An attention drawing headline, a catchy jingle, and a good script incorporated with an engaging and professional voice over recording - in today’s globalised world advertisements come in many shapes, sizes, and forms. Advertising helps your business grow by attracting new customers and helping you sell more products and services to existing customers. It can increase profitability, too, by helping increase order size. The many different forms of advertising used by companies fall broadly into the following categories:
- Radio Advertisements
- Television Advertisements
- Internet Advertisements
- In-Store Advertisements
- Print Advertisements
So why should you include advertising to your brand promotion activity?
- Generate Leads Better: Advertising has the power of filling your sales funnel and helping you get more leads for your sales force to follow up on.
- Increase Traffic: For brick and mortar businesses, advertising in newspapers, magazines, television and radio can get more customers in the door. For online businesses, advertising can attract people to a landing page where you can convert the visitor into a customer.
- Introduce Products: For software, tech or consumer manufacturing businesses, advertising can help launch products with a splash, by creating an instant buzz among potential customers.
- Highlight Product Enhancements; If your business has an existing product or service, advertising can make the public aware of improvements. Letting the public know about your innovation can boost sales.
- Improve Brand Awareness: Advertising keeps your business at the top of the minds of consumers so that they instantly identify with it when they require a service and thus, generate awareness about your brand..
- Publicize a Sale or Special Promotion: For any kind of retail business, advertising can make the public aware of a sale or promotion bringing in more customers in the process.
- Immediate Online Sales: For ecommerce businesses, advertising with pay-per-click ads can bring online sales almost immediately. A great advertisement generates curiosity and drives customers towards any business.
- Boost Brand Image: Great voice overs embody your brand, message and product- conveying the unique strengths of your offering. An advertising voice instantly attracts the listeners and creates an immediate and lasting impact.
Voice Overs in Advertisements: Whether in a subway, grocery store, shopping in arcades or while streaming music applications - one of the most influential parts of any advertisement is the voice you hear. Gone are the days when the visuals in a newspaper prompted customers to take a call to action! Today As more and more brands are using voice overs for ensuring a professional and relatable reputation with the audience, voice acting has become a requirement of almost every campaign. Marketing companies and brands these days are finding creative ways to attract and sustain clients through engaging voice overs. A high-quality, powerful voice adds life to any advertising image or video in a literal sense. As the technology is advancing and reaching new heights, there has been an increase in the demand of not only advertising but also animation, IVR, E-learning and video game voice overs.The life and spirit of this massive and rapidly expanding industry are professional voice actors who use their voices to connect with customers. The voice actor needs to be able to fit the tone of the brand as well as persuade and sell the product or service. Depending on the target market and demographic, the voice may sound like the guy next door, an educated professional or a fun and lively teenager.
The main job of an advertisement voice over professional is to promote and influence the audience so they experience professional advertisement voice over services. This can be anything from brand promotion to a luxury or cosmetic product advertisement. These advertisements may be broadcasted on the radio, on television, in podcasts, over the Internet or, more recently, through smartphone applications. From any household product, food, holiday or entertainment, a charismatic voice becomes synonymous with your brand, transforming it from just another name on the shelf to being as familiar and beloved to your customers.
So what is so attractive in the ‘voice’ element that companies are using voice overs in each advertising or marketing campaign?
- Humane Connection: Spoken word performances remind us that the written word is part of our daily lives. Whether we’re proofing an email for tone or providing a line read in a directed session, we’re interacting with text and finding ways to make it more interesting, meaningful and palatable to the audience meant to hear the message. That’s exactly what a voice-over is meant to do. As a consumer, people are more likely to buy something when they have an emotional tie to the product or service. Voice overs can help in adding a human touch by embodying the feeling of happiness, surprise or compassion in any video script, therefore successfully capturing an audience’s attention.
- Provide credibility: People develop a sense of trust in what they hear and voice overs are a great way to build that trust of the users with your brand. Native and professional voice over artists can build a positive aura of your brand by connecting with them and by attracting attention to a product or service by providing the right character and tone to the advertising message.
