Hiring Voice Talent that fits Your Business Brand

As a start-up, the need to add a voice to digital marketing could vary when hiring voice talent. To be clear, a voice talent is essentially the voice of your business for videos, explainer or brand videos, for websites and social media, plus, radio and or TV commercials, voicemail, maybe audio demos – all possibilities. And, using a professional voice can be affordable, or cost prohibitive, depending upon at least three variables including script length and usage of recordings, plus, who you hire to complete the productions.

1. You can hire an ad or media agency, a video production company, or a marketing company to produce everything for you. The choices and price points are endless. However, if you hire the voice talent separately, you’ll save money and time!
2. The script length is both how many words are in the script and/or what the script will time out to when recorded. For example, 90 words equals 30 seconds, approximately. A voice talent can usually give you a quote or an estimate based on word count, knowing how long it will likely time out to. However,  some scripts are read unusually slow or fast, so it may time out differently.
3. Usage of recording means how the recording will be used and where. A 30 second TV commercial broadcast in the Toronto market costs significantly more than a 30 second narration that will go on your website. The exposure of the recording is taken into consideration when a voice talent quotes a script. Radio and TV rates differ dramatically. And now, a YouTube commercial, which is technically called non-broadcast, is billed at yet a different rate. (These are generally called Pre-Roll spots.)

Further considerations for rates are script revisions, technical or medical terms…those things the voice talent should bring up, if and when necessary.

How long will the whole process take? For “turnaround”, it is very common to have a script recorded and delivered in 1-48 hours, depending how long the script is, when it is submitted, and who you are submitting it to. If you hire a voice talent directly, turnaround is approx. 1-48 hrs. If you hire a video production company, who then hires talent, the voiceover may take a bit longer. If you hire an ad agency, they will hire a production company and the voice talent, and this all adds more time to the process.

Please let me know if you have any more questions about hiring talent. Advice is always free, isn’t it?!