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Marketing & Leads with special guest Jonathon Grant
104 Plays1 year ago
This week, special guest Jonathon Grant, founder of VOLeads.com joins Will, Victoria, and Al in the bar to talk about the VO Leads platform, and general marketing discussion. Learn why Jonathon decided to build the platform, what it provides, and how/why it may be of benefit to you in your career.
Chapters:
(00:00:22) Introduction and Marketing Discussion
(00:01:20) VO Leads and its Features
(00:02:18) Challenges in the Marketing Channel
(00:02:46) Building VO Leads Application
(00:03:11) Experience with Other VO Entrepreneurs
(00:04:36) Encounter with Email Marketing Service
(00:09:00) Creation of VO Leads
(00:19:35) Criteria for VO Leads Membership
(00:21:54) Handling Influx and Rejection Notices
(00:27:03) Success and Frustrations in Voiceover Industry
(00:29:55) Marketing Blueprint and Your VO Wallet
(00:30:23) Time and Motion Study on Apollo.io
(00:31:16) Data Validation and Email Deliverability
(00:32:15) Case Study: Impact of Bounced Email
(00:32:45) Quality of Ingested Data
(00:34:31) Data Privacy and Access Control
(00:34:58) Subscription Benefits and Customer Testimonial
(00:37:28) Email Marketing Best Practices
(00:38:30) Direct Marketing and Lead Generation
(00:42:11) The Long Game of Marketing
(00:57:36) The Reality of Marketing in VO Career
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Transcript
Opening Jokes and Introductions
00:00:00
Speaker
They don't care about, you know, Uncle Touchy and all your stories about your weird family stuff going on. You know what I mean? Oh, man. No, I do not want to hear about anybody's Uncle Touchy. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Nope. Nope. You need a drink. I do too.
Marketing Insights with Jonathan Grant
00:00:21
Speaker
Today, we're talking about marketing and specifically leads with our special guest, serial entrepreneur, fellow voice actor, and the founder and creator of Violeads, the first product offering of legit Vio services, Jonathan Grant. Welcome, Jonathan. Hi, guys. Hello. Welcome, welcome. Did I get your bio right? Yeah, that's pretty close. I mean, there was some pig farming in there, but that was a long time ago. Bacon seeds. Suey? My uncle grew some bacon once.
00:00:51
Speaker
I was a fan. Not sure I know what that means. But you understand where bacon comes from, right? No, please. Groger. And there you have it. Yes, indeed. My uncle raised pigs for a time. So yeah, he grew some bacon.
What is Violeads?
00:01:12
Speaker
Grew some bacon. Gotcha. All right. So let's talk about VO leads and what that means.
00:01:20
Speaker
What is it? So Violeads is a lead source specifically for voiceover, hence the name. So it's Violeads. They're carefully curated, hand-selected, and we also offer free business tools to help you track your leads, your bookings, your auditions, and your follow-up tasks, communication. And we are about three weeks into it.
00:01:47
Speaker
Three weeks live. Three weeks live. We're 10 months into it. Three weeks live.
00:01:52
Speaker
How goes the battle? So far so good? Yeah, it's interesting. The reaction has been really strong. We do have a marketing channel that we're working. It's been a bit of a disappointment. So we decided to switch to a more organic, word of mouth type of marketing outreach. And in doing that, we created this incredible referral program that's doing 100% match.
00:02:19
Speaker
So if you refer somebody and let's say they buy 100 credits on their first purchase, we're matching you 100%. You're going to get 100% of whatever their first purchase is. And that has been crazy. People have been going nuts over it. Yeah, that's quite a deal.
00:02:36
Speaker
And how would you describe, what made you put together, would you call it a platform? What would you
Motivation Behind Violeads
00:02:44
Speaker
refer to as? Well, it's more an application. It's web-based, it's responsive, so it'll work on any screen size from a Jumbotron down to a phone. The impetus for building this was my own
00:02:56
Speaker
voiceover outreach. And, you know, I've been in VO for about three years now, and just kind of got to a point where I'm comfortable enough to start doing my own marketing and outreach and trying to find work directly through direct marketing. And as I looked around, the options were pretty thin. And I would take various courses from other
00:03:19
Speaker
VO entrepreneurs. Man, it was just thin. There was not a lot of depth to anything that I looked into. I've been an entrepreneur for 30 years. Over the last 25 years, I owned a job site that has connected almost a million people to new opportunities.
00:03:39
Speaker
So I know how to kind of market online and do that organically, but I think the mistake that I made was thinking that I had to go to somebody in VO to learn how to do direct marketing. Sure. This is just one channel.
Critique of VO Marketing Services
00:03:53
Speaker
This is just one field. And what I found as I went around these various offerings,
00:04:00
Speaker
was they know how to market themselves. And they're kind of using these programs that don't offer a lot of depth. They kind of give you this thumbnail sketch of what you're supposed to do, but they don't necessarily tell you how to do it and who specifically you should be talking to. And gosh, what do you say? So fortunately with my background, I have experience in knowing what to say and who I should be looking for. So I got a hold of this one company
00:04:29
Speaker
They do direct email marketing and they charge a dollar per email to send an email on your behalf. So I called them up. I'm like, well, you know, I'm busy, so maybe I want to use this service. We'll come to find out. They mail to this mystery list of whom we know not.
00:04:47
Speaker
Then the interceptor replies. The interceptor replies and then forward it to you. I'm like, wow, that sounds interesting. How big is your database? Well, we have 17,000 records. We've been getting these since 2015. I'm like, if you are doing outreach to records from 2015, how in the world are you handling bounces? They replied with, well, what's a bounce?
00:05:15
Speaker
Oh. Ouch. Ouch. Wait a minute. Their business is email marketing. Correct. And they don't know what a bounce is? No. In fact, to this day, I still kind of keep an eye on them. To this day, they call them undeliverables.
00:05:39
Speaker
Excuse me. What they do is- That's the mystery. They claim to at that time have 45 people that they're doing this for and they have an invitation-only roster. I don't want to tear them down before I tell you the solution that they drove me to, to build for myself. They have this invitation-only roster and they're intercepting your warm replies.
