Part 3 - The Virtual Storyteller - Getting Equipped

Okay! Now you have made some decisions about what you think you might want to do on this virtual performance ride! 

You think you know what you are going to try to produce

You think you know what you want to offer

I use the word "think" because you should not set anything in stone at this moment. 

Stone is bad

Stone breaks

Stone weathers and becomes illegible

Try something more flexible. Flexible is very good at this point.

I went into my first recording sessions on my laptop with gusto. I could do this! I am woman, hear me record!

Failure

Abject Failure

Horrible

Unacceptable

I went to The David and informed him I had failed to do a thing that I was pretty sure I should be able to do.

What was the problem?

Lighting

Video Quality

Background Too Busy

Not focusing well enough on the camera

Content Not Engaging

Structure not tight enough

Not connecting on a personal level

In other words, I did not have a handle on this at all. 

I had to back up and try to acquire a set of skills I had neither wanted nor needed at any other point in my life. Honestly, I didn't even know what those skills were.

I did a few "shots across the bow" stories and uploaded them to youtube just to see if they worked.

Well, this looks...homemade. 

Clearly, I needed to up my game, but how could I do that?

That's when I realized that despite all the time I'd spent in front of the camera producing subpar work those first few weeks, I was only at the tip of a very big, very intimidating iceberg.

I researched video editing

I researched lighting

I reached out to professional lighting designers

I researched video recording speeds

I researched how to deal with echo

I spoke with my friend,  the talented and sexy Simon Brooks who helped me immensely - with recording

My son - Degrees in digital music and 3-D art and animation was a key player in the research!

All of this research resulted in several different outcomes:

1. I went from room to room and space to space in my home and listened for echoes and ambient sound. 

The first best place was in my living room in a corner between the fireplace and a bookshelf that faced the downstairs hall. No wall to bounce the sound back, and lots of ambient light as long as I shot footage during the day at it wasn't raining.

2. I decided to get an external camera. I have an old Iphone and an even older laptop.

Webcams were out...not because I didn't try to source one, but because every single human being on the earth was smarter than I was and bought one the second the pandemic hit. There were none available.

After buying and returning a camcorder, I finally settled on this one.

The Canon Vixia r80

3. I listened to what was coming out of the camera and decided I needed an external mic.

Insignia Universal External Mic

After acquiring my purchases, I discovered I needed a tripod. These were also in short supply, so I bought a selfie stick that doubles as a small tripod and I repurposed - wait for it - my ironing board.

I borrowed a really bright light from my daughter and bought two track lights at Lowes.

My totally professional and not jury-rigged setup looked like this.

I got a horrid glare off of the picture behind me, so I took out the glass. It is a very nice, contained, non-echoey space with a simple background and nothing distracting.

All sorted, right?

No.

Not even close.

I had not yet begun to purchase!

My Macbook Pro, which had been a wonderful word processing machine and portable movie theatre for the last nine years discovered that I suddenly needed it to process video, upload, and download a ton of content, and talk to a video camera.

I can almost hear the thought process.

The Mac - "What the hell is wrong with you? You knew my memory and processing speed when you bought me! At no time in our relationship did I ever give you the idea that I was up to this sort of abuse. You better back up, woman!"

So, I bought a new Mac.

Wait! Wait! Wait!

I am not suggesting you go on a shopping spree! You don't need to do what I did at all!!!!!

1. I am explaining what happened to me.

2. I am explaining why I made the choices I did

3. I am not saying that if you don't drop 4 grand your quest is hopeless or anything of the kind

4. Lots of people are using their Iphones - I just have one that doesn't have a stellar camera

5. Lots of people have great lighting situations already - mine sucked

6. Lots of people have computers that could handle the processes - mine didn't

I am not a technophile, and mostly what I used my laptop for was writing. I have an amazingly huge amount of writing on my laptop and little else.

I was completely unprepared to be a virtual anything.

Now, if you do need some new equipment do not despair.

If you are having a cash crunch, there are tons of sources for cash out there right now for artists who need to upgrade their gear for this new age of virtual work. My buddy, Tim Lowry, (Head to his website and support his brilliant work) just went Mac crazy at his house with a PPP loan. (This program is closed, but keep a lookout for future programs of this kind)  

 The resources are there.

