with Pamela Muldoon
VO Boss and Host Anne Ganguzza is joined by Pamela Muldoon, a veteran Content Marketing consultant and VO talent. What is Content Marketing and why should every VO talent better understand this form of marketing? Get the content marketing basics on this episode of VO Boss! There was so much to talk about, we had to split it into two episodes. Get ready to take copious notes and listen to Content Marketing for VO Part 1!
Takeaways
Quick Concepts from Today’s Episode:
What is Content Marketing and why should VO talent care about this form of marketing?
VO talent need to take on a content marketing mindset.
Stop marketing to each other and create content that solves a problem for your target audience.
You have to know who your buyer is; who is it that is actually purchasing your voiceover services?
You must define your buyer persona and align that persona to a customer journey.
Follow the new rules around email marketing. It’s just going to continue to become the norm vs. the exception.
Let’s use a real-world example to show how to create a content marketing approach.
Create a problem/solution list of that your target audience has around your industry and services.
Make what you do easy for your client. Knowing your persona will ensure you are doing what makes their life easier.
Content can be the lead magnet that drives your buyer persona into your database.
Content done well can be a great way for your audience to be found via SEO, keywords, etc…
The fear of other talent within your industry to take your content and re-use it comes from a scarcity mindset vs. abundance mindset in your business.
You may be special in how you create and deliver your content, but in the end, the majority of your content is not a brand new idea. But only you can be you.
Build an audience from your content and they will see you as the ‘go-to’ person for that information.
Content marketing forces us to think bigger and become more creative with how we market to our target audience.
Referenced in this Episode
Direct links to things we brought up +
Read Anne’s Blog on email marketing
Reap the rewards of direct marketing with a VO BOSS Blast
Check out Pamela Muldoon’s Website
Recorded on ipDTL
Awesome editing by Carl Bahner
Transcript
>> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry has top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS. Now let’s welcome your host Anne Ganguzza.
Anne: Welcome, everybody, to the VO BOSS podcast. I’m your host, Anne Ganguzza, along with special guest host Pamela Muldoon. Hey Pamela!
Pamela: Woohoo! Crowd goes crazy, Anne. [laughs]
Anne: Thanks so much for joining us.
Pamela: Oh, you’re so welcome. It’s great to be here. I’m excited to be a part of the show.
Anne: Pamela is such a treat. I’m super pumped to have Pamela as part of our content marketing series. Let me tell you a little bit about Pamela as per her bio which is amazing, by the way. Guys, we have a bio podcast. If you don’t realize how important your bio is, go back and listen to that. But anyways, I’m always in awe of Pamela because she’s been working in the content marketing world for, oh my goodness, I want to say at least 20 years. Pam, Is that correct?
Pamela: I’ve been doing marketing believe it or not for 30 years.
Anne: Look at that.
Pamela: I’ve been in content marketing since it became an industry in about 2010, is when it really became an industry. Probably before that there were some digital presence of this thing called content but it hadn’t actually formulated as an industry until about 2010, 2011.
Anne: Well, let me tell you what struck my eye in your bio here, and we’re gonna talk about content marketing in this episode. You’ve been listed as one of the top 50 women in content marketing and named one of the 20 women to watch from the Sales Lead Management Association. Man, that’s good stuff. I’m super proud of you, Pamela.
Pamela: Thank you.
Anne: Like a mother.
[both laugh]
Pamela: You’re so sweet. Thank you.
Anne: You’ve also been professionally podcasting since 2009, and you hold this very special place in my heart because, BOSS listeners, I don’t know if you’re aware, but back in the beginning of BOSS, Pamela and I actually were kind of the grassroots foundation. I had Pamela on board to help me develop the podcast as we had envisioned it, and really, Pamela was an amazing help to me because of her experience in podcasting. And unfortunately at the time, I believe you were relocating for a job and then it became a full-time thing. And so you ultimately didn’t end up being a cohost with me for a while, actually until now.
Pamela: Yeah. So I believe, you know, everything is perfectly timed for a reason, right?
Anne: Yeah, exactly.
Pamela: But you’re right. Yeah. I watched a growth and the way this podcast has been thrown out into the world with a little bit of, you know, motherly love as well. [laughs] Because yeah, that was a couple of years ago, four years ago actually , Anne. Can you believe that?
Anne: I know. God.
Pamela: Four plus years ago, we started to have these discussions around what would this podcast look and feel like, and what is it that you really wanted to create to reach this important audience. It has been wonderful to watch it and I’m so excited to finally get to share the mic with you.