00:06:07
Speaker
And then two of them are in voiceover and these videos start trickling out on their channel where the owner is talking about how he's competing with one of the guys on the roster and made the best man win. And I'm like, interesting that this guy, they're intercepting the warm replies and somehow magically
00:06:27
Speaker
they're auditioning for the same work. This is Icky, beyond Icky. This is Saturday morning cartoon villain stuff. I mean, this is way past. That's just dirty business, I mean.
00:06:40
Speaker
But it's not even hidden. It's blatant. Well, that's, you know, that's I can't compete on my own. So I'm going to stack the deck in my favor and write and tell you about it. Right. Yeah. So the story gets better. The situation gets worse. So new for 2023.
00:06:59
Speaker
A new policy is enforced where if you get work through their referrals, now it's a referral from their secret list that you never get to see, they want 20% and they take it. So here's the thing that really just
00:07:17
Speaker
got me angry. In three years, I've purchased coaching and what was supposed to be educational resources. And in only two instances did I feel that I got what I paid for. In every other instance, I felt like I was just getting ripped off. So I asked these guys, how are you managing this database? Well, what we do is we have a spreadsheet
00:07:38
Speaker
It's an Excel spreadsheet, and we have a spreadsheet for each person. And we stop at the first week of every month, so they're not doing any marketing for you for the first week, and we clean up our undeliverables. And I'm like, listen, thanks for your time.
00:07:53
Speaker
I appreciate the call bro, but this is not for me. I mean, I can build something to solve this. So I went on to a dollar an email and I'm like, so, and I asked him plus 20% of any bookings. Yeah. So I asked him straight up. I'm like, so do I get credited back for bounces? I mean, I've owned internet businesses since the world wide web existed. I've had something on the internet since before Google, before
00:08:21
Speaker
Amazon, we were there. And I'm like, am I eating these? You know, because that's a dollar a piece and any email list that I've ever bought in the past, you know, it's 25% bounced right out of the gate. Right. You know, so am I eating, you know, 25 bucks? Let's say I pay you 100 bucks a month. Am I eating 25 every month? And he's like, well, no, but what we do, I'm like, how do you, how do you deal with those? And he says, well, we just keep going through the list. Then we start over.
00:08:47
Speaker
So they don't report bounces in that. So anyhow, this is where I was in February of last year. You know, I'm looking at this, I'm like, you know, I think I'm just going to build my own tool, you know, source my own leads.
Creating Violeads from Scratch
00:08:59
Speaker
I am a developer. So I wrote, I have algorithms and crawlers that I've written that go out and get all the public facing information that we can find.
00:09:08
Speaker
I started these crawlers going and then I started building my own interface because I looked at some CRMs, I looked at some programs that are offered out there, not tailored to VO, not offering the things that are specific to us, things that we're interested in. It's always bloated or missing something or ugly or super slow or built on a platform that can't be expanded. I mean, insert problem here. So I'm like, well, I'll write my own. So I started writing this thing.
00:09:35
Speaker
And in the interim, I had gone on to one of the voiceover community forums on Facebook or groups and I posted, hey, guard your V.O. wallet. This is what's going on. And I told the story that I just told you. So the owner of the direct email marketing company immediately did a video and called me garbage. He's like, you know, I've listened to this guy stuff. He's garbage. He doesn't even know what he's talking about.
00:09:56
Speaker
I'm like, okay. And then one of their big champions who is actually in all their metategs and that he's got to be a business partner, spent the entire next week shooting me down and puffing these guys up, protecting them. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to bring something meaningful to the voiceover community that is fair and equitable and everyone wins. So I designed VO leads so that obviously the voice talent wins. So
00:10:24
Speaker
We vet everybody in that's a voice talent. So you have to be pro level. That means that the people that you're emailing to, they're going to win because they're hearing from pros and you're not competing with the riffraff that some of these training companies are just churning out by the hundreds. So you're competing with people who are at least as good as you or better for getting on a roster at one of these places.
00:10:45
Speaker
So then we said, man, we went through it over and over again. We finally were able to get it to well under a dollar per lead. So our currency are credits. So you'd come in and buy credits and you get many more for $10. I think you get like 13 or something like that. But anyhow, you went on the price. You went on the fact that we are hand selecting every single lead that goes into our system.
00:11:09
Speaker
before it's published to you, there's up to 15 data points per lead. And before it's given to you, every data point is verified, including deliverables. Making sure that the email is deliverable. Now, I'll pause right here to say that something about email being deliverable, it's gonna bounce. We promise. I mean, that's the very nature of sourcing leads and finding email addresses. It's going to bounce. But in our situation, we bounce at a rate of 4.8%.
00:11:39
Speaker
That's it. So what we do, again, with our Everyone Wins approach, we give you after you pick how many credits you want.
00:11:47
Speaker
Before you buy, we give you a 5% extra to cover that because we know it's going to bounce. And we report the bounces. If the system later identifies that there's a bounce, no, we're not going to replace it for you. But we're going to tell you, it's going to show up right in your system. If our system detects it, it's going to say, hey, we detected a bounce on this. You need to find another contact at this company. And that shows up right on the company page of every single company in our system. So we're pretty serious about that. We will show you everything except how the sausage is made.
00:12:17
Speaker
You know, it's where we try to be transparent and every feature that we built into Violeads is a direct answer to these people that are out here trying to rip off voice talent. And it just drives me nuts. So I like how you said in the beginning, it's the first, the first service offering of legit Viole. And we have other stuff coming to answer the rest of it.
00:12:38
Speaker
Speaking to the credit thing, I heard from someone just the other day wondering, and I think I understood, so I told him my thought, but just to get it from a horse's mouth. He asked, at what point is the data mine? After a warm response, he said, it looks like you're holding the leads pretty tightly. Yeah, let me answer that.
00:12:56
Speaker
So we are really,
Data Management and Integrity
00:12:58
Speaker
really rigid with data protection, data security, whether that's your data or ours. I own the server. I own the firewall hardware. It's hosted on LA on the largest fiber optic network in the world.
