According to a recent study, 72% of customers prefer to learn about a product or service through video. With video emerging as one of the most popular media forms and podcasting exploding in the last couple of years, ensuring your voiceovers are performed by native-speaking voiceover artists is the best way to maximise the benefits of video and voice marketing on an international scale.
How does voiceover work?
Specific voices for specific audiences
If your target demographic is young adults, having a young adult voice talk over your videos will resonate and engage more with your target demographic. A specific audience might also mean a particular region within a country. Utilising voice actors with regional accents or dialects is the best way to engage with that particular customer base, much more so than if the voice remained in English for an international audience.
Multilingual audiences
According to the CSA (Common Sense Advisory), 76% of customers prefer to buy a product in their own language. Localising your voiceover is another way of reaching out to your international customers and ensuring they understand your message. This in turn builds trust. The more trust your customers have in you and your business, the more likely they are to buy your products or services.
Voiceover script
If you don’t have a script readily available, then native-speaking transcribers are a cost-effective way of generating your script. The script can then be translated, ready to be recorded by your preferred voiceover artist.
Professionally speaking
Whether you go down the professional recording studio route or simply use a smartphone or laptop with recording software, will depend both on your budget and the level of quality required. Both work equally well depending on your requirements, and a good localisation partner will be able to advise which will work best for your purposes.
Language Expansion
One of the challenges of adding voiceover to an existing video is when the target language voice requires more run time than the original. Spanish, for example, will often “expand” by up to 25% compared to English. However, this can easily be solved using clever editing and working with timed scripts to make sure the voiceover syncs with the on-screen action.
What’s the benefit of having multilingual voiceover?
Communication between you and your customers, both potential and existing, is vital for any business. However, ensuring that you communicate clearly with your employees and teams is also important. So, what are the benefits?
YouTube and Social Media
Placing your content on social platforms gives potentially millions of people the opportunity to view or listen to your content. Using multilingual voiceover to localise your audio content gives you access to potentially millions more customers globally. Having content in a customer’s native language also builds trust in your brand, making them more likely to purchase your product or service. In fact, a recent study confirmed that 93% of businesses say they acquired a new customer from a video on social media. It’s also possible to optimise YouTube videos for search through the use of video tags and content optimisation techniques. Once you factor this in across international markets, YouTube has the potential to be a powerful tool in your marketing toolkit.
Employee Engagement
In a recent study, 33% of the study’s survey respondents reported an increase in the use of e-learning content and online training due to the recent number of employees working from home. Ensuring your international staff engage with your training content these days increasingly relies on ensuring all content is localised, including any voice content.
By taking the time to localise your voice content, you not only promote employee engagement, but you also demonstrate that as a business, you also care about their individual needs. This extra detail can really help to motivate and inspire your workforce, so is definitely worth considering.
Podcasts
There’s no doubt that the popularity of podcasts is growing. Podcast listenership in the UK has been increasing year-on-year, reaching an estimated 15.6m listeners in 2020. 28% of Americans listen to a podcast on a weekly basis. That’s approximately 80 million people. For this reason alone, more companies are now choosing to communicate their marketing message through podcasts, and at an international level, it’s clear that this popular medium can be a hugely effective way of reaching global customers.
Podcasts provide numerous benefits:
- Cost-effective – Cheaper than videos or articles. All you need is a microphone or two, recording equipment and a host.
- Accessibility – They give access to potential customers and Office workers and long commuters haven’t necessarily got the time to read an article. However, they can listen to a podcast during that long journey or whilst working.
- Community – Speaking of consumers: having a weekly or fortnightly podcast will build an audience of listeners who will not only be interested in what you have to say but also in your products or services, thus helping to drive traffic to your website.
- Optimisation – Podcasts are optimised for voice search through most major podcast providers, including Spotify and Apple. It is estimated that by 2025, 130 million Amazon Echo units will have been sold. That’s a large market that goes hand-in-hand with podcasts and would provide great exposure for your business.
- SEO – In 2019, Google began to index individual podcast episodes meaning your podcast can be included in search results. Also, having a podcast attached to your business improves your domain authority, giving you a better chance of a higher ranking.
In summary, there are huge benefits to adding multilingual voiceover to your international video content, from employee engagement to building trust in your brand. And as podcasts seem to be with us for the foreseeable future, now is a good time to consider adding multilingual podcasts to your marketing activities.
If you’re interested in finding out more get in touch with the ALM team today!
