VO Boss and Host Anne Ganguzza continues the conversation with Pamela Muldoon, Content Marketing professional and VO Talent. This is Part II of their content marketing conversation where they talk mindset to methodology. Learn some actionable steps you can take today to put your VO business on the right path with content marketing.
Takeaways
Quick Concepts from Today’s Episode:
If you are wondering which type of content to create, you are asking the wrong question.
What are the key questions to ask when starting with a content marketing strategy?
What is the Content Ideation Process and how can I use this to develop the right content for my audience?
Developing a Buyer Persona is the first step in creating great content.
Aligning your Buyer Persona to a customer journey is an important step to ensuring you are getting the right content in front of your audience at the right time.
The more focused you are, the more money you make.
60-70% of a sale actually happens online without ever actually talking to a person.
Content attracts more qualified visitors to your website. Take the time to map out content and all of your marketing improves.
Speak the language of your clients and they will trust you faster. Content marketing allows the ability for your audience to know, like and trust you.
Content marketing, regardless of the type of content, can be the fastest and most efficient way to become an authority in your industry.
Creating content in the way that people are searching will improve your SEO. Clients are buying through the power of search.
Consider search when setting up your demos on your website.
Don’t let technology hold you back. Content starts with you and its imperative to get content on your website that matters.
Quality of content vs. quantity of content: Which is more important? It’s critical to find the balance of quality and consistency to gain real traction with content marketing.
Quality content is critical to attracting your qualified leads.
Referenced in this Episode
Direct links to things we brought up +
Find out more about Pamela Muldoon
Check out Voice Actor Websites to boost your SEO
More content marketing advice from our previous episode with Andy Krainak of Team Gary V!
Learn about Orbit Media
Recorded on ipDTL
Badass 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’s 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 my special guest cohost Pamela Muldoon. Hey Pamela!
Pamela: Hey. Hi, Anne.
Anne: How are you?
Pamela: I’m fantastic. Fantastic. It’s so fun to be here. Thank you.
Anne: I know. I’m so glad you’re here and so glad to pick up on our conversation from our last podcast which was all about content marketing. Consider that our content marketing part one, content marketing mindset. So now that we talked a little bit about what content marketing is and how to get into the mindset of how we can present our content to our potential clients, how do we actually get started? Like what’s the methodology?
Pamela: Yeah.
Anne: Let’s go from mindset to methodology.
Pamela: I love that. Mindset to methodology.
Anne: Yeah.
Pamela: Fantastic.
Anne: Put it into action.
Pamela: Well, I’ll start with actually telling you one of the most common questions I get as a content marketer. I get this question almost all the time. What kind of content should I create? What type of content? And sometimes it’s even phrased as, well, should I do a podcast? Or should I do videos? And my response to that is that you’re asking the wrong question. That the question really needs to come from what is it my audience needs and how do they want to ingest this content? How do they want to take it in? And so I actually, when I’m working with my clients in my full-time content market strategist position, I’ve developed this process of what I call content ideation. Ideating content is probably one of the biggest, hardest challenges we have, right? We start to think of maybe a couple of ideas and then we get stuck. And we start to panic. This is exactly one of the reasons why. And little known fact, Anne, that you’ve been doing your podcast for now, what –
Anne: 3½ years I think.
Pamela: Yeah, three – God. You’ve got a few episodes in the can, right?
Anne: Yeah, I do.
Pamela: [laughs] But the average podcast only does seven episodes.
Anne: Oh man.
Pamela: Let that sink in.
Anne: I’ve got about 167, I believe. Something like that.
Pamela: Yes, something you’ve definitely skewed that average quite a bit.