00:13:12
Speaker
And so we protect your data and we protect our data. And that's the only way, again, it's an everyone wins approach when we protect our data, because we don't want that being shared all over the place. Because the value drops immediately, you know, if there's 100 copies out there. The way our system works is this, you're not making a purchase, you're licensing the data. And once you license that data, you have access to it immediately forever.
00:13:41
Speaker
So the way the system works is you would come in and buy credits. One credit equals one lead. You search through the leads. You find a lead that you want. You can add that to a shortlist, or you can unlock it immediately. So you can unlock in bulk from a shortlist that you've created yourself, you picked it, or one off as you find them. So we give you three ways to unlock them. Once that's unlocked, that's yours. And we give you the ability to download the raw data immediately.
00:14:11
Speaker
So, and as you unlock your leads, a lot of people, you know, we offer you a free almost CRM, you know, to manage your leads and manage your communication. But we realize that a lot of people already have a CRM. They already have some system that they're using. So as you unlock your leads, we keep track of them by group.
00:14:30
Speaker
for you. So if you unlocked 200 and you're back for another 50 or another 5 even, we keep track of that grouping for you so that you can download just the new ones. So you don't end up with duplicates and trying to keep track of some mess that you've created. So then you can upload those anywhere you want. You can take them with you.
00:14:51
Speaker
as long as you adhere by our license, which is you can't resell our stuff, man. Please don't share this stuff because we'll be out of business tomorrow if you're just giving our stuff away or trying to resell it, which would be pretty expensive to resell it. Does that answer your question? It does, and it aligns with the answer that I gave, which is good. That means I get it.
00:15:12
Speaker
Because I think what happened was he had kind of just glanced at the site and went, oh, it's a subscription thing. So if I don't renew my subscription, I'm going to lose access to all my stuff. But I said, but no, but it's credit based. So yes, you can pay monthly for a set number of credits. But once you use the credits, you've used them, and now you have access to that forever. Well, and so our tools, and this is, again, back to the transparency and everybody wins approach, is that
00:15:41
Speaker
the tools, you don't even have to buy leads from us to use our tools. If you want to track your leads, if you want to put your data in there and your data is your data, we don't want your busted up data. It's not vetted, it's not verified. We're not going to get into your stuff and sell it to somebody. I don't even know if it's any good. The reality is, once you meet our qualifications to become a member of VO leads,
00:16:07
Speaker
You have access to those business tools for free. You don't ever have to buy a lead from us. And we give you a referral link. Every member gets a referral link of their own. And through the end of, we're going to extend it through the end of April. Right now it ends at the end of March, the 100% match. We're going to extend that through the end of April because we're going to get a little bit of love at Vio Atlanta. So I wanted to make sure that those folks will have access to that program. Probably more than a little bit of love.
00:16:33
Speaker
That would be my problem. Be prepared. Anyhow, the idea here is that this is our gift to the community.
Violeads Tools and Future Plans
00:16:44
Speaker
Using this tool, it's not a CRM yet. That might be phase two. I heard a rumor that that might be happening by mid to end of summer. You may know somebody in there. There's this guy I've been talking to.
00:17:02
Speaker
So anyhow, you have access to those tools forever. The credits never expire. If you buy credits from us, and just a side note on the credits, so legit VO is the umbrella. And we're going to have, VO leads is the first of three legs that are going to support something much bigger to come.
00:17:22
Speaker
And our currency throughout the entire architecture of legit VO will be credits. So you'll be able to use those credits for other things. Today, they're just available for VO leads. So I don't want to peel the onion too much on that, because I might over promise and under deliver, and then we're all embarrassed. But the idea here is that your credits are your credits. Your data is your data.
00:17:48
Speaker
We don't, and everything's secure. We can't even, we can't send you your password. We can't reset it for you. It's triple encrypted on the way in. You have to reset it if there's a problem. Everything's super secure. We're using cutting edge technology, which I'll geek out in a minute if you don't stop me. Wow. I'm here for it. They might not like it. I know. Will's like, tell me more. I know. I know. But what's your tagline again for Violeads?
00:18:15
Speaker
Get ready for different. We're taking a completely different approach here. If this was a money grab, we would just throw the doors open. In fact, if this was a money grab, the component for the leads was done last April.
00:18:29
Speaker
So it took us 10 months to stand up a corporation, take the tool I was building for myself and build it into a multi-user. And there's actually a feature where users can add users to their accounts. So if you have a VA or something like that, you'll be able to add them. We haven't released that yet. Don't tell anyone. But that's coming. So it took us the hardest part was the free stuff.
00:18:51
Speaker
everything that was giving away, and of course that's a loss leader, but everything that we're giving away was the hard part. We could sell leads to everybody in bulk, gosh, almost a year ago, but we wanted to build something really useful and deliver on all our promises. How are you going to deal with the influx of after these conferences and people wanting to join?
00:19:14
Speaker
Most of it's automated. Here's the only problem we're facing. So we vet every single person, which right now there are only two people that I trust, one of them is me, to actually go through and listen.
Quality Criteria for Joining Violeads
00:19:28
Speaker
We go to your website. So the criteria, which we haven't even talked about, and I'll just jump on that real quick. So to be accepted as a member here, we had to pick criteria that
00:19:40
Speaker
Is an indicator of pro level that didn't open us up to discrimination so the criteria is this you have to have a professional website you must have that you have to have a matching email address we don't care what you use in the wild but for us to know that website is under your control is the email address matches your domain.
00:20:01
Speaker
Sure. So no Hotmail or Gmail. Right. No free email. In fact, the system is sniffing any email addresses that you put in there and it'll reject it. We've got, there's like 247 free email accounts out there. So the system is sniffing that. And then you have to have quality VO demos.
00:20:18
Speaker
above the fold, easily accessible. It should be one of the first things on your website. I've seen both of your websites. I haven't seen yours yet, but I have seen your website. You will. You're the example. You know what I mean? You guys are the example of what you must have. And what we're talking about with quality demos is you have to have a solid VO performance.
00:20:39
Speaker
You can't, it has to be free of background noise. We don't want to hear your refrigerator. We want to hear your kids screaming in the background. We don't want to hear an airplane going over. You know, we want a quality. We've also made friends with a lot of people that can help you with those things. If you notice our resource center.
