post Constantly, but nothing connects their content to a particular buyer or particular problem. Now think about somebody whose messaging focuses on helping healthcare companies communicate complicated medical material accurately and with compassion. Their posts and their content talk about patient education, medical terminology, building trust with an audience. And which of those actors is that healthcare video producer more likely to remember? And hire. Now that doesn't mean that you have to pick one genre and stick with it forever and ever and ever. Amen. It means that your positioning has to be clear enough for a potential buyer to immediately know whether or not you're a good fit. Positioning isn't about limiting you or what you can do. It's simply about helping a buyer understand whether or not they should hire you. And if your positioning is confusing, then posting twenty-five times a week just reinforces that confusion. And I have a particular problem with marketing advice that assumes that every voice actor on the planet has unlimited time to create and post content. Most voice actors are building a voiceover career around. Possibly a day's survival job around families, possibly caregiving to elderly parents or other family members, and tons of other adult responsibilities. Life be lifen. And they might have five or six hours a week to do any sort of marketing if they're lucky. Telling those people to just make more content and maintain 17 social media accounts and chase an algorithm is a fucking fantastic recipe. For exhaustion. But worse yet, it takes away time for actions that will have a much better impact on the revenue of the business. Let's say today you've got one hour for marketing, right? You could spend that hour making a video and editing it and putting it out on the internet for some other algorithm to decide who's gonna see it. Or you could spend that time researching 15 production companies, identifying the decision makers who hire voice talent in those companies, send those 15 people a thoughtful introduction, and follow up with some contacts that you've fallen out of touch with. Now, which of those activities gives you more control over which people actually hear from you? That's a pretty damn important calculation when your marketing time is limited. And while we're talking about control, let's talk about another inherent problem with social media. You're putting one hell of a lot of faith in tech companies who have absolutely no interest in the success of your business. Algorithms change. Reach fluctuates up and down, and something that worked great six months ago might not be worth a damn today. And that's just not a solid foundation for a your business, which you hope is going to replace your paycheck. Compare that with a professional website. A database of qualified prospects and relationships that you've developed with clients that hire you again and again and again. Those kinds of assets are ones that you can keep on developing doesn't matter what Instagram or TikTok or Facebook decides to do next week. I'm not saying you have to abandon social media altogether necessarily. What I'm saying is that renting attention is different from building a business. What should you be doing instead? I teach a simple framework called Target, Reach Out, Grow. It gives voice actors a framework to market intentionally, deliberately, strategically, rather than throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Start by figuring out who are the kinds of clients that you want to work with. Maybe that's animation studios, maybe it's production companies, maybe it's ad agencies, e-learning developers, independent book publishers. Then find out what they produce, who are the decision makers within those companies, and what are the challenges those people are dealing with. The better you understand their world, the easier it is to explain to them how you fit into it. And that understanding should inform what you're publishing in terms of content and in terms of your outreach. Once you know who you're targeting, make those connections. Send a personal introduction by email. Engage with their content on LinkedIn. Go out and meet those people at an industry event, or maybe even reconnect with somebody you haven't worked with in a little while. And yes, social media can actually play a legit role here. But the difference now is you're using it to build relationships with actual prospects. Rather than hoping that gee random posts just magically produce clients somehow. Don't expect every email, every social media comment to produce a client magically from the ground right in front of you. You're building familiarity and trust over time so that when a need arises, when a project comes up, that prospect naturally thinks of you. And marketing doesn't stop after the introduction. Follow up is absolutely crucial. Follow up, keep track of your conversations, stay in touch with your past clients, and share material that provides relevance and value and helps solve the problems that your prospective buyers have. Make it shit simple on your website for buyers to hear your demos and get in touch. Then measure the metrics that matter, replies, conversations, inquiries, bookings, auditions. Repeat work and overall revenue. Those metrics will tell you one hell of a lot more about your marketing and the health of your business than likes and followers. And over time you will come to understand through experience which actions actually help grow your business and And which ones just keep you busy. Now, none of this means you need to stop posting. What it means is every single post should have a purpose. Maybe you're posting a project you did that demonstrates how well you handle complex technical narration. Maybe you have insightful commentary on a change in the industry of one of your client segments. Maybe you're congratulating a client on one of their campaigns that didn't even involve you. Or maybe you're just staying visible and providing value to people that already. Already know you. Before you hit publish, ask yourself, who is this for? Why should they give a damn? What do I want them to do after they see it? And if you can't answer those questions, maybe that post doesn't need to happen or needs to be rethought. You don't need 50,000 followers to have a thriving business as a voice actor. You need enough of the right people to know you, to trust your ability, and to think of you when they need talent. A talent with Let's say a dozen solid relationships at production companies is a hell of a lot better position than somebody with 80,000 followers but no actual business connections. One is developing potential repeat business. The other is just entertaining strangers. Now, if you like making content, congratulations. That's great. Keep doing it. But don't let that action and that activity and the time investment that you're putting into it Crowd out the actual actions that are going to build your business. Researching prospects, introducing yourself, following up, and taking care of people. Your goal is not to become internet famous. Your goal, I think, if you're here, is to build a thriving, sustainable voiceover business. And no amount of posting can replace knowing your clients, understanding their needs and their problems and their challenges and their pain points, and building relationships with them that leads Now, if this video provided you value and relevance and helped you solve a problem, maybe you'll share it with another voice actor and help us find them and help them as well. The more we exchange strategies, opinions, tactics, even insights here on the channel, on the podcast, and in the voiceover commun community at large, the better stronger industry we're going to have for ourselves, for our clients, for the families that we take care and love so much, and maybe we'll have a little bit better world. at the end of all of it. Thanks so much and we'll see you back here again real soon.