Benefits of Voice Overs for Your Business
If your business has not explored the benefits of voice over, now is an excellent time to do so. Voice overs can act as a secret weapon in helping more companies engage with their target audience, building brand authority, and building a following of loyal customers. Before we delve into the business voice over benefits, let’s define voice overs and show how they’re used.
What Are Voice Overs and How Are They Used?
So what is voice overused for and what is the definition? Simply put, voice overs are narrations that viewers or listeners hear without seeing an actor. They are also an easy way to direct people to your product or service. It’s common to hear voice overs in a audio range of commercials, documentaries, or even audiobooks.
When hiring a professional, look for a professional voice that will resonate with your target audience. The right advertisement voice can captivate an audience and help viewers pay attention to what your company has to say. Some actors specialize in various types of voiceover work with some offering friendly tones while others are ideal for calm and relaxing messaging.
Finding the right voice over talent to portray your messaging can help increase the chances of your message resonating with your audience.
Types of Voice Overs
There are five general categories of professional voice over services, all with unique benefits:
- Commercial voice overs: This includes voices over in radio, podcast ads, television, and online videos. It’s common for commercial voice overs to center around a character or spokesperson who is advertising a service or product to the audience.
- Narration voice overs refer to more technical videos, online tutorials, explainer videos, documentaries, and business training materials. In narration voice overs, the narrator walks the audience through a story of specific steps often with the assistance of animation or filmed footage.
- IVR/voice prompts/telephony: This voice over type refers to a voice-based system such as digital assistants (Alexa, Siri, GPS systems), in-app voice narration, PA systems (like at the airport), and phone trees such as on-hold messaging. This category is highly technical.
- Animation and gaming: Through professional voice talent, you can bring characters and stories to life. These range from short online animation videos to longer films.
- Promos, affiliates, and trailers: Short commercials that advertise upcoming movies, television shows, and broadcasted events.
You might not know which type of voice over is ideal for your business. Here are our recommendations.
Where to Use Your Business Voice Overs
We’ve outlined some different examples of how your business can implement voice overs.
Elearning and Training Videos
Many companies use commercial voice over for eLearning custom courses and different videos. These training videos require a clear and engaging voice, one that the audience can listen to for multiple hours. The voice over should be delivered in a way that makes it easy for the audience to retain the information.
Corporate Videos and Animations
Corporate video content and animations are used in a range of scenarios such as representing the company at a trade show, communicating messages to the public via YouTube, business-to-business communication, and more. The tone of the voice talent is aspirational, conversational, and upbeat.
Advertising on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter
Voiceover ads on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are becoming more popular. Using high-quality and engaging voice overs can grab the attention of your audience and solidify your brand’s character. When hiring a professional, you can consider opting for a regional accent or implementing a more conversational tone.
How Voice Over Recordings Can Help Your Business
Business voice overs and voice over marketing are growing in popularity. Here are six ways that voice over services can benefit your company.
Brand-Building
One simple way to reinforce your brand’s identity is through voice over marketing. There is a term for this type of branding referred to as sonic branding. If you’ve never heard the term “sonic branding” before, you likely aren’t using it. Think of it as an audio logo for your brand that relates to your audience and demonstrates what you stand for.
For example, consider the professional voice talent used in home improvement store commercials: it is a rugged, American male voice that leaves a positive audience on home improvement professionals and DIYers alike.
On the other hand, consider the formal British voice overs often used in luxury automakers’ marketing efforts. This helps to convey a sense of luxury and class to their target audience.
Engage and Influence Target Audience
Videos with voice overs similar to your target audience make it easier for your customers to feel seen. Consumers will naturally gravitate toward voices that sound similar to theirs, so try to find voice over talent that is similar to the age and gender of your target audience. Another option would be to hire a professional with an accent. Research shows that some consumers gravitate toward foreign accents in voice overs for commercials and other audio bites.
Either route that you choose, make sure to compile data from your audience so you have a better understanding of what they want to hear. This could mean that you create different ads that have different voices to target a certain audience. In the case that your audience is bilingual, consider hiring bilingual talent to read your voice over scripts.
Wider Awareness
It’s a common misconception that the radio is dead. In reality, this is not the case. Beyond the basic AM/FM airwaves, billions of people turn to stream solutions and podcasts to consume content. This provides ample opportunity for companies to run ads on these platforms and reach their audience in a new way. Consider marketing your products and services through these channels to tap into an audience that you might have missed otherwise. In addition, you can use voice over professionals to make your ads sound consistent and high-quality.
Better ROI
Through well-crafted voice overs, you can have a positive first impression on your audience and generate a strong return on investment. For example, you can use voice overs to create high-quality commercials that run locally and engage with local consumers. You can also produce better radio ads to generate brand awareness and get more customers to your website.
Consider the large ROI that you can generate when tapping into podcast ads. Podcasts are quickly becoming one of the leading platforms for consumers to learn about new products, brands, and services. Research points out that consumers prefer podcast ads over other types of digital marketing.
Improve Customer Support Experience
Customer support is often a dreaded aspect of any business, but brands can use voice over services to make customer support a more enjoyable experience for their customers. Custom voice overs are a much better alternative to annoying and repetitive music or announcements and they can help keep your customers on the line for longer periods of time.
Instead of answering machines or holding messages, you can tap into voice overs for meaningful human connections and a better overall brand experience.
Brings More Shares
Companies can also consider posting translated videos on their websites to avoid costly and prohibitive limitations that accompany radio commercials or tv advertisements. This is also beneficial to consumers as there is no time limit to get through the content, allowing them to absorb the information at their own pace. This type of high-quality media is easily sharable and gives companies a competitive edge.
Cast Voice Over Talent with Allegro Media Design
Now that you have a better understanding of just how powerful voice over services can be, it’s time to implement voice over marketing in your organization. Our team at Allegro Media Design is seasoned in this area and we are happy to help you throughout every phase of your project. We offer cutting-edge, custom eLearning solutions to elevate your business and generate tangible results.
For additional information on our voice over services or to get started with the process, please contact our team today!