00:20:55
Speaker
for each of those criteria that I've given you, we have a resource that we can point you to to help you with that. And almost all of them are giving some type of, everybody's giving away some things. And most of them are giving away a discount, you know, on their services. Nice, nice. So, you know, it's, it's, again, everyone wins.
00:21:13
Speaker
So we vet the resources in as well to make sure that you're going to get quality help to get you ready to direct market. And it's really not about picking winners or losers. You're just not ready. You're not there. As a winner, if they're ready. Right. If you're ready, you're happy to have you.
00:21:33
Speaker
Jonathan. But if you're not ready yet, then you shouldn't be direct marketing anyway because you're not doing yourself any favors.
Guidance for VO Talent
00:21:40
Speaker
Piggybacking on Victoria, her question about after these conferences, how you can handle the influx, you're going to have that group of people, whether they're summer ready, summer not. Do you send rejection notices or do you immediately send, here's the fixes?
00:22:01
Speaker
Yes, because both of those happen at the same time. We're going to be honest with you. This is VO and we take the producer director role in this and we're like, you're not there quite yet. We found some problems and we tell them what the problems are. Here's a resource. We're going to hang on to your registration. It'll be here waiting for you and you're more than welcome to contact us once you have that fixed.
00:22:26
Speaker
No, that's awesome. Like I said, because you know you're going to find people are going to be jumping on whether they're ready or not. And you know the world of VO. You audition and rarely hear a response. Oh, I'll tell you, you'll hear a response. It's a beautiful thing. There will be a response. Yeah, you'll know. And you'll know immediately. So that's good for these people to know. Yeah, yeah. And we, you know, we don't do. So think about this. If the impetus
00:22:54
Speaker
to start this in the first place was people being ripped off, people being uninformed, people being under trained or not trained or misinformed. We don't want our time wasted. We're not going to send junk out to our contacts and then they're just angry because they're getting flooded with a bunch of garbage. I hate to put it that way, but that's the way they see it. Well, that makes it hard to do your job. It makes it hard to have a company.
00:23:18
Speaker
Yeah, and it doesn't do anybody any any favors to not be honest and straight with them. I mean, how many times have you guys been in a directed session? I'm not feeling it. Can you pick up the energy? Give me a little more gain. Put hit this word. You're not hitting the brand. I mean, you know what I mean? It's like you're not doing anyone any favors and you don't want them wasting. This is this is the most important thing. There are so many traps for new voiceover. They don't need to fall into what I created.
00:23:49
Speaker
And so they need to be saving their time and their treasure for things like treating a good recording space, getting the proper equipment, getting training in your craft. This is where you should be investing. You should be investing in your craft. I mean, it's like a mechanic has to get his training. He has to stay up with his certifications. He has to get his tools, which is our equipment.
00:24:10
Speaker
Many times they invest in their own workspace. This is what we do here. Why in the world would I want to take somebody's money when they're not ready?
Vetted Talent Badge Plan
00:24:22
Speaker
I'm representing to these companies out there because eventually I'd like to be able to give all of our members a badge that says this is a vetted VO talent. They're professional. We vetted them and they can put that in their email. If that shows up at a production house, I envision
00:24:37
Speaker
You know the dream is and the hope is that the production houses start seeing legit vo. On somebody's email or on their website that's a vetted talent. You're not going to get garbage from them. You know and that's that's part of kind of. Where we're where we're headed.
00:24:54
Speaker
So I hope that answers your question. You've touched on all good things, even probably the last podcast we had about people taking money and not giving anything in return. I mean, you're the best of both worlds here. At some point, no one's going to fight giving you money for the help you're giving.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah. The whole idea here is, man, I've been an entrepreneur for so long. I've had some wildly successful businesses. I do know how to run a system. I do know how to run a business. Nobody knows me, so I'm trying to earn credibility. I'm trying to earn business by delivering on what I say I'm delivering.
00:25:42
Speaker
We don't want people here that aren't ready to direct market. We also don't want people direct marketing that are ready to be here, but don't know what they're doing. That's the biggest problem I see. Actually, we have a couple customers already who are wildly successful. They're booking national ads.
00:26:02
Speaker
They don't have the first clue. They don't have the first idea how to direct market. So I've managed just in testing this as we built it. I'm on 50 rosters and three of those came last week. We just dropped another 1633 records last week.
00:26:18
Speaker
active now on the site and I think next week we have another 13 something coming. I'll have to double check. So ballpark, what's the total?
Diverse Leads for VO Needs
00:26:27
Speaker
We're around 11,000 at launch and by the time we're done, we've identified potentially because we have to vet all these. So within the United States right now, as it stands, we've kind of sussed out that there's about 54,000
00:26:44
Speaker
contacts within the voiceover industry, within production houses and video production and whatnot, all over America. Those would go all the way from small mom and pop up to premium type production houses, like an indigo slate, something like that, a big, big. The vast majority fall in the middle to slightly under the middle.
00:27:10
Speaker
charm that because we're, you know, it's a cottage industry for a lot of people. Right. So, you know, if you're, say you're after a strict, you know, this might not be for you.
00:27:23
Speaker
It might be, you might find some stuff, you might find some stuff that fits in your price model, but it's going to be more difficult. Well, now these leads aren't just commercial though, right? They're across basically any genre VO? Yeah, yeah. So in that case, even if you are SAG, there's definitely things that SAG doesn't control, right? Industrial work and so forth, that you could still certainly target. Like corporate narration and that. Yeah, for sure.
00:27:46
Speaker
And actually, so interestingly enough, in testing this data, again, I'm an open book with my personal experience with this. So I'm on 50 rosters. And last week, some guy, first time I ever heard from him, responded. He was from February 23rd of last year, was my first contact with him. And he replied to that email with a script attached.
