For Voiceover Achievers who work tirelessly on their craft, career, and brand, it’s important to measure progress. After all, when you put a lot of time and effort into something, you want to be able to look back on how far you’ve come, and also articulate that success.
The best way to do that? Tracking metrics and setting goals. For your VO brand, that means measuring certain stats related to your work, and determining targets you want to hit in your career. Don’t worry – you don’t have to be an analytics pro or a business guru to do this. We’ll help you get started with an outline of which metrics are best for VO professionals to track, and how to set goals that work for you.
The Best Metrics for Voice Actors
1. Revenue
To kick off this list, we have the most obvious metric for a brand’s success: how much money you are making. After all, as a skilled and talented artist, you deserve to be compensated for your work! And it’s worth keeping track of this compensation to measure your business’s volume.
The best way to use this metric to assess brand performance is income over time. For example, are you making more this month than you were this time last year? If so, you’re heading in the right direction. If not, and you’re not sure why, it could be a sign to take a look at your strategies.
Let’s emphasize that revenue is not a metric for comparison – how much money others are making compared to your profit says nothing about your brand. What matters is that you are staying in tune with what’s happening in your VO world, and you are heading in the direction you want to go.
2. “Micro-wins”
Revenue may be the most obvious metric, but it’s certainly not the only metric, and may not even be the best metric depending on who you ask. According to Forbes, “micro-wins,” or the seemingly little things you do every day that go right, “help you keep your finger on the pulse on what is really going on in your branding and marketing from day to day.”
These small wins could be anything from a potential client reaching out because they heard and enjoyed one of your recent spots, to a person or a brand you love reposting some of your content.
It doesn’t have to be quantitative, nor does it have to be life changing. A micro-win will help you stay positive, enjoy the ride, and not get so bogged down with the overwhelming aspects of the business.
3. Clients
Voiceover, like many industries, is a relationship-driven industry. Successful VO professionals tend to have a strong network of colleagues, and as their career goes on, clients. There are many different angles to keeping track of your clients: how many new clients you worked with in a set time frame, how many repeat clients you have, conversion rate for new clients to repeat clients, and beyond.
This may seem like an overwhelming metric with a lot of moving parts, but the simplest way to measure this is to start a log and keep track of all your clients’ names, when you last worked with them, and each project you’ve worked with them on. Once you have that done, you’ll be well on your way to running the numbers and gleaning insights.
4. Audition-to-booking ratio
This metric is a simple calculation – take the number of projects you’ve booked divided by your number of auditions, multiply by 100 and find out your audition-to-booking ratio. A high ratio means you successfully book a lot of projects (yay!), but a low ratio doesn’t necessarily mean anything’s wrong – it could be that you submit a lot of auditions, and that’s not a bad thing at all!
If you do want to boost this number, though, consider asking for feedback from a trusted colleague or your agents/managers on your audition performances and see how you could potentially improve. Or, seek out more projects you feel will be a great fit for you instead of submitting for any available project.
Tips for Setting Goals as a Voice Actor
Now that you know four of the metrics you should measure for your VO career, it’s time to start setting goals. Here are a few tips to help you succeed in measuring your success:
1. Be specific!
A goal like “be more successful” may be something we all want, but how do you ever know when you’ve achieved it? The best goals have a measurable outcome, whether it be a number or a specific achievement, within a set timeframe. With that format, there will be no mistaking when you’ve met the goal.
2. Tailor them to fit you.
Goals are not one-size-fits-all. The goals a VO professional who’s been in the business for 30 years has compared to those of an industry newbie should be very different. Make sure your goals are challenging, but doable, relative to where you are at in your career.
3. Put them on paper.
It’s easy to say you want to achieve something, but in order for it to really happen, you need to hold yourself accountable. Write the goal down somewhere you can see it, remember it, and then continue working towards it.
4. Regularly check in.
Maybe you set a goal to achieve within the year. Well, once it’s set, don’t check back in at the deadline. It’s best to regularly check your progress and make sure you’re on track, so you know if you need to pivot along the way.
5. Celebrate the wins!
The best part about setting goals is meeting them, so when you achieve what you said you would, don’t forget to celebrate yourself!
After tracking your metrics and setting your goals, if you notice you’re not where you want to be, we can help! Here at CSM, we are passionate about helping voiceover artists build their best brand. Reach out to our team today and let’s get to work.
And if you want an inside look at some of our best branding tricks, check out the Voiceover Achiever book! It walks you through just how branding your VO career can change your life.
Thanks for tuning in, Voiceover Achievers, and happy measuring!
– Celia Siegel Management