- Persuasive Power: A good voice over helps in creating a lasting image in the minds of the audience and encourages the listeners to take the intended action. Energetic and enthusiastic voices can guide and convince your listeners to believe everything your advertisement video depicts.
- Enliven Script : Using a conversational voice over can enliven the characters and reinforce the idea presented visually. An engaging and conversational voice that can mould into the character or script can help in portraying the intended feeling better. A voice that identifies with the brand can keep the audience hooked by the narration quality.
- Invoke underlying emotions: Incorporating right voice over tone and consistency of voice overs can provide authenticity to your brand and help to enliven any story or character. Voice overs create a unique and unforgettable audio as well as visual aid for users that help them to recognize a brand easily.
Hiring the right voice artist: The chosen advertisement voice over actor and script direction is the result of careful planning and decision-making on the part of the company, ad agency, or director. The actor is specifically selected to effectively reach the target audience most likely to be interested in buying the product or service.
So what are the qualities to look for in a professional voice actor for your advertisement project?
- Audio quality: It's tough to understand what an ad is conveying if the voice is not clear and crisp. The voice over narration must be of pristine quality and overall likeable by the listener.
- Technical details: There's a lot to voice overs than just 'voice'. The artist must be able to understand the tone of the script, the flow and modulations and voice inflection to deliver a quality voice over.
- Linguistic proficiency: The right pronunciation and enunciation abilities are essential while delivering any script. The artist must also know when and how to use accents and should be able to identify with the native audience.
- Script clarity: The confidence of presenting any product or service to the listeners can only be achieved if the voice artist understands the context and requirements of the script completely.
- Voice Acting: Some scripts may demand the voice actor to play multiple characters and the artist must be adept in doing character voice acting according to the needs of the advertisement.
Tips to record your advertisement yourself: If you have always believed that you have a naturally pleasing voice and can do voice overs by yourself, then fret no more! It basically takes practise and learning the technical skills to make a successful advertising voice over debut. But before you start, you must have an understanding of the recording equipment. Setting up your home studio to record a quality voice over requires the following equipment:
- Microphone
- Mic stand
- Headphones/Speakers
- Pop filter
- Recording software
- Software
- Find a good room: The room that you record in will have a big impact on the sound of your voice recording. Pick a room that has the most soft furnishings and isn’t particularly large or small.:
- Test the room: Now that you’ve decided on the room, check the room for echo and reverberation. Is your voice clear and intelligible, or mushy and hard to understand? If so, try placing some soft furnishings (like mattresses, duvets, pillows) in the room to lessen the effect of the hard surfaces.
- Set up your equipment: Put up your mic stand, attach your microphone and plug it in. If you have a USB microphone, plug it directly into your computer. If you have an audio interface, plus your microphone into it with an XLR cable and then connect the interface to your computer.
- Right microphone position: To get a good sound you need to experiment with microphone position and distance from your mouth. Hit record, and start talking with your mouth 5 inches from the microphone. Listen back to how it sounds. Practice with a few positions to find the right one.
- Prepare for the session: Before you go for your first take, mentally prepare for the voice session. Get your notes ready, and make sure they’re all there. Relax and keep a water bottle handy.
- Press record and… action! :Go for it! Record your first take. Give it all you’ve got. Depending on the length of your voice over, you could record in sections or do the whole thing.
While recording a voice over yourself can be an option, hiring a professional voice artist is always recommended as a quality voice over can enhance the overall reach of your advertisement. Seasoned voice artists can engage the listeners better and provide credibility to the narration. Voyzapp is a premium voice over company that hosts thousands of professional voice artists who can provide quality and cost effective voice overs in multiple languages and accents.
Remember, a professional voice-over actor can help to make your project shine, and reach a wider audience. Experienced voice actors can make a real difference to the effectiveness of your advertising video. Take the time to consider what you want that voice to represent and evaluate your options carefully.
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