00:28:10
Speaker
that we auditioned for and I gave him GVAA rates. I auditioned for it. He calls me up and he's like, well, you were the second highest bid. So I'm recalculating. I'm willing to eat some of this because it's about bookable work. So I'm like, well, I'd probably eat a 100 bucks. He goes, however, the buyer, their client,
00:28:39
Speaker
heard your voice on that and they raised their budget to meet your quote. So I'm like, when do we start? Is this the final script? So I did the work for them and sent it and it got accepted. That's the fourth one so far this year that were from early last year. This is the biggest frustration and this might be leading to your question, but I feel like it's a good segue.
00:29:06
Speaker
People don't know what to do. They don't know what to expect. They don't know when to expect it. They don't know what to say. There's a lot of variables here. And in fact, we have a lot of internal dialogue about this, about, gosh, we're going to have to teach this.
00:29:25
Speaker
You know, we know what we're doing, but I can't in good conscience send you off to, I'm not even going to name names because that'd be mean. It'd be honest, but it'd be mean. I can't send you off to some of these places that are going to give you
00:29:40
Speaker
a sketch, a syllabus, but no depth. You're going to get the silverware and the plate, but no meat and potatoes. I'm not going to send you out to somebody who's going to give you a blueprint. Think about what a blueprint is. When you're done with your blueprint, you're going to have a framed building. You're not going to have a roof. You're not going to have wall finishes. You're not going to have your appliances. You're not going to have your landscaping. You're not going to have your cabinetry.
00:30:04
Speaker
A blueprint gets you a sketch, an outline.
Lead Validation Process
00:30:07
Speaker
You know, it doesn't give you any depth. Be very careful when you're sitting here breaking out your V.O. wallet. You got to ask some questions. You know, how about if somebody else is selling you leads, a list, and what if somebody is teaching you or go do this free program at Apollo I.O.? We did a time in motion study on that, so I can tell you exactly what you're going to get.
00:30:27
Speaker
A time in motion study went like this. We spent three hours of our precious development time on Apollo walking through their free program. It took us three hours, two of us, it took us three hours to find 100 likely leads. Of those 100 likely leads, 70% of them had a personal email address, not a business email address. Of those 100 leads, 30 of them were delivered, the rest bounced.
00:30:53
Speaker
of those 30 that delivered and didn't bounce zero responded three hours, which is contrary to what we find with our handpicked hand selected data. So how do we select our data? We have scripts that run in programs that run that they validate every web address. They validate every mail server.
00:31:11
Speaker
They validate every, I have to say business, social media link. So they validate all of that. We validate, and then just before publication, before we give that data to you, we validate deliverability of the email. And I know this, I wrote this software. So when the, if an email bounces, the system automatically kills that record.
00:31:36
Speaker
However, there's 15 data points. We save that data and what we're thinking is we might give that data to the folks that are on a subscription for free. Here's an example. We have one of our beta testers delivered his first 10 messages. One of them bounced. He's like, man, this is junk. That's 10%.
00:31:57
Speaker
You know, these are no good. Well, I'm on a call with him. I'm like, why don't you go and connect to their business social media account? See where they're at. Go look them up over there. See what's going on. So he looks the guy up. The guy responds, man, good timing. I just moved to this company. I've got this big project. 48 hours later, this guy's in a two hour directed session on a $3,000 job on a bounced email.
00:32:23
Speaker
If he had bought that as a one-off, it would have cost him $0.84. Now, that's a lightning strike. You know what I mean? It's results cherry. But that's a real story that happened in our first week of testing. It's real, so it's good data. Just because your email bounced, that's not the end of the world.
00:32:45
Speaker
Email bounces. That happens. I can tell you that the data that we're ingesting right now, we have 100% business email. 100% of them have their business social media profile. 100%. 100% of them have the business website.
Handling Email Bounces
00:33:06
Speaker
The vast majority of them have
00:33:09
Speaker
up to five other business social media links, whether that's Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, what have you. But if even if the email what you're saying is even if the email bounces, you've still got several other contact points you could reach out to on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. So if you email Becky Sue and Becky Sue is gone, here's what we find most of the time. There's an auto response that comes back. It's not a bounce. Our system only picks up fatal bounces. So
00:33:38
Speaker
We come in, we add a header to every message in our testing, and it comes back, we grab that unique identifier, we go in, we check and see if it's a fatal bounce. If it's a fatal bounce, we kill it. We kill the record, we don't give it to you at all.
00:33:51
Speaker
If it's out of office, mailboxes, full auto responder, challenge response, there's a whole long list, as you know, Will, of different things that you can get. We don't kill it at all. We will still publish it because it was deliverable. But if that email bounces, man, you might get a response that says, Becky Sue left, but Billy Bob took her job.
00:34:16
Speaker
Please, so we knew that that would be an eventuality. So you can then go into that account or that company page on Violeads and you can add the new contact to that record and that's yours. Nobody else can see that you have, look at me, I've got the only up to date record for whoever. You can add that information to our data. So you can append our data. You can add your own companies. You can add your own contacts to our companies and your companies.
00:34:46
Speaker
And when you come to download or print that data, it's in aggregate. So you get all of it. Okay. But if we were to go in and add a contact to your list, nobody else has access to that. That's correct. That's your data. If you look on the homepage of the website, there's a statement that I sign and that's my real signature on there. Your data is your data.
00:35:07
Speaker
and we don't allow anyone to see it, we don't use it, we don't want it, because we don't know if it, you know, why would I spend all this time making a system that goes and gets it, you know, to get who knows misspellings typos. Yeah, this is not Wikipedia. I'm going to build a database and harvest all of your data.
00:35:28
Speaker
Yeah, based on my experience with that other company, who is not a marketing pro at all. No, I don't want any data that you may bring. Yes, interesting. All of the undeliverables. Yeah, I mean, come on. This is so this is a company, okay, I just have to I just have to throw this out there. But this is a company that, you know, they're sitting you're talking about, you don't need a website.
00:35:52
Speaker
It's the 21st century. Listen, here's what I'd like to welcome you folks to, you VO people. Welcome to the post freelance, post platform, post COVID pandemic voiceover industry.
Modernizing VO Marketing Tactics
00:36:05
Speaker
That's all behind us. Things have changed. And these guys are teaching garbage that helped them build a business 11, 12, 13 years ago. That doesn't work today.