Start searching for artist grants here!

Okay, back to the saga of transforming my reality to a virtual experience.

Now, after purchasing a new Mac, transferring over relevant files, and commencing to store my videos on the drive, I discovered that if you try to put ten one-hour-long videos on a computer that is already storing lots of other things, it gets mad.

(I promise I will do a post about editing software and what little I know about how to work it.)

So, I bought a Seagate External Back-up Drive. I'm currently on my second one.

Then, there was the backdrop saga. (Blog post where I decide to upgrade the feel and look of my videos)

Now, all of this buying and rethinking happened in the first month of the lockdown as I realized I didn't have the capacity to go virtual in any way that looked professional.

The amount of failure that I experienced over the course of this summer was epic. Each and every single fail taught me something valuable that I was able to take into my next attempt. 

As the Mythbusters were always fond of saying - Failure Is Always An Option.

 

So, wherever you are in this process...here is my advice for dealing with the absolutely annoying, frustrating, exciting, draining, nonsense up to and including listening to hours of your own voice and performing for a camera of some kind:

Some New Rules for Old Dogs

1. Be gentle

2. Be patient

3. You can always start over

4. Not everything works

5. Play - Play like there is no tomorrow

6. Victories whether large or small should be celebrated like the world is ending.

7. Breathe

8. Relax

9. Lather, rinse, repeat

Happy Recording -

In the next installment - I will talk about lighting

Part 1: The Virtual Storyteller - The Philosophy of Plenty - Don't Let People Talk You Out Of It!

Part 2: The Virtual Storyteller - You Need A Cunning Plan

Par 3 - The Virtual Storyteller - Getting Equipped

Part 4: Lighting the Virtual Storyteller

Part 5: The Virtual Storyteller - Performing For The Camera

Part 6: The Virtual Storyteller - I'm a Teller Not a Film Editor!

Part 7: The Virtual Storyteller - How Do You Market This???

Part 8: The Virtual Storyteller - The Internet Gods Are Not Always Kind

Part 9: The Virtual Storyteller - We Are An Evolving Business

Marketing 101 Part 7: The Wrap Up!

Writing a series on marketing has taught me several things.

1. It would be possible to write about this stuff every week and still not cover everything...and I am quite through with this!

2. I never say as much as I mean to, but can fill up this space quite quickly with observations.

3. There are lots of people far more qualified than I to talk about this, and I am going to leave them to it!

This is my final entry in this series, and I mean to quickly wrap up my observations!

To Review:


1. The Questions I Consider About Marketing
2. Branding: Do You Have A Logo? Do You Need One?

3. Your Business Card: Is It Working Hard, or Hardly Working?

4.The Brochure: A Giant Multitasking Business Card!

5. The Press Kit: What On Earth Is This?

6. Cohesion: Why Does It Matter?

7. Marketing 101: The Wrap Up!

I will endeavor to go through the last few points I want to make about this subject in this series.

1. Ghosts Of Marketing Past!

1. When I was a wee, baby storyteller back in the olden days, we used carrier pigeons to get out our message. Yes, then came Western Union and ultimately the post office...the thing we now call snail mail. These days, The David rarely uses the snail mail for marketing; contracts, yes, but that is about it. 

This means we no longer send out postcards. I used to design these myself, and I enjoyed it. We used Modern Postcards back in the day because they were one of the few services that offered what we needed. Today there are lots of companies that offer services like this. 

UPS Store

Express Copy

Vista Print

Barely scratched the surface! The coolest thing about this is that they will print and mail the cards for you. All you have to do is send in the designs. It is a no muss no fuss type of thing. 

Personally, I love postcards, and we got an okay return. In other words, they paid for themselves plus a little extra. I, however, am not in charge of marketing in my company....The David is, and The David controls the budget. 

What do we do instead? We have a vigorous online marketing strategy. The David painstakingly creates comprehensive email lists of schools and libraries in every state in which we market. He also finds out exactly who is in charge of booking cultural arts events for each school. This targeted marketing is much more effective in terms of reaching our potential clients. It also allows him to include links the client can click and instantly see the product they might be buying. 