Anne: I’ve surpassed the average. [laughs]
Pamela: But I share that because everyone gets excited at first. Right? And putting aside just the conversation of what it means to consistently get content out the door, the other piece to this is the idea, how do you continually come up with good ideas? I don’t care if it’s a blog or if it’s a podcast, or if it’s a video series, most of these things don’t have a lot of legs because we don’t take the ideation process as seriously and proactively as we should. So what I like to tell folks, think about your audience first, and that’s for the buyer persona. I call them a persona. I think we mentioned on the last podcast sometimes they’re called an avatar. But at the end of the day, it’s your customer, and in a future episode, I do want to spend some time just talking about how to develop that persona, some of the elements and specific pieces to building a persona that are important to getting the right content. But you have to know your audience first. I think we talked about corporate narration and e-learning as genres, right. You’ve got your curriculum developer. That’s a person, right, a persona, a type of person who is purchasing your products and services. And then the next piece to this puzzle is what stage in the buying journey are they? And so on a future episode, I know we’re going to break down a customer journey in a little more detail. Are they just at a point in their situation where they’re just becoming aware that they have a problem that would possibly need you to solve it? Or are they in the position where they already know they have a problem, they’re evaluating, right, their options, and you might be one of those options? So really understanding what journey means to your customer or your persona becomes critical. And when you understand that, then you can actually define the content idea, right? Now you start to formulate more of a content idea that’s specific to a person, specific to a stage of the journey and your ideation process should become much easier, smarter, and more effective.
Anne: Yeah, it’s making me think now, and I’m trying to get an analogy here –
Pamela: Yeah.
Anne: – when Joya Lord and I talked about our government class, on how to work for government clients. Their needs were very different e-learning needs than a traditional curriculum developer for a company, because they wanted the whole enchilada. It wasn’t just a voice. They wanted the whole curriculum developed, and you know, written and created and voiced. And it became a different set of issues that, if you’re a voiceover talent, that you would need to solve in order to fulfill that job, as opposed to fulfilling a job for a curriculum developer. Much different stages, much different stages. Curriculum developer, I think, already anticipates and knows what the problem is. The government buyer doesn’t necessarily know all of the aspects of it yet, and you may have to be a more prominent part of the journey in terms of educating the client.
Pamela: Absolutely. And to your point, now that you have a very specific person, right, or type of person in your mind, once you’ve gone through that exercise, then you can create content that speaks specifically to them. So it could even be from that lead magnet conversation, right Anne, that we had in last episode, was you know, what if you created a checklist for government curriculum developers? What’s the title that –
Anne: Government buyers.
Pamela: Government buyers, right? Here’s a checklist for government buyers, when outsourcing or when choosing a vendor for audio and production, or something to that end, or for learning curriculum or things to that end. My adage that I’ve said for years and years now is the more focused you are, the more money you’ll make. And content marketing has that ability to do that for you. The one piece to content marketing that I think frustrates some people, especially if they came from more of a traditional industrial background of the four P’s of marketing, you know, we come from a billboard, radio, television background. The way that the purchasing process is now, and I think you understand this very well, Anne, is that 60% to 70% is happening online, right?
Anne: Oh yeah.
Pamela: Before they actually talk to you. So what is the information you’re putting out there? What is it that you’re helping them educate? And when you get very focused by providing content specifically to a government buyer versus anyone who buys voiceover, do you already see how it becomes an entirely different conversation? The more focused you are, the more money you make. End of story.
Anne: I like that. And the more – I’m going to say, the more eyes you’re going to draw to you.
Pamela: More qualified eyes you’re going to draw.
Anne: More qualified – exactly. That will actually bring you into the light as an authority –
Pamela: Correct.
Anne: – within the industry. And I think that that’s super important to remember. It may not be like, I’m a voice artist, hire my voice. It becomes, you become an authority in the industry aspect of things more than just providing voiceover. But you have a broad sense of what it takes to be the piece of the puzzle that’s going to solve your client’s problem. And that, I think, is a much better sell, or it’s a much easier sell to your potential client than just the one aspect of voiceover. If you can be an authority on, you know, the checklist of here’s what you need, and here’s what’s going to help you get your job done quicker, better, faster. That’s going to put you in the lead and put you in front of their eyes I think a lot quicker than someone who is just advertising voiceover.
Pamela: There’s a couple of things I want to unwrap on what you just said. One is being that authority expert. At the same token, think about that with us when we hire. When you speak our language, when you prove that you get us, we’re more apt to spend time with you. Right?
Anne: Agreed, agreed.
