Q&A: “How to market audio services to Christian filmmakers?”

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Today's caller seeks help marketing his services to Christian filmmakers. Where can he find clients and what does he offer them? Welcome to Side Hustle School, my name is Chris Guillebeau. Now those two questions are what a lot of service businesses come down to, clients and offers. You've got your customers, people who are paying you, you're providing a service for them.

The offer is what they're actually paying for. Not necessarily the service itself, but the offer is like, okay, here's how much it costs, here's what I receive for it. A promise, a pitch, a price, an offer is something specific that people pay for. So let's see if we can help him out and perhaps by proxy, someone else out there who's hoping to start a service business. So glad you tuned in today, I'll bring you the detailed question and my answer in just a moment.

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Hi Chris, this is Steve from Branson, Missouri. I've been listening to the show for three or four months now and it has quickly become my favorite podcast. I'm an audio engineer with almost 30 years experience in live audio and studio recording. I've recently become interested in doing sound for Christian and family friendly films as my side hustle. My question is, what is the best way to do market research and find out what the audio needs of the Christian filmmaking community are?

These filmmakers network with each other on Facebook groups and possibly other places as well. My thought was to make a website with a marketing research form on it and provide a link to it on my Facebook page or in a post. I also thought about offering a discount on my services as a way to say thank you for filling out the form and use the info to create an email list. Does this sound like a good idea or is there a better way to approach marketing research? Thanks in advance for your answer.

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Hey Steve, what's up man? Thanks so much for the question. It definitely sounds like you are leveraging those long learned, long practiced skills, 30 years of audio engineering and you also have a specific market in mind. So very good start. About the marketing strategy though, I think I might have a better way to approach it.

The challenge with like making the website and having people fill out the form, it's a little bit impersonal and for lots of things, it's totally fine. But for something like this, business is gonna take place through referral, through actually getting to know people. So rather than the process of the website and the form, I mean, you could do that, but I would also make sure I'm making direct contact with these people. You said they're hanging out on Facebook, some Facebook groups. I would be talking to them directly.

I would be asking them, "Hey, could we have a 20 minute phone call?" So I can ask you some questions. And not everybody's gonna do that, but some will. Like people really do like to help. I think that's important to remember. People like to help when you have specific asks.

So most likely over time, your business is gonna come about through referral and through getting to know these people as opposed to just using a website, using social media. It's just a much warmer process this way than the relatively cold process of trying to convert them from a website. In the end, like if someone wants to hire you in this world, they're gonna wanna talk to you anyway. So you might as well just do that on the front end and that way you have an existing relationship. That's what I think about that.

But as I said, you're on the right track, using those skills, identifying a market, figuring out a way to then hopefully create some offers and move forward. Good luck, Steve. Let us know what happens. Listeners, if you've got a question or you wanna share your idea, get some feedback, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Continue to feature them throughout the year.

New episode every single day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.