Not nearly as sexy as postcards, labor intensive, but the return is much better, and since he does it in-house it doesn't cost us a penny extra. 

2. Online or Hard Copy Directories

There are companies that ask you to pay a fee, join a directory, and let them do the marketing for you. They say their directories are distributed far and wide, and your work will end up in front of thousands upon thousands of potential clients. We have signed up for things like this in the past. We no longer use them.

Now, that does not mean these services are not worthwhile for some artists, but we were never able to track the efficacy of these services. When it comes to our marketing budget, if we are shelling out cash for something, we need to be able to track the return. If we cannot see a  return on our investment, we discontinue a service. We typically give such services like this two or three years. 

There may be artists who have found such services financially lucrative or at least a good brick in their marketing strategy, but they have never worked for us.

The reason for this is that most of our work is in schools. The contacts for schools change on a regular basis. They have lots of other ways to find artists and are not as likely to use these directories. Libraries don't seem to use them either. If you work in theaters or have some other type of venue, these might work excellently well.

3. We no longer create marketing pieces in-house. They are always outsourced.

4. Is there something you used to do that you no longer do, but someone else might want to try? Leave it in the comments section!

2. Other Marketing Resources - 

There are lots and lots of blogs that deal with marketing. Just type in what sort of advice you need into Google, and let the internet do its thing.

As for me, I have taken any number of workshops about marketing. There are, however, two that stand out as being exceptional.

Dianne De Las Casas offers an in-depth marketing workshop. You want to know how to reach people, get your name out there and shock the world? Find out where this woman is offering a workshop, and take it!

The other one that struck me as being a stand out in the world of marketing workshops was given by my blogging goddess mentor Karen Langford Chace, and the dashing Simon Brooks.

Karen Langford Chace

One of the coolest things about the workshop they designed is that it not only talks about marketing strategies, but offers a comprehensive look at what type of storyteller you are, what might be your strengths, and what you are most proud of as a performer. The questionnaires they created help you figure out not only how to market, but WHAT to market. It is a very clever approach, and highly effective if you are at the beginning of your marketing career, or thinking about taking it up a notch.

Simon Brooks

There is so much more that could be said about resources and books and people, but I will stop with these two. I did say that one could spend their entire life writing a blog about marketing, and that is not my intention! If you have a link to or a suggestion for who gives a bang up workshop, or a great book you read, feel free to offer that information in the comments section so we can all  benefit from it!

3. The Marketing budget

How much money should you be spending on marketing?

Well, here are some questions.

How much did you actually spend on marketing last year? Do you know? Do you track that? What counts as marketing

-Your website

-Hard and soft marketing

-Mailings

-Lunches

-Showcases

-Advertising in Publications

-Fees for arts councils

-Art Fairs

-Mailings

Can you make a good estimate as to which of your activities produces the most revenue?

Once you know what you spent and what you earned, you will be able to figure out what percentage of your gross was spent on marketing, and what sort of returns you got. This brings us to the burning question:

How much should you budget for marketing?

The simple answer is if you want to grow your business you have to invest in your marketing strategies. Not all marketing strategies are alike. It isn't a bad idea to sit down and evaluate your various marketing activities. 

The best way to track efficacy is to simply ask anyone who books you how they found out about you. In fact, as The David just reminded me, it is the ONLY way to track that!

Some marketing strategies require time to reach fruition, some need to be rolled out at once, some are ongoing. How are they serving you? If there is something you are doing that is a continuous drain on your resources with no clear reason to continue doing it, then it might be time to consider reinvesting that capital somewhere else.

In Conclusion:

The more I write about this the more I realize there are lots of things I never even touched upon...but that will have to be for another day and another time. 

There are lots and lots of ways to market yourself. I am sure you have come up with clever ways to get the word out about your work and the products you offer.

This series deals only with the paper products we produce, it does not touch on all of the other marketing that we do! 

In future blogs, if I say, "You've got to market like crazy every year just to keep your hand in the game", this is the sort of thing I mean. 

Producing and distributing marketing materials that are professional and effective can increase your bottom line, improve your market share, and let everybody know that we storytellers are not in this as a hobby. 

Storytelling is a profession, and it deserves to be treated as such.

Happy Marketing -