Pamela: That’s the power of the research that we as voice talent we need to do. We need to research what this buyer needs, what their pain is, and then you mentioned more efficiency, right? Quicker, better, faster. If a big pain point for the government buyer is I just don’t have enough time to build this team, bingo, what’s a solution? “I will show you how to do it or I will do it for you,” right, becomes the solution. But you got to get your content out there that teaches this or shows this buyer that he or she one, has seen what you have, and then as they stay with you and engage with you, then they’re seeing that “you know what? This is a really smart person. They totally understand us. I’m going to reach out, I’m going to do more than consider. I’m going to go ahead and evaluate that they’re my person.” And then of course the next stage is decision, sign on the dotted line. Right?
Anne: I think it’s so important to be known as an authority in your industry in order to gain potential clients’ attention. Just as we buy, right, and we’re doing research on the Internet, I like to buy from companies that have a proven track record, that seem to have been in business a while, seem to have already been a solution for a problem that other people similar to my situation have and provide good service, all of the things, provide all of the things. You really can’t research that if you don’t have content out there. I mean, they’ve got to be able to find you through the content that you’re providing. I think that’s another thing I just want to kind of reiterate that point that people are not going to find you or your business, unless you’re out there being found or being findable [laughs]
Pamela: Right.
Anne: I think that goes back to your comment on SEO from a while back that content marketing is going to help get your name out there quicker than as if you have nothing, you know, if you have nothing to put out there content-wise. And I think that was the primary reason for a lot of people who don’t know a heck of a lot of content marketing. They just want to get out there for SEO purposes. But I think also you need to, exactly what you were just saying, you need to present yourself as the authority, as a reliable, knowledgeable source.
Pamela: And the two actually end up complementing each other greatly, right, because the Google algorithm continues to evolve to a content first approach. And what I mean by that is how we speak and how we ask questions is how we need to be putting our content out there. So perfect example, voice search is becoming extremely important, to become the chosen one from Alexa. Means you really have to be the chosen one. Right? [laughs] So if a corporate buyer for example is sitting around in their office, and they have, you know, Echo sitting there, and they say “hey, Alexa, where should I go to get a voice for my e-learning project?” Then that means that you have the answer to that, or you’ll come up or more likely come up if you have answered literally that question, how to be the voice for your government buying curriculum project. Do you see what I’m saying?
Anne: Absolutely.
Pamela: So that’s part of the SEO conversation that a lot of folks are not having on a regular basis when we’re building out this content idea. There’s SEO and there’s keywords and there’s key phrases, and those are critical, and of course there are wonderful people that help us build our websites to make those things happen, but at the same token we’ve got to understand that we’re selling to an audience that is buying through the power of search. And the more we understand how does this government buyer search for information, that’s again why the persona information or those details that you want to put together about that person becomes so critical.
Anne: Buying through the power of search. I just wanted to reiterate that because I think that was such a, that’s just so spot on. Buying through the power of search. You’ve got to be out there, you’ve got to put content out there so that you can be found and then people can look to you to being the authority.
Pamela: And here’s one of our tricky parts to this because we’re in the audio game. Google is making some inroads in this, but it’s not quite there. You have to have text that goes with your audio for anyone to find you. And so it’s great we have these demos. We spend a lot of time, energy, resources, it’s our calling card and they’re critical, but you still have to have that text that goes around it, and every time you put an episode out or an episode of VO BOSS, you’ve got a process of making sure that there’s text that goes around this so that SEO is available, and it’s being searched and found.
Anne: So important. Certain sites make it easy for you, like YouTube will ask you for search terms. They’re supposed to put your description. Everywhere we put this podcast, we have a description, we have search words.
Pamela: Right.
Anne: I’m going to go back to the part when you talked about demos. I have always maintained that it’s a great idea to not just have your demos sitting on your website, but don’t have just a demo that says commercial demo, that is a single sound file that people can download. If you can break up that file, there’s a number of players out there that can do that. If you can break up that file into different spots and then put those spots with descriptive keywords as to what type of spot, maybe what industry. I always like to take the corporate demos that I do for people and break them up into industry and then brand name. So for example, it would be automotive-Toyota, and then it could be descriptors of how that was performed. If that sits on your website in a visual way, and also in a text way where Google can grab those words, then it will be easier for people to find you or your demo based upon industry brand, keywords for type of delivery.