00:36:15
Speaker
And for anyone to have the nuts to stand there in front of any group of people or on a camera and say, you know what, you don't need a website to promote your business. You don't need to see who we're emailing on your behalf. You don't, we're going to intercept this. And then not only are we going to intercept those replies that you paid us to mail out for you, we're going to call them ourselves. They say this on video over and over again. We're going to call them ourselves and promote our invite only roster using your money.
00:36:42
Speaker
your demos, your website, your marketing dollars that you spent to get ready for direct marketing. So yeah, I have a little bit of a bone to pick with people who are doing that. Let's just say it. That's bullshit. Oh, I'll say it. Their company name is called VO Marketing Pro. Listen, I wanted to shine a light in the darkness, not a light right on them. But you know what? Stay away from that.
00:37:05
Speaker
They're stealing from you. They're enriching themselves at your expense. The other question I was going to ask, but I see it on the website, so I guess I don't need to ask it, but I'll say something about it anyway because I didn't notice it when I first looked at the price page and other people might not, is that the credits never expire and they roll over.
00:37:27
Speaker
That's awesome. So really, at that point, the only benefit to having a subscription versus just buying one off unless you make this change you were talking about.
00:37:38
Speaker
is just a little bit higher percentage of credits that you get. Right. Yeah. Well, and so you're getting fresh. About 13% more. Yeah. Well, and so it also scales. So not only do you get more for being on a subscription, but it also ramps up, obviously, as you go up in volume. So the way we kind of envisioned it is that folks would stick to the middle to the lower end on the subscription model.
00:38:06
Speaker
And then let's say they have a month in the middle of the summer, like August, you know, everything's busy. I want to take some time and really start hitting this hard. You can be in the middle of a subscription and do a one time purchase and kind of get a bump. Excuse me. But you can always do a one time purchase.
00:38:25
Speaker
You don't have to, it's not strictly subscription based. And the only, like we wanted to add the bounced emails since the rest of the data is good. We're thinking about giving that as free access to people on a subscription. So there's a benefit. There's another benefit to being on a subscription. Now I will tell you again, we're completely transparent. Our first customer ever put out an amazing video for us.
00:38:51
Speaker
He was really pleased. Actually, he was kind of stunned at the results he was getting and put out a video and referred a ton of people and I showed him how to use his link, his referral link. And he's has since canceled his subscription because he has more leads now than he knows what to do with.
00:39:10
Speaker
That's on purpose. That's my design. I'm welling up over here. The thing is, you can't spam. February 24th, there's some new policies coming out on the Gmail platform. Most people in VO where their website is hosted is in a shared environment. Gmail is counting total mail by IP address.
00:39:36
Speaker
So there's one VO host out there, I mean, this guy should be taken out and just beat, but he's got like five months- But tell us how you really feel. Yeah, I'm holding back, but there's 528 sites on a single IP address.
00:39:52
Speaker
So as soon as somebody crosses Gmail or Google's arbitrary number, everyone on that IP address is done because they're using IP reputation, they're getting away from the domain restrictions. Even if one person sent spam,
00:40:10
Speaker
That's it. It's screw everybody else. Right. Right. Even before this change, because the blacklists are tied to IP resolution. Anyway, it's it's based on a domain name, but it resolves to a single IP. So I've had I've been blacklisted because I host my own
00:40:27
Speaker
email server on DigitalOcean and other people in the subnet have spammed. This sounds like nerd talk. And that blacklist me. And DigitalOcean's like, yep, sorry, we don't support you hosting your own email server, so you're screwed. So I've since switched to like all my outgoing goes through Amazon. Yeah. But I've also noticed recently that a couple of the Gmail subnets have gotten blacklisted as well.
00:40:55
Speaker
Yeah, so you have to be really careful. And so I might, you know what I might do is I might put together some videos on the site on how to be smart about trickling out your email.
Effective Email Marketing Advice
00:41:07
Speaker
We do have a, the software is already written. I'm really hesitant to use it, but we already have the ability to mail from Violeads.
00:41:20
Speaker
I've been waiting for these new policies to shake out, and it mails from your server, not ours. So basically, your account at Violeads becomes your client to your mail server. A lot of serums are doing that. The only one that we don't have, because it's a pain, is the Gmail API. We don't want you to have that bad experience. But anyhow, our ability to mail through your server has been done since, I think, June of last year.
00:41:46
Speaker
and we just hesitate because we don't want to facilitate spam. Because if you don't care if you're going to end up in Gmail jail because you blasted out a bunch of records that you got from us, that violates our everyone wins approach. Gmail has got pretty specific regulations in place, but honestly, it's to protect you. They limit how much you can send in a day,
00:42:16
Speaker
to protect you because if you send too much, you look like a spammer, even if it's legit. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I mean, they still can't get the Nigerian Prince, but they're after us. You know, it's like, it's like, come on, man. It's like, everybody's grandma has to click that link. You know, it's like, okay. I'll be right over. So yeah, that's, that's, uh, so emailing, I, do you mind if I touch on, on what you should be doing just for a second?
00:42:46
Speaker
Okay, here's the thing. Everybody has these fancy email signatures and some of them are animated and it's amazing. It looks great. It's wonderful. The Gmail specifically and Microsoft system more and more recently is viewing all those links to your social media profiles as potential spam, as potential bad links. So your email comes in from a server that's probably hosted somewhere else that may or may not have a good IP reputation.
00:43:16
Speaker
you may have a spammy subject line instead of saying something like VO talent.
00:43:23
Speaker
Something simple, it might say, we'll read for a cheeseburger. You know what I mean? Because people are trying to be cute. And I see it all the time. And then they look at the body of the email and somebody wrote them a novel about, well, last summer when I was with the kids, we were out at the lake and this stupid pontoon boat, it looked like it was going to run out of gas. Oh, by the way, I do voiceover.
00:43:47
Speaker
What the hell is this guy? You know, when you got links all over the place and sometimes they try to link and embed videos and then they've got this massive signature block with all their other cool stuff. My best template ever goes like this. My subject line just says, VO talent. That's it. I'm not a plumber. I'm not, you know, I'm none of these other things. I'm a VO talent. That's what my subject. Then it says, hi, Becky.