Anne: Yay! And of course, Pamela is also a voiceover talent for those of you who are not familiar. So not only is she a completely amazing content marketer, she’s also a voice actor and now my special guest cohost. I would love to talk to you about content marketing. If you can tell us a little bit about content marketing, what is it and why is it important for us as voice talent, for our business.
Pamela: Content marketing, we’ve all been involved in it in some way, shape or form. We may not just have called it specifically what it is, right? So if you have a blog or if you’ve been doing social media on a consistent basis, all of that kind of falls under the realm of content marketing. What’s critical to understand is the word marketing. That there is – as someone who has worked in marketing for three decades, there’s all of the stuff you do, but if it doesn’t have some direct result and intent to someone buying or purchasing from you, then it’s just doing stuff, right? It’s when you add this marketing element that there’s an intent for there to eventually be a conversion to a purchase or a sale, and that’s where content marketing – sometimes you’ll just hear the words just content strategy, and that’s a slightly different way to look at this because once you throw the word marketing in, there’s an intent that there’s a purchaser on the other end. Does that make sense?
Anne: Yeah. And I think it’s important to mention that most people, when they get into voiceover, probably one of the most important things that they have to really get set up and start doing is marketing themselves. I know for a lot of people, it’s a scary thought, let alone content marketing. Marketing alone is a scary thought. And I think you really have to get yourself into a mindset of, you know, being able to market your business, and content marketing is a huge part of that.
Pamela: It really is. It involves a few different kind of elements that are critical that you might think of as separate but they’re all equal. And so of course there’s the SEO factor, anytime we’re doing something digitally and we have keywords, key phrases, content becomes a big piece of that, but the other part of this, and I think it’s really a struggle especially for voice actors, is we tend to, we tend to be able to write about what it’s we do rather than writing for how we solve problems. Does that make sense? [laughs]
Anne: Yeah.
Pamela: And that’s really, you know, as we work together on our series, Anne, I want to touch more on that, with the importance of really understanding your audience, how it plays into what we call a customer journey and how you align the solution you provide with the problem that your audience has. That’s at the end of the day what all good marketing does, but when you bring it into content, it means you have the ability to create information, education, etc. either through the power of text, audio like we’re doing in a podcast, or video, where you can reach that audience and do some education information, but it’s got to align to what it is, their problem or solution is. Not necessarily just all about you, if that makes sense.
Anne: I love that because as a demo producer I’ve always gone on to say, who are you producing your demo for? It’s not really for other voiceover talent. It’s for your buyer, and you have to know who your buyer is. And I think that’s super important.
Pamela: And you work specifically, much of the time, right, I have attended some of your wonderful training sessions on the e-learning, corporate narration market for example, right?
Anne: Right.
Pamela: And I think it’s a perfect market to talk about this as an example because there, you’re reaching people who are not voice actors, right.
Anne: Right.
Pamela: They’re not voice production talent people for the most part. Once in a while, you get lucky. [laughs]
Anne: They have their own agenda, right. They have their own agenda.
Pamela: They have absolutely a different agenda. Their day to day becomes absolutely critical to how you spend time marketing to them, right?
Anne: Yes.
Pamela: And so in future conversations we’re going to have as part of this series, I want to break down the importance of developing a buyer persona. Sometimes it might be referred to as an avatar on the Internet. I just always think of the movie, so I don’t like to use that word. I find blue creatures in my head [laughs] Like no. It kind of messes with my idea of a person, a persona. And then of course the customer journey really understanding how the person you’re talking to goes about the stages of purchasing a product or service that you provide. And it’s a little more work than most of us are used to when it comes to the marketing process. We tend to think, I’ll just get a list, or I’ll start emailing, but even that – you know this, with all of the changes going on with laws from the recent changes with California to what happened with Europe and things like this, we have to be really cautious about what we’re doing in terms of email marketing, and content marketing is your answer. It’s your absolute 100% total answer how to embark and grow your database 100%.
Anne: BOSS Blasts, we actually do marketing for creatives. We actually had to have a policy change. There was a policy change, the people we obtain our list from. So again it became more stringent, more strict. We of course had to make adjustments as well. If you don’t, I’ll tell you what, it’s one way to go from company to no company in a split second, by not following these policies and procedures and adhering to those laws.
Pamela: And actually, I think, you know, even though we’re hearing it from Europe did their recent, you know, a couple of years ago, California just implemented, this is going to become the norm. It’s not going to be the exception. This is going to become the norm. So what does that mean? It means you have to have double opt in. It means you can’t email me unless I chose to opt into your database, things like that. Even if you’re getting a list, you’ve got to be really careful how you go about connecting with those people because you never know when there’s that one person who got just one more email too many.
Anne: And they had a bad day.
