Contributed by Gigi Vizon
Gigi Vizon is a writer, content creator, and digital marketer. She helps clients up their digital marketing strategy through her agency. When she’s not at work, you can find her at the neighborhood cafes, enjoying her matcha latte.
In order for your company to grow, you need to have a solid arsenal of marketing materials and execute various marketing tactics properly. One marketing tactic you may want to utilize highly is storytelling—a strategic marketing tool that offers a lot of benefits.
Storytelling itself is a fundamental part of being human. And the story reinforces the message. This means that the more we hear and read the stories, the more we connect and empathize with others. However, telling a story isn’t good enough. The story must be compelling—shown and said engagingly. It’s a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their target audience and achieve better business results. After all, just letting people read a bunch of text doesn’t do all that much—unless you have the best copywriters in the world.
So, what can you do to guarantee that your story will be impactful and exciting? Have a voiceover artist read it for you!
Commonly referred to as VOs, voiceovers can breathe life into your stories. Voiceover artists are highly trained, qualified, and skilled professionals who can convey your message impactfully and with intention. They’re a perfect fit to improve your storytelling.
In this article, we’ll look at the benefits of storytelling as a marketing tool and how voiceovers can help you take it to the next level.
1. Establish Your Brand Voice
If you’ve already done some marketing before for your brand, you know how essential colors, fonts, and logos are. These things get associated with your brand. And whenever people see these elements, they may think of your brand or be reminded of it. The same goes with a voiceover.
Sonic branding is the utilization of sound, music, and voices that enhance your brand. For example, you can get a specific voice associated with your company. When they hear it or anything similar, an image of your company may appear in their minds. In addition to voice, you can also associate your brand with sound effects and music.
Sonic branding helps ensure that your business is heard, on top of being seen. Sounds that perfectly align with your company’s purpose and values help give your brand identity greater depth. For instance, a study from The Voice Realm showed how the gender of the voiceover artist plays a role in conveying a brand’s message. For instance, some businesses may use a male voiceover artist to sound more authoritative or to target more male customers. Others may prefer a female voice over artist if they want to be perceived as friendly, approachable, or trustworthy.
Here are some examples:
- Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad has been asked to narrate a Mazda commercial. There, he narrated the story of a young man who undergoes multiple life stages, including driving and his car. His distinct voice helped convince the audience that driving matters.
- Julia Roberts’ ad for Nationwide also helped the insurance company secure more policyholders. Her confident, assuring voice drew people in and made them want to put safety first.
2. Target Your Audience Better
Voiceovers can make it easy for you to hook your target audience. According to an analysis, if your ad is related to education, healthcare, and child-care, you may want to hire women voice actors for the voiceover as they’re more effective at getting this kind of ad across to listeners.
Meanwhile, if your ad, company, or video stories are politics-related, you may want to hire a male voice artist to entice your target demographic. According to a study, 62.7% of political ads are voiced by males, and so far, those ads are considered effective.
Also, note that you don’t need only to use professional voice actors to get the job done. In some cases, it’s better to let actual experts be your brand’s voice and attract your target audience’s attention.
Here are a couple of examples:
- Apple has used Gary Greaves and Evans Hankey to do voiceovers for their AirPods Max product. Both of them are the top honchos in the company’s acoustics and industrial design department. While they aren’t really the best at voice acting, their words carry a lot of weight, which allows the target audience for the ad to believe them more and be curious about the product they’re advertising.
- Rashida Jones, best known for her roles in The Office and BlackAF, helped make Southwest Airlines’ rebranding efforts a success. Their ads brought in 151.7 million travelers in 2016.
3. Share More Memorable Stories
Storytelling is a powerful marketing tool; a story can easily make a brand memorable. For example, if you’re selling sports shoes, you can hire a voiceover artist to narrate how a professional basketball player wore your shoes and won games.
It’s a simple story, but it can convince people that with your shoes, they may have the chance also to achieve the same success. If you don’t know how powerful good voices can be at telling stories, think about the guy narrating old action movies.
Old action movie trailers are often introduced and narrated with a deep and rough voice. And even if the action movie is about something dumb, say two black male FBI agents’ crossdressing as two white, rich ladies, the deep and rough voice can make you think the movie is exciting and worth watching. And because of how it’s delivered, the trailer’s plot may stick in your mind, making you decide to watch it later.
4. Humanize Your Brand
Aside from making your company and story memorable, storytelling with a voiceover can humanize your brand and remove the coldness and sterileness of a business. It breaks down barriers and makes the connections a business makes much more personal. Also, it allows brands to spread their messages and ads easier, establish solid relationships with people, and let them be seen in a much better light.
Suppose you sell contact lenses. Without story or marketing materials, people would think of your brand as a nondescript store selling contact lenses. However, with a story, like giving contact lenses to poor kids in slums, people’s perception of your store immediately changes. Instead of just a store selling lenses, they may now perceive you as a store that gives and helps children with no financial strength to see the world more clearly.
A story told by a good voiceover artist can also help people understand your brand more. After hearing your narrative in the previous example, people will know that your company is socially responsible and not just out there to make money.
5. Elevate the Believability of Your Reviews
Companies tell their customers and leads one common story: ‘how their current customer base loves them.’ While showing the positive reviews you have collected about your company in a video could display how your customers perceive your company, it’s not enough.
To make a story like that effective, you may want to let voice actors read those reviews. While the actual reviewers aren’t really the ones who read their reviews in your video, voice actors can make your viewers think that they are.
Of course, letting voice actors impersonate your customers and read their reviews is a common industry practice. As long as the reviews exist, you can always just let your viewers go to those review sites where you got them to verify their validity.
6. Tell a More Personal Story
You can’t deny that reading stories from companies can have an impersonal feeling to it. A voiceover can change that. However, the last thing you have to do is to try and slap in a robotic AI voice on your video or advertising materials just because you want to save a few bucks. It only makes the script sound colder and more impersonal. And it’s just outright weird to hear a text-to-speech bot.
With a human voice, your story can sound more personal. People can easily relate to it if an actual person tells it because they can produce the right and natural inflections in their sentences.
Aside from that, if your stories involve a lot of statistics and data, it would really do you good if you give it the voiceover treatment. After all, the last thing you want to happen to your target audience is to start snoozing when they see the numbers. It’ll be better if someone with an attractive and attention-grabbing voice can tell all that data without your viewers or listeners tapping out fast.
Below are a couple of examples:
- Leslie Mann’s did the voiceover for a series of ads called “Mom Confessions” for LG Appliances. She hilariously described the pains and struggles of being an adult and a mother. The humorous angle and the relatability of the Mann’s stories helped the brand connect with more customers.
- Julianna Margulies lent her voice to ads for Pampers, a well-known diaper brand. Her friendly voice and the fact that she is a mother herself, helped the brand make an emotional connection with the audience.
Conclusion
Those are the ways voiceovers can elevate your marketing and brand storytelling. As you have read in this article, you know how powerful storytelling can be a marketing tool for your business and brand. And if you utilize it and ensure that a good voiceover actor will work on it, you know very well that it will have many positive effects on your company’s marketing campaign.
Thankfully, voiceover artists have become easier to find nowadays. Some can be found on freelance job listing websites, while others can easily be found on search engines.