00:44:13
Speaker
I'm a full-time voice talent who's looking to connect or hoping to connect, something worse to that effect. I've worked for global brands, ABC, a couple of regional brands, AB, and then uncountable, you know, local stuff. Then my next section just says, hey, I delivered pristine audio. If you get a chance, go ahead and click this link out to my website. You can check out my specs. You can see pictures of my studio.
00:44:37
Speaker
I hope you guys do something amazing this week. Jonathan, cell phone number, source connect ID. That's it, because the link is linked to the websites in the body. That's it. That's it. Two sentences. So and then here's the other thing, frequency. So I was talking to a guy who I hear him. He's not from around here. I hear him on my radio here almost every day. I hear him on AM. I hear him on Sirius XM. I hear him on TV.
00:45:05
Speaker
I know that's his work. This dude is sending three messages in a week and somebody out there in one of these VO programs, because he's not the first voiceover person I've talked to, somebody's teaching them, send them an icebreaker, send them on Monday, send them a follow up on Wednesday, and send them a breakup letter on Friday. Well, you must not be hiring voiceover. You get that crap all the time. It's like, hey, did you see my last message? And hey, I'm still trying to reach out. I would just want to follow up. When's a good time?
00:45:33
Speaker
Man, all you're doing is pissing them off. You look like and you sound like a spammer. And desperate. 90 days. Yeah. You send somebody an email, don't talk to them again for 90 days at all. And next time, if they haven't responded and added you to their roster, next time act like you never talked to them before in your life. Send them another one. Send them the same one.
00:45:56
Speaker
You know, you don't have to get don't, I mean, it's madness what people are teaching people to do out there. You know, it's insanity. So you also if you can spread them out like that and you're sending them one off and you're keeping nice big gaps in your sense, you're not going to show up as a spammer. Right. You know, but if you if you come to veal leads and you buy like, let's say you buy the biggest package you can get, that's what, four hundred and seventy three leads right off the bat and you go do a bulk unlock and who I'm going to
00:46:26
Speaker
I can't wait to put this out here and just send. You're done. I mean, the minute you click that, you're blocked on all Gmail, likely all Microsoft, you're done. So, you know, it's better to go one off. Anyhow, the reason people aren't doing direct marketing is this. They don't know what to do. They don't. They just don't know what to do. Well, they've been told so many different ways.
00:46:51
Speaker
So many inconsistent techniques. Well, and most of the techniques that are taught are only partially taught. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of great information out there, but most of it is so high level, you know, 20,000 foot view. Right. You know, it's like, OK, well, I know I need to be doing this, but I don't really understand what.
00:47:11
Speaker
Or I know I need to go dig up leads and before VO leads existed, how am I going to do that? Go Google for a production company and then spend an hour vetting each single one. That's why I haven't done as much as I should because I've hired people to do lead generation for me and they've produced decent lists, but then I've gone through the whole, like I'll get 300 and I'll go through every single one in the list and spend 20 minutes, half hour to an hour per item.
00:47:41
Speaker
vetting whether or not it's even worth reaching out to them. You know, do they have evidence that they do work that could use VL? If not, I'm not going to reach out. And maybe that's wrong. Maybe I should. No, no, no, no, no. That's that's exactly what we do. And it takes it's hard. It takes it takes time. So basically, in plain English, we try to do the nitpicky bullshit work, and get that out of the way for you. We go and make sure there's evidence of
00:48:07
Speaker
likely VO buyer. It's not perfect. Sometimes a magazine will slip through or some billboard outdoor advertising sometimes, you know, it's not perfect.
00:48:16
Speaker
But it's damn close. So we also did a time and motion study on hiring somebody to source leads for you. Let's assume you're paying somebody $20 an hour to source leads. OK. So if you have the site open, I don't. But what's the $60? Let's say you're going to hire them for 30 for three hours. Let's just call it 70. So here's the way it works out on our subscription model is where I did the math.
00:48:42
Speaker
In that scenario, for the same $60, that person that you hired to vet leads would have to produce for you a fully vetted lead with up to 15 data points every 2.6 minutes for that whole three hours.
00:48:58
Speaker
Wow. Do you see that? I see the value. And I don't do math. I'm a numbers math. Just very anti-math. That would be, even if you got that number of leads, you're not going to get that many data points. No, no.
00:49:16
Speaker
Usually, the couple times I did it, I would get an email and maybe a LinkedIn, and that was it. And I didn't, frankly, didn't even care about the LinkedIn. I just wanted the email addresses, but they gave me a LinkedIn too. But, you know, links for people on LinkedIn are only so valuable at this point, unless you're paying for LinkedIn.
00:49:35
Speaker
because you can only add so many people per day or per month. You can only reach out to so many people per day or per month, and they're tightening those down because they're really trying to force people into paying, which is crappy. I dropped mine. I had a premium account with LinkedIn for, God, 10 years, and I dropped it last year. The reason that I dropped it was I've got plenty of connections on there, like thousands.
00:50:02
Speaker
But, and that's not braggadocious, if you're on there that long, hopefully you've made a few. But the bump that you get for additional connections or in mail, to use their mail system, it's not worth it. What I find is, I'll put up a post of something new that I've done that hopefully a production house I'm connected to sees that. That, look, he did something for Microsoft.
00:50:28
Speaker
So that's kind of cool. And it's just another way to keep your name out there in front of people, because you know what, we're CEOs, we're entrepreneurs. And it's like everybody gets into voiceover and it's the first time they've ever been like the boss, you know, and they get hung up on that part of it. But what they don't realize is
00:50:43
Speaker
you're the marketing person you're the accountant you're the bookkeeper you're you know you're the equipment engineer you're you're also the talent you're not just the ceo and so as a as an entrepreneur you're resting posture after all that work is done and you've put it you sent in your bookings you've got your recordings done and editing and everything is delivered.
