Choosing the right voice actor for your explainer videos is key to engaging your audience.
What you say and how you say it will determine the appeal and success of the explainer video. So, choosing the right narrator voice is one of the most important decisions you’ll make in the creative process.
The perfect voice can help simplify complex information, maintain viewer interest and help craft your brand’s personality.
Here we provide you with 3 important tips to consider when choosing the best voice over artist for your explainer video, all with the aim of bringing the audience closer to the message you want to convey.
1. Who is the audience?
Knowing your audience is critical, but many explainer videos fail to identify who they’re talking to specifically.
This is because they make the mistake of trying to catch everyone – the moment you speak to the world, you speak to no one.
Here’s some points to bear in mind:
- Gender – does the audience ratio lean toward male or female?
- Age – what is the general age range of the audience?
- Income – what disposable income do they have?
- Education – what kind of education or equivalent skills and jobs do they have?
- Location – is your audience local, national, multi-national, continental or global?
For example, a London based therapist commissioning an explainer about her anxiety treatments may answer as follows:
- Female
- 40s+
- Mid-level income
- Degree level in a professional services job
- Local audience in London
Whatever your audience demographic, you ought to know the age, ethnicity, education level, and any other key factors.
This prep work allows you to be much more prescriptive when choosing a voice actor to ensure you build an emotional bond with your audience – as they watch.
2. What question are you answering?
Great work, so you’ve got your audience demographic sorted. Now you need to think about the question your explainer video answers.
If you’ve already written the script, this should be easy, but if you’re still undecided about the approach, we recommend using Google’s keyword planner it will help you to identify the top searches in your categories.
Once you have a few ideas, do searches using the keywords and review the results. Are they any good? If they are – great! It’s fine to use your competitor’s ideas as a benchmark but you should really seek to improve them in a BIG way.
But we digress, we’re not trying to teach you video production but we can say with certainty that the question should always be the critical driver when you’re casting the right voice artist.
3. How do you want to be perceived?
It’s not what you say, but how you say it- this common saying is particularly important for any web explainer voice-over.
How you say something triggers an emotional connection with the listener. People can even hear if you’re smiling – it’s true! – a study found that a smile in speech is perceivable. The pattern has yet to be identified but whilst smiling, vowels are produced with the mouth a little bit less opened and with the lips a little bit more stretched to the sides.
Smiling alters the acoustic properties of the vowels and rhythm of the speech. It’s subtle, but people can hear it. And the same applies to other emotions. Mind blown!
When you’re selecting the voice-over artist, choose the tone that evokes the appropriate emotion in the listener.
The best tones for explainers
| TONE | AUDIENCE PERCEPTION | LISTEN |
| Authoritative | A knowledgeable teacher | Authoritative Voices |
| Comedic | A comedian or character | Comedic Voices |
| Conversational | A friend giving advice | Conversational Voices |
| Enticing | A sensual stranger | Enticing Voices |
| Inspiring | A coach or motivator | Inspiring Voices |
| Nurturing | A mother, father or older relative | Nurturing Voices |
| Playful | A young happy friend | Playful Voices |
| Sad | A distressed relative | Sad Voices |
And let’s not forget native accents. People associate specific regional accents with different levels of knowledge and friendliness. For example, in the UK, an Irish, Northern English or Scottish accent are renowned for their friendly and approachable qualities whilst a London accent will appeal more to a trendy and fashionable audience.
Conclusion
Choose a voice that sounds like the real deal and increases the value of your material. Your beautifully animated explainer video will be quickly relegated to irrelevance if the voice over sounds like it’s been recorded in a tin can or the speech is inaudible.
Unlike many voice-over agencies, Voquent has a fully dedicated team to support your casting and recording of voiceovers for explainer videos. Our service is offered with no hidden charges and we’ll consult with you every step of the way to ensure you end up with the highest quality voice over for your project.
Our aim is to exceed your expectations and help you to blow the socks off your audience, wherever they are!
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