Pamela: Most definitely. And of course, what we’re talking about, I think this is what holds so many of us back, the collective us, is we’re asking you to do a little more extra work than just putting up the website, putting your demos on your site. Right? This is, it’s a very conscious, intentional effort, whether it’s going through that breakdown of the demo and making sure that you’re providing more specific information not only for search but for your audience, and the same applies to anything you do with a content marketing strategy. That this is going to require a little more commitment than just simply pushing out your website on LinkedIn. [laughs]
Anne: Let me just come on and be the empathizer here. I know, guys. I know, BOSSes, technology can be really difficult sometimes. And you know, I know a lot of people are held back by the technology of it all. But getting stuff on your website properly, keyworded properly and just the content, and it starts with you, the content starts with you. Voiceover actor websites with Joe, Joe is amazing with SEO, I’m just going to say that right here, hands down, and Karen Barth is an amazing person to work with. Guys, if you have a chance, work with those two. They really have it going on with the knowledge of SEO and what it takes to get your website found, but it still requires you to write the content. They can help you to write to the content, but really I’ve tried to get people to write content for me for years now. It really has to come from you. I mean you are the one knows how you want to market, how you want to present, what words you want to get found for. It starts with you, your brand starts with you, and that content marketing is going to start with you as well.
Pamela: It really does, and it’s a challenge. I mean, it’s a challenge across, all across the board like from enterprise to individual, how do you continue to feed the content machine, right? [laughs] How do you continue to do this? And there’s a constant discussion in our industry of content marketing, is more better or quality better? And the answer is of course quality over more, but at the same token, what does that actually mean? It means that the quality then has to be, if it’s going to be ghost written, you are very intimately involved, or you yourself are doing the work.
Anne: Oh yeah, you can’t not be involved.
Pamela: You can’t phone this in. It’s going to take a little more effort and a little bit more of a how do you manage yourself instead of how you use your time to make it work. I just want to touch on as well, that the results can take a little more of a long-term approach because it takes a little while to create that engine, right, that process of consistently putting information in front of your audience, but the rewards on the backend kind of happen once that tipping point happens, it’s pretty amazing what you can experience.
Anne: So you brought up something about a minute ago. You said, quality over quantity.
Pamela: Yes.
Anne: And actually I just had an interview with one of Gary Vee’s brand directors, Andy Krainak, who maintains, at least Gary does, if you follow Gary at all –
Pamela: Yeah.
Anne: – quantity over quality. There are two schools of thought there. I think that quantity, if you put it out there enough, people can’t not see it. [laughs]
Pamela: Right, right.
Anne: So therefore, does that deem you an authority, versus quality over quantity, because I think there’s a stress. There’s a stress involved in, oh my gosh, quantity, how can I, I can’t even get one blog post done let alone a blog post on every day or you know, two a day or whatever it’s talking about.
Pamela: I think the best answer is honestly where’s the balance between the two, because you have to be consistent. Absolutely consistency will trump creativity every day of the week. You know what I mean? He or she who is more consistent and more out there is going to have just a different presence than someone who shows up once in a while. Right?
Anne: Yeah.
Pamela: Absolutely. I mean, that’s where I can agree with the consistency or the quantity factor to a certain degree. I think what’s starting to happen though is all of us have audiences that are smarter than they’ve ever been. They are seeking information that really does solve a problem. They can tell when they see a click bait post, they can tell when they’re seeing the atypical BuzzFeed quiz. Right? Like they want something that’s meatier. If you’re really going to engage and get a qualified lead, it becomes imperative that you provide information that they want and are seeking. Right? So do you want to be out there just to be out there or do you want to be out there to get the qualified lead? That’s where the quality starts to come into play. Interestingly enough and I’ll just kind of mention my friend Andy Crestodina, he runs a marketing agency out of Chicago called Orbit Media. Highly recommend everyone check him out because he’s amazing. But he, for five years now, he’s done this blog research survey, and every year he gets thousands of respondents from all different payers of creators, right? And it’s always fascinating. Right now the most in terms of success, the number 11 is, seems to be the tipping point for success, 11 blog posts a month. Doesn’t matter –
Anne: Oh really?