Pamela: Right? Yeah, exactly. The fine could take a business like a voice talent’s business off the map for sure.
Anne: Yeah. It’s nothing to mess around with. I’m so glad that we’re here to talk about that in our series. In going back to I guess a marketing – I hear your assistant –
Pamela: My dog has decided for the first time since I’ve owned my booth to [laughs]
Anne: To bark?
Pamela: To bark literally outside my door. [laughs] Sweetheart –
Anne: So the other day, as you know, when I was doing my directed session, my cats decided to like shred up the rug outside of me, and even though you could hear the difference when I was outside the booths, when they’re running through my booth, [laughs] you know.
Pamela: It’s like kitty chaos. Yeah.
Anne: They don’t bark, but they do make noise. Anyways. [laughs]
Pamela: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Anyhoo. So yeah, content marketing. One of the ideas I had too was if you wanted to use this series to take a genre then take a person –
Anne: That would be great.
Pamela: Like a curriculum developer, and then talk about what that means to them as a person, like how to build a persona around that.
Anne: Yep.
Pamela: And then we can take it to the journey – like actually use this as a real working model. Because I think sometimes in the world that I work in, when people in my industry and content for example say, “you need more engagement,” what the hell does that mean? Right? That’s a very ephemeral concept. Right? So putting things in a more of a specific and strategic idea can help the audience to say, “hey. I totally get this now.” So. Because when I even talk about content marketing, it’s very easy for me to say, you should be doing this, when you’re looking at someone like me and saying yeah, that sounds great, but how do I do it? How do I actually get started? One of the things I found though in the years that I’ve been doing content marketing and voiceover parallel is, and I’m not the first one to, you know, obviously discuss this, that we as voice talent tend to market to each other more than to our audience, right? Again, it’s natural to talk about what you do, but it comes from more of a place of let me tell you about myself doing it versus how does my audience improve their life or their business because of what I do? So it’s a natural place. It’s where we tend to want to write a lot of blog posts, how we throw things up on the Internet or on social media. So what I’m asking voice talent to start to do, if they’re not already doing it, is to create literally the problem solution list of how what they do helps their specific persona, not just an overarching audience of quote unquote people who buy your services, but a curriculum developer is going to have a different need than say a production house, right? Than say a medical technical curriculum person, right? So there’s so many different nuances. If you take the time to actually develop that information, you’ll create or have the opportunity to create ideas where you can develop content that answers those problems, and then you’re the solution.
Anne: I love that you just said that. Because I was just talking about one of my clients to one of my students saying it’s so difficult to get in touch with this client because this client is the medical client. A medical client communicates with me in so very differently than let’s say a corporate client because I don’t know, he’s off, I don’t know, speaking at symposiums or whatever it is. For him, his requirements out of what I can help him do is basically, you know, just here’s the script and don’t bother me until it’s done and yeah, I’ll pay you. Like for me, I have to be able to service him with my voice and understand what it is he needs and how I can help him and not give him homework. I think that’s an important concept, to not give your clients homework because that just doesn’t make you a convenient person to work with.
Pamela: Right. Well, it could be the deciding factor, right? We can say that we have a voice print and what makes us unique is our voice, which is very true, right? I have a very different voice from you, and you have a very different voice from the next person, etc. At the same token we also know that it’s those little tiny differences, sometimes the make or break for us. We may not know that because we don’t get hired. [laughs]
Anne: Right, and nobody ever tells us. Right? That’s the other thing.
Pamela: Exactly, and so going back to how does content fall into this, you know, even from the marketing perspective of being found, and this is more of a rhetorical question, but Anne, knowing what you know, right, what would it mean to your medical narration business if you were to create information on how you’re making that persona’s life easier with the skills you do? And you’re making that information available maybe through a series of blogs or through a checklist, or through something they can download so they can now come into your database and opt in. Remember, we want to be legal, right?
Anne: Sure.
Pamela: So content becomes that lead magnet source, right, of information. But the source of information has to be specific to the audience, and it has to truly solve a problem that they have. Not something that you want to brag about, if that makes sense.
Anne: Yeah, and I think too that it’s important to make a distinction that, when you do something like that, when you’re talking about how can I service a medical client easier, here’s a checklist, the purpose of the blog would be to, you know, make it easier for other medical clients to find you and understand how easy it’s to work with you, not so that other voice talent can go take that content and make it their own as well. I think a lot of times voice talent are concerned about that which is why they may or may not get into the blog aspect of it, thinking that, oh well, some other voice talent is going to take what I’ve spent my time working on, and make it work for them, when in fact that’s just kind of a moot point, if you ask me.
