Critical Missed Factor For Marketing Actors To Hollywood

If you’re like most actors, you would rather be acting in a movie or TV show than marketing yourself.   Yes, you know you need to market yourself, but you think that it’s not really your job — it’s not really part of your acting.  But you do it because if you don’t, who will.  Right?

But thinking like this may give you a little bit of trouble.  Like with anything in life, when you resist “what is so,” it gets harder and harder to deal with.  I know that for many artists and other people who have their own business or personal service and don’t have someone else to market them, they just feel like they are no good at marketing.  And frequently, they then make a half-hearted attempt at it or they don’t do it at all.  Then business goes down, or you don’t get many auditions, and you’re left frustrated.

To be powerful in your career, you need to shift your relationship to marketing and how you think about it.  Start by giving up resisting it and simply owning that it is a critical element of your career.  Just like staying in shape, looking well, being healthy, being friendly to your fans, and taking care of yourself overall is a critical element in your acting career, so is marketing.  Some people don’t like to work out, but if you want to stay in shape, you’ll have to do some kind of exercise.

With exercising, you can’t get someone else to do it for you — although you can get a trainer and coach.  But with marketing, fortunately you  can get someone to do a lot of it for you.  My company Smart Girls Productions has been marketing actors to Hollywood since 1992.  We’ve helped literally thousands of actors get agents and managers and also get auditions for top TV show and movies.  We work with you one on one and help you pick out headshots and write your cover letters and so forth.  And there are other companies who offer some version of coaching in helping you package yourself for the market.

But the bottomline, as I always like to get to, is this.  No matter what you want to have someone else support you in, you have to take that first step.  You are always the person responsible for making it happen.  If you don’t, I promise you no one else will.  You have to market yourself over and over and over.  You don’t have to do all the steps, but you have to take the first step to find someone esle to do it.  Then you still have to be involved.  Even when you get a talent agent or manager to represent you for the film and TV roles you want, ultimately, you will still need to keep promoting yourself.

What I’m really suggesting is that if you can change your attitude to embracing the fact that you need to market yourself, you may find that you get more creative about it.  The sooner you embrace that ongoing promotion of your career is as much a part of your acting career as auditioning, then you will leap forward in your career much more quickly.

Here’s to your success!