Pamela: Yeah, doesn’t matter if you’re an individual or a large company. There’s something about the number 11 where there’s an increase in SEO traffic, there’s an increase in website traffic. It just changes your stats altogether.
Anne: Interesting. Ohhh.
Pamela: And then the other piece to that is the quality piece, is the blog posts that are between I want to say 1200-1500 or 1500-2000 are actually more successful than blog posts that are 500 or less in terms of characters.
Anne: Characters, not words.
Pamela: Words. I’m sorry, words.
Anne: Okay, okay. Yep.
Pamela: And that just goes to whether you’re feeding your audience what they need. Like think about this. What’s happening is we can skim through a quick blog post. That was, ehh that was a nice little appetizer, right? But when we see something like a blog post with lots of images or how to, or it really takes us through almost an e-book type of journey, we’re engaged. And if it’s what we really wanted to read or ingest, we’re going to stick with it. So time on site increases as well as your ability to educate your audience in a more detailed way, which again to your point earlier, this is that authority factor. Right?
Anne: Sure.
Pamela: There’s a lot of different schools of thought, but the research is showing that consistency matched with some high-quality content, and the high-quality content is what gets shared the most as well.
Anne: It’s interesting to me that the longer articles retain the attention, because people are always talking about the attention spans of today are less than a goldfish, eight seconds, in terms of viewing or listening.
Pamela: I go to a lot of marketing conferences, and we joke that if we see that damn goldfish one more time on a slide, we’re all going to like revolt because it has been around for so long. Yes, we have a very modified attention span. Going back to your persona and journey, if you’ve done that research –
Anne: Sure.
Pamela: If it’s something you really want, you spend time on it.
Anne: True, very true.
Pamela: Another question I get all the time, how long should my podcast be, or how long should my videos be, and I’m always going to say, it depends. Because if you provide value, it doesn’t matter.
Anne: Right, right.
Pamela: Does that make sense?
Anne: I think for the BOSS podcast, we’ve always kept it around 20, 20 minutes, a car ride.
Pamela: Yeah.
Anne: That’s an average car ride.
Pamela: It’s a great starting point I think for a lot of podcasts, because you can justify that 20 to 30 minutes is kind of the average time of a commute, or you know, it’s a nice binge, you know, if you want to get two or three back to back. But then there’s always going to be people like Joe Rogan and Dan Carlin –
Anne: Yes.
Pamela: – that throw all of this out the [laughs] – three hours.
Anne: They have hour, two-hour long – you’re right. They have hours in the podcast.
Pamela: And that’s because they have an audience that they find what they’re providing is very valuable to spend their time and participating with.
Anne: Wow.
Pamela: So start somewhere. 20 minutes for example, but it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have a show that’s 60 minutes one day and it goes gangbusters. There’s nothing to say that that would not happen, right?
[both laugh]
Pamela: And if we keep talking, you could end up being that way, Anne.
Anne: Good segue into –
[both laugh]
Anne: We are running a little bit over. But hey, it’s all good stuff, and that just means we get to do another podcast together, Pamela.
Pamela: That’s right.
Anne: Where we continue the conversation about buyer personas. Guys, make sure to stick around for our next podcast where we talk even more about content marketing, how we can get our stuff out there to the right people at the right time, and make some money like good BOSSes. I’d like to give a big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. God, I love ipDTL. It’s so amazing, and especially the newest interface that’s out there right now. Pam and I were just going on and on and on about it and how wonderful it is that we can actually record each of these tracks separately. Give ipDTL a try. Oh my gosh, you can get a day pass for like $15. It’s a no-brainer.
Pamela: That’s awesome.
Anne: Awesome stuff and –
Pamela: That’s amazing. Wow!
Anne: Yeah. And you can connect like BOSSes and find out more at ipdtl.com. Alright, guys. Have a great week, and we’ll see you next week!
Pamela: Bye!
Anne: 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.