Content marketing: making your brand heard

Armin Hierstetter tells how voice overs increase the impact of your content marketing.

Research suggests that adding video content is a vital ingredient to a business’ online content marketing efforts. But when it comes to turning visitors into potential buyers and finally into customers, clips often lack an affordable yet powerful spice: a great voice.

Need some convincing? Here are some facts about online videos: By 2018, videos will account for 79 per cent of total consumer internet traffic. Combine this with Unbounce’s and Forrester’s findings that conversion rates of emails including a video increase by 200-300 per cent while videos on homepages increase conversion by 80 per cent and you jump to the conclusion easily:

You will want to add videos to your marketing mix.

Although this looks like a ‘no brainer’, a study by Kantar Media suggests that only one in four brands use video to market to their customers. And that’s just where the trouble begins: While it used to be enough to have some fancy animation along with on screen keywords explaining your products or services, today’s viewers are much more demanding when it comes to spending their time with your content: The buzz word is: story telling – you not only need to capture your customer’s attention using strong visuals, you need a strong, relevant voice, too. That catches them, takes them by the hand and leads them to wherever you want them to go: posting a comment, making a phone call or clicking/swiping onwards to make a purchase.

It is surprising that something as natural as a human’s voice is used relatively rarely in marketing content. I think I know the major reason for this: people think it’s too much of a hassle and cost to source and add a great voice over to web clips. At the same time they tend to underestimate the impact of a voice actor.

An example of surprising content marketing:

Imagine you wanted to spice up an existing two minutes image clip for your company’s homepage with a voice over describing the core values of your business. You could be looking at a price tag of about £200-300 for the finished audio. If you run a test, posting the clip on your site for a couple of weeks and compare the metrics compared to the silent/amateur voice over, you will be able to measure the impact of voice on your video content.

And while people familiar with voice overs would find this price pretty acceptable, a marketing novice or someone with no experience of using voice is likely to respond to the price tag in the following way ‘that’s a great way to earn a living just for talking!’.

In all fairness: It’s a bit more than talking. Professional voice actors bring years of training and experience on how to deliver your message in exactly the tonality you consider appropriate. They can follow directions and change their delivery from ‘hard sell’ to ‘confident’ to ‘believable’ to ‘conversational’ in a split second. It is not only a jaw dropping experience to listen to a voice pro in action – it shows you what separates the pros from the amateurs.

While you might often think about describing your company’s brand in terms of a colour, an animal or even the feeling you would like it to evoke with your customers, trying to ascribe an aural description is a challenge and to then get someone to express this vocally is harder still.

As a side note: Ten to 20 years ago, you would have paid a lot more for voice recordings. Whereas, back then, you would have to go through specialised agencies and audio studios to get voice jobs done, today the internet offers tools that help you in finding the perfect voice over talent without paying for overheads. At the same time, more and more voice over talents have their own professional recording studios, thus further contributing to reduced overheads.

While dozens of studies have proven that video content helps you achieve your marketing goals, you can significantly increase the impact of your clips by adding a relevant, professional voice over to them.

It is vitally important that you avoid using amateurs or cutting corners and think that you can just use your phone and upload a clip. Because, inasmuchas a professional will increase the impact of your marketing materials, an amateur will have the reverse effect.