Target your voice over marketing – Literally

I’m finishing up my latest automotive voice over demo with the fantastic Cliff Zellman from A-Mazing Demos who is the king of automotive advertising voice over. He and I started talking about how to start marketing my new demo to ad agencies, dealerships, etc. As we were talking he recommended getting a wall map and use that to track where I had marketed to. He told me to get some push pins and when I send my information or contact a particular company put a pin in that location to keep track of things; red for leads, yellow for when there’s been some initial contact back and forth and green when we actually have a working relationship in place.

This is a fantastic idea because it allows you to visually see geographic areas you have marketed to and areas that you may have overlooked. But here’s the thing, I’m a 21 century virtual boy. I’m not one to actually have a map on my wall, not to mention the fact of not having a place to put it. So I started looking into an online map so I can have the same information but on my computer or phone. And after doing some research I discovered that Google actually allows you to make custom apps that do this exact thing. I was so happy to discover this. So let me share for a couple of minutes how you can create your own map and use it to help target your voice over marketing.

1. First, sign into your Google account and go to google.com/mymaps.
2. On the upper left side of the page click on CREATE A NEW MAP. Congratulations, you have a new map!! That was super easy wasn’t it? Now comes the fun part.
3. From here you can search for an address, company name or whatever in the dialogue box at the top of the page. Google will of course make suggestions as you type and you can click whichever one is appropriate.
4. Once Google has mapped the results you were looking for, simply click on ADD TO MAP. The dialog box will change and this is where you can do customization to your pin and see the actual longitude and latitude which for a nerd like me is pretty cool.
5. By default it’s a blue pin that gets dropped when you add something to the map but by clicking on the paint can symbol on the bottom of that dialog box you can change the color or if you want you can change the icon all together.
6. By clicking on the pencil icon you can change the information that’s displayed. For me I usually search by the address so what I like to do is copy the address into the description box which is the second dialog box and paste the name of the company in the top dialog box. When typing in the description box you can create a new line by holding shift and enter. You can also add a photo, find driving directions or delete the pin.

There you go, you now have your own personalized map. But wait there’s more! There’s a whole bunch of customization you can do that we haven’t talked about yet.

So say you’ve created a location but after the fact you want to go back and make a change, convert them from a lead to an active client for example. You’ll notice on the left side of the page is your listing of all your pins. If you hover over them you can see the paint bucket icon again on the right side. Once you click that the dialog box comes up on the map for the location and you can change the color, icon and all the things just as before.

Let’s look a little deeper into this area on the left. You’ll notice on top of your pins you have the name of your map. In my case it’s Automotive Marketing but a really cool thing you can do if you wanted to have a little more segregation between items is set up different layers for different groups of pins. For example if you wanted to just have one layer be leads, another one be active clients or whatever you’d like. That way you can filter out and only see one layer at a time or you can combine them.

You can find a page with all the things you can do with these maps here.

You can also access your maps from your mobile device. Open up Google Maps and hit the menu icon on the left. Click on your places and slide the menu on top to the left. There you will see maps and then select your map from that page. I haven’t found a way to add pins on the mobile app but I’ll let you know if I find it.

Like I said, I think this is a super handy tool because not only can you visualize the areas that you have targeted with your marketing but you can definitely see where you might have neglected and refocus your efforts to those places.

I hope this has been informative and helpful to you. If you have any questions or comments or would like me to write about any other topics please feel free to email me Chris@voiceoverdad.com. I would love to hear from you.
Thanks so much for hanging out and have a great day.