00:51:05
Speaker
your resting posture must be self-promotion, must be. It doesn't matter whether you're in voiceover, it doesn't matter if you own a restaurant, it doesn't matter if you're the CEO of General Motors. As the CEO, your resting posture must be self-promotion, always. If your eyes are open and you're not on the pillow somewhere, you should be promoting yourself. That's Business 101. You know, a long, long time.
00:51:31
Speaker
And honestly, speaking just for myself, it's probably one of the things that's most difficult for me is to go do it. Like I've got the tools, now go do it. I think that might be a whole nother podcast. I would say though, some of that activity is putting the things in place, putting the tools in place, improving your website, improving your social media.
00:51:58
Speaker
pages and whatever. It's not necessarily actively going out and say, hey, look at me, look at me. But making sure you have everything ready so that you can go, hey, look at me. Yeah. And if somebody was to build a tool for you where
00:52:12
Speaker
heavy lifting, it's daunting building a lead list. It takes an incredible amount of time. And if that portion of it was removed from the equation, now you have to get past ignorance and fear.
00:52:29
Speaker
That's it. Well, some people are lazy, you know, but but ignorance meaning you don't know where to where do I start? What do I say? What do I say for a follow up? And you get all up in your head about it. Talk to them like they're human beings because they are. It's not some magic unicorn sitting in our office somewhere that you're trying to break through there.
00:52:48
Speaker
shell. Well, and I think another misconception that people have about direct marketing is you're not trying to book a job when you first reach out to somebody.
Building Personal Relationships
00:52:59
Speaker
It's like a handshake, right? You're starting a conversation.
00:53:04
Speaker
Okay, this is me. This is what I offer. You look like a cool person. Let's get to know each other. And if you're looking to start a conversation, it helps to know who you're emailing to. Yeah. Well, that's what I like about Viole leads too, is I can go to the website and I can, you know, you can check out the social media. You can check out their LinkedIn. It's got all those things that you can look at. So you can actually
00:53:27
Speaker
you know, if they do make that connection, you'd be like, hey, I really like that campaign you did for Spotify or, you know, whatever, and just kind of make that, for lack of a better term, that is that connection, like an organic connection. Yeah, well, and that's really the most effective direct marketing includes
00:53:46
Speaker
kind of building personal relationships with people that you're working with or that you hope to work with. It's really simple. If you make them take a sip from a fire hose, you're going to blow them out of the water. They'll never respond. Hi, look at me. I'm cool. Here's what I do. You happen to need this. Here's how you can get a hold of me. See you soon.
00:54:12
Speaker
It's been 24 hours since I reached out to you. Do you not like me? No, don't do that. I emailed you two days ago and you didn't respond. Oh my gosh. So this guy that is buying leads from us called me and I'm sorry, I'm not going to say your name, but I have to tell the truth. It's a learning lesson and I think they will appreciate it that I'm offering this. So he was on that whole,
00:54:39
Speaker
email follow-up breakup letter plan. And this guy called him in custom out. He's like, bro. Oh my.
00:54:48
Speaker
What the F? He's like, listen, I'm out in the field. We're filming a commercial that we want to hire voiceover for. I got you, man. I'll read your email when I get back to the office. But at least he called. You know what I mean? Most people would delete, you're going straight into the bin. Don't hassle these people, man. They've got your email. Look what just happened to me. So far this year, I've had four people hire me. What were we, six weeks into this year, I've had four brand new jobs from people. The first time I talked to them was last February.
00:55:18
Speaker
all back to back to back. So it's a long game. That's what I'm hearing. Well, and it is a number time and it's a long game marathon. Yeah. But yeah, don't reach out too often. Don't do that. That whatever the hell break up with them in a week thing. Yeah. I guess I was teaching that, but that's a bad idea. This is the second guy that way. Yeah. Best. You look desperate.
00:55:44
Speaker
Yeah. Realistically, you look like a spammer. It's better to look cool. Frankly, when I get stuff like that, because I get stuff like that a lot from, you know, oh, we looked at your website and you need better SEO because you're not on page one for every keyword ever. Do you think? Yeah, same.
Avoiding Excessive Follow-ups
00:56:03
Speaker
Then like two days, three days, maybe a week later, they'll follow up again and they'll say like, oh, you didn't respond. Can you let me know if you're still interested? Well, A, first of all, I would have had to indicate that I was interested in the first place to still be interested. And B, screw you. I didn't want this in the first place and now you're being pestering. So, spam. I mark them as spam and I report them as spam. So don't be that guy because you're gonna get flagged as spam.
00:56:28
Speaker
Right. And that doesn't make for me a jerk. You know what I mean? That's people are sick of it. Yeah. Or they give you their calendar link. No, I want to talk. Here's my links meeting with me like now. I don't know who you are. No. And I don't talk to strangers. Just like Rick Springfield. Don't get in vans with strange people offering candy. Exactly right. Especially if their name is uncle touchy. Yeah.
00:56:55
Speaker
Aw, dang. Okay. You know, at the end of the day, if you're serious about your VO career and you're treating it like a business and not a hobby as you should be, you need to market.
VO as a Business and Direct Marketing
00:57:08
Speaker
That's just the reality of the world we live in today. Yeah. So you may as well market right. Yeah. You will not get enough work from just agents. Right. Because there's just not enough for everybody that way.
00:57:22
Speaker
Pay to play is losing battle. So, you know, really the only way that you're going to build a sustainable business is direct marketing. And I've done it. We've all done it, I think, gone through the process of digging up leads and vetting them. And it's a pain in the butt and it takes way more time than we actually have because we're
00:57:47
Speaker
Like Jonathan said, we're all wearing, you know, 30 different hats. So a tool that provides vetted leads for, you know, better than what it would cost to hire somebody off, you know, upwork or something to generate un-vetted leads. I mean, it's kind of a no brainer. Yeah. It really is. Hard recommend from me. Well, thank you. And me. Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate your time. Full disclosure, Victoria and I were both beta testers.
00:58:15
Speaker
But we're not getting any kickback unless you use our referral codes, which if you want them, Rachel, we'll give them to you. Well, definitely. Thank you so much. Thanks for being on, Jonathan. Hey, thanks for having me. This is actually great information, man. I enjoyed it. All right.