Pamela: Yeah. There is an ethics issue at play here as well, right? Our industry is not the only industry that has this issue, right? This is especially prevalent. It’s kind of funny. It becomes more prevalent in the independent market, and yet at the same time, as a content strategist, I work with a lot of enterprise companies, and it still kind of sits in their mindset as well. Like, if I put out all of our secret sauce, somebody is going to steal it. At the end of the day, first of all, it’s not secret sauce. Most of what we have to say is not rocket science level, right? Like it’s – what makes it unique is the way that we put it out there. I totally respect and understand –
Anne: Good distinction there.
Pamela: Yeah. And I totally respect and understand this idea of “if I put it out there, other voice talent will take it,” and I think that’s where it really omes down to, do you have an abundant mentality or a scarcity mentality to how you want to approach your business? You can’t stop people from doing unethical things, but you can protect yourself. There are ways through legal to protect yourself with policies on your site, and if you do scrape the web, and you find someone else is using your materials, you have some legal repercussions at play that you can move forward on. It always comes down to whether or not you want to go that far, right, because sometimes the headache of that is more than it’s worth.
Anne: I like how you say it’s not rocket science. Because I say that a lot. Look, I come from an educational background. Right? If I didn’t, if I wasn’t free with sharing my information, I wouldn’t be a good educator.
Pamela: Right.
Anne: So I believe that content marketing falls within the realm –
Pamela: Yes.
Anne: – of allowing information to be shared, and in the end there’s only one me. No one can get that from me. My content, you know what, I always think well okay, then you must have needed it more than I did if you chose to take it off of my site and claim it as your own. You’re right. You do have some ways if you’ve got policies on your site to be able to, you know, maybe take control of that if you want. Depending on the content, that might or might not be stolen. You could take action on that. But for me, it’s not rocket science. Like in voiceover, we always try to get to the, let’s talk conversational read. Right? We all want to get to the conversational read. There’s many, many coaches that are teaching that. We all are trying to get to the same end goal. We may just say it differently. But the idea is the same. And so content marketing too, the ideas are the same. It’s the way say it that’s different.
Pamela: Absolutely. And the other piece of that, and I know I’ll definitely want to dive into this into a future episode with you, Anne, but the other piece to that is when I talk about content on the blog or as a lead magnet, and I just want to define that a little bit, lead magnet is basically – and we’ve all done this. We just don’t know that there’s language sometimes around what we’re doing. So we’ve all done this where we’ve experienced something, seen an ad on Facebook, an ad on Instagram or something, and we’re like wow, that piece of content looks really great. I could really use that. I really want to read it or download it. And we have to provide a name and email address. That name and email address now goes into someone’s database. Right? And you’ve opted in. So that’s what a lead magnet is. You’re now their lead. Like I’m a lead to dozens of people, let me tell you. [laughs] So I’ve constantly practicing this as a consumer because I like to see what other people are doing. And kind of to your point where your secret sauce is, it’s all about you. So once you’ve opted into the database, now what’s Anne going to do to continue the conversation with me? What’s she going to do? What else can I go on her website to learn more about her and her services, and how she can help me? This bigger overarching content marketing conversation goes beyond just that one piece of information that somebody else can scrape off your site and share. If they’re not following through, they’re still not the ones more than likely getting the actual, you know, solid successful clientele.
Anne: Okay. So I think we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg.
Pamela: Yes.
Anne: And I’m so excited now to do another podcast with you [laughs] to continue the conversation –
Pamela: Yeah.
Anne: – about content marketing, because it’s one of those things where I think a lot of people say to me, “I don’t know how or I don’t even know what to begin, and what do I say.” And it just becomes a frustrated kind of bundle of mess for any voice talent trying to really incorporate it into growing their business.
Pamela: And I understand that, and I think too we come from more of a tactile methodology which is I have a demo, and then I send it to somebody, and they listen to it. And content marketing forces us to think bigger. It forces us to be much more creative in how we approach the information we share and how we put ourselves out there on the web. And it really forces us to understand who it iss we’re marketing to, which is going to help us stand out from other voice talent for sure.
Anne: Thank you so much, Pam, and I look forward to our next podcast. Big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect like a BOSS with people like Pam and all over the world with ipDTL. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Alright guys, have a great week, and we’ll see you next week. Bye!
>> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via ipDTL.
Anne: You can say goodbye, Pam.
Pamela: Bye!
[both laugh]
Pam: So sorry.
Anne: You can say another bye if you didn’t want to do it. It’s fine. See, he’ll edit it out. I’ve got a great guy.
Pamela: Oh my goodness. [laughs]
Anne: So. Anyway.