Avoiding Pitfalls: Tips for Effective Voiceover Usage in Business
Voiceovers have become one of the most effective and popular ways for businesses to connect with their target audiences. Turn on your smartphone or your computer, and within moments you’ll come across a seemingly endless stream of videos using voiceovers. Audiences love voiceovers. And businesses are beginning to fall in love with voiceovers too. But many businesses are still making basic mistakes with voiceovers.
Trends in Voiceover
According to the Marketing website Lemon Light, 99% of the respondents to a video marketing survey enjoy watching online video and voiceover content from different brands. And so, it looks like voiceovers related to video will continue to grow in popularity in the upcoming years.
Yet not all businesses know how to take full advantage of these trends. Many of them are still making basic mistakes when it comes to voiceovers. If your business is making these mistakes, there’s a strong likelihood you could be left behind.
The 5 Most Common Mistakes Businesses Make with Voiceover
Many businesses make mistakes with voiceover that tarnish their brands. Photo by Krakenimages on Unsplash.
Here are the 5 most common mistakes that businesses make when it comes to voiceovers.
1. They Choose Not to Hire a Trained Professional Voiceover
Many businesses believe that an effective way to cut costs is to use members of their staff or amateur voiceovers for their training videos, eLearning modules, video blogs, and social video marketing. But we all know what usually happens when you put a microphone in front of a regular person and ask them to read a text: the person freezes, stumbles through their sentences, reads the text in such a wooden fashion – filled with pauses – so that it’s painful for listeners.
A recent study found that one in four consumers loses interest in a company when it does not use videos for marketing. But nothing is more likely to make listeners switch off or just lose interest than text read by a bad voiceover narrator. It really isn’t a pleasant experience to listen to someone stumbling or hesitating over words.
A Professional Voiceover Offers Great ROI
Using a professional voice over for your business may seem too much of an expense. But when you do it right, it pays off. You’ll see a worthwhile return on your investment. When it comes to eLearning in particular, bad voiceovers don’t just sound bad, they can also have a negative impact on the learner’s or trainee’s learning experience. This is not an outcome you want.
If you want to create a quality audio-visual product, it’s essential for you to look for trained professional voiceover talents who have the skills to guide your audience and elevate the learning experience.
2. They Don’t Take the Time to Choose the Right Voice
As a business, it’s very important that you choose a voice that matches your brand and your target audience. There’s a good reason for you to do this: people generally like to get information from a voice that sounds like it could be that of one of their peers. And so, you should make sure that the voice and gender of the voiceover talent you choose is the right one for your listeners.
Make sure you take the time to choose the right voiceover talent. Photo by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash.
You Need to Listen to a Good Selection of Voices
In addition, you’ll also need to think about the area or region where your commercial will be shown. In some regions, people have distinctive accents, so this could be a factor.
When you go about choosing a voice over for your commercials, try to listen to a good selection of voice demos before deciding on the voice that you think will best suit your commercial.
You could begin, for instance, by listening to my demos.
3. THEY USE A DISTRACTING REGIONAL ACCENT
In an age when media is more open to regional accents than ever before, this might seem to be, on the face of it, a somewhat controversial point. English is renowned for the myriad of variations in pronunciation among its native speakers from different parts of the world.
But, as we saw in the previous point, when planning your marketing, you will need to consider the region where your commercial will be shown. In some regions, people have very distinctive accents, and this could be a factor in your audience’s reception of your commercial. An odd accent or what is perceived to be a mispronunciation could result in your viewers’ attention moving from your commercial’s message to the voice behind it.
However, when used appropriately, a distinctive regional accent can add charm to your commercial or give it a note of authenticity.
4. They Decide to go the DIY route
Online visual content is more popular than ever. More than 8.2 million blog posts are published every day, and there are countless ads featuring dancing or slideshows. With the average consumer spending about six hours and 37 minutes online daily, it’s not surprising that all this online activity has boosted the use of voiceovers. Short-form videos – in the form of video blogs or vlogs as well as social video marketing – continue to be popular.
The relative ease of creating video has prompted many companies to go the do-it-yourself route. While DIY videos certainly make sense for many brands, it’s still imperative that they deliver quality. As noted in point #1, a low-quality voiceover really sticks out in a negative way. A trained voiceover professional can contribute greatly to the production quality of your content. A quality voiceover can help transform a run-of-the-mill vlog, or social media video into a compelling piece of marketing content that perfectly speaks for and aligns with your business brand.
5. They Use a Badly Written Script
As mentioned in point #1, many consumers get turned off by a bad voiceover narrator. All listeners hear is a person reading a text, with no passion or inflection and with far too many pauses and stumbles. But nothing kills a voiceover production like a badly written script. Its message will sound overly complex, wordy, and meander all over the place. Or it could sound flat and unfeeling.
Just as a trained professional voiceover talent is ideal for your voiceover project, so also is a professional writer. A company simply cannot afford to stint on hiring a professional writer. When presenting commercials, explainers, or corporate videos, what matters most is telling a good story. A professional writer will know how to use tone, language, anecdotes, statistics, or any other storytelling device to help you communicate an emotion in your production.
the value of using a professional writer
A professional writer understands the importance of effectively communicating your brand voice. The writer will make it easy for your audience to form an emotional bond with your brand by positioning it as a helpful and approachable friend.
Your marketing content will likely feature visuals and audio, and the script will need to complement and also drive both of those arenas. The language in the voiceover needs to roll off the tongue and sound natural. The script and the voice that speaks that script represent you and your business. A professional voice over supported by a script written by a professional scriptwriter will help you win over your audiences and convert viewers into customers.