Good morning and Happy MLK Day, Inauguration Day, and Holy Crap It’s Freezing Day. Hide your brass monkeys! Don’t know what means? Go read definition #3 in Urban Dictionary.
A few quick news & notes first…
I sent out my quarterly newsletter, “The Rognog” last week. If you didn’t get a chance to read it you can do so here.
Thanks to everyone who attended my latest Edge Studio “Business and Money 201” webinar: Tracking, Billing, and Contact Software. We had another great turnout and as always the students were a blast!
Like most people, I like to hit the ground running at the beginning of the year. I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions but I do believe in missions, goals, and action plans, which tend to be more realistic, specific, and attainable. So once it’s written out and all shiny & pretty-like on a fresh piece of paper, it’s great to just dive in and bang some stuff out to get that sense of accomplishment and also build some momentum. For me, it was marketing.
I’m pretty consistent with my marketing, but you can always do more and you can always do better. So I decided to start off the year with a laser-like targeted marketing campaign so I can do two things: maximize results by doing my due diligence with the contacts in question and gather some strong analytics.
My marketing campaign was directed towards a very specific niche of the voiceover industry to about 100 contacts. Some were emails and some were postcards. Why not all postcards, or maybe phone calls? More and more companies aren’t divulging their locations so it’s nigh impossible to get snail mail addresses and phone numbers for some of them. The reason is that companies don’t want potential customers to be biased by the geographic location of their facilities. For example, I checked out the websites of two companies whose websites were equally professional-looking & informative. By looking at them you had no idea where they were located but both looked great. One was in Ohio and one was in Pakistan! See what I mean?
The results? So far, so good! My response rate was about 20% for the email campaign. The postcards went out last Thursday so it’s too early to tell how that one went.
TIP OF THE WEEK: So, what’s a good “batting average” for a marketing campaign?
I did some cursory research online and I found that nationally, direct mailings average about 2%-5%, email blasts about 20%, cold calls about 6%. How do you maximize your chances?
Be specific: know exactly what kind of voicover genre you want to focus on, have the right demo, and be sure that the company you contact does that kind of voiceover work.
Have a good script: make sure your speech/script on your email/postcard is brief, informative, brief, not all about you, and brief! Don’t waste their time bragging about your work on products they’ve never heard of. Just quickly tell them how YOU can serve THEM, not the other way around!
Names!: know the name of the person you want to call/email/snail mail. It will greatly increase your chances of getting added to their roster.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Everything has an end. Only the sausage has two. German Saying
STUFF!: Go see “Silver Lining Playbook”. It was hilarious, poignant, brilliant, all that Oscar-like goodness. I haven’t laughed like that watching a new movie in a long time!
From Tom Dheere’s apartment, this is Tom Dheere: GKN News…