Hiring a Voice Actor for your Business

When you hire a voice actor for any aspect of your business, the actor becomes the voice of your business. Whether for marketing, explainer or product videos, for websites and social media, radio and TV commercials, voicemail, they represent your brand.

Hiring a voice can be affordable, or cost prohibitive…

…depending upon at least three variables including who you hire to produce a project, the script lengths, and the usage of recordings.

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. They will in turn, hire talent for you. However, if YOU hire the voice talent independently, you’ll save time and money. You will avoid the extra cost of intermediaries and the time it will take for them to find the voice.
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 the recording will likely be. 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 for your website. The exposure of the recording is considered 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 called Pre-Roll spots.)

Further considerations for rates are the amount of script revisions, matching voice to video, pronouncing technical or medical terms…

How long will the whole process of receiving a voice file take?

“Turnaround” is generally 1-48 hours, depending how long the script is, when it is submitted, and to whom you submit. Hire a voice talent directly and turnaround can be under 48 hrs. If you hire a video production company, who then hires talent, the voice-over 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.

Questions? Contact me by email or social media and I’ll answer asap! @Natasha_VOX