One of the least used but most effective and economical marketing tools a
website business has at its disposal is signature voice-over, or Sonic
Personality. It establishes your identity and embeds your brand by giving your
site a human voice.
It is the sound of the human voice that conveys all the subtlety and nuance of
the message you have to deliver. Major advertisers use familiar sounding actors
and actresses to deliver personality and impact. Even when an audience doesn't
recognize the voice being used, the positive attributes associated with that
voice are transferred to the product or service being offered. It is not by
random choice that Ford Motor Company chose Keifer Sutherland's Jack Bauer sonic
personae for the voice of their television spots or that Chili's restaurants now
employs John Corbett's comfortable, friendly, 'Sex and The City' voice instead
of the previously grating and irritable sound of comic Wanda Sikes.
Most website businesses or bloggers cannot afford to hire Hollywood
talent to pitch their products. What is important is that the voice you choose
is a signature voice, a distinctive sound that delivers the script with
character and style employing timber, cadence, and phrasing like only a
professional voice actor can do. Of course, you must also give your voice talent
the right words to say, which means you provide them with a professionally
written script if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your signature
voice-over.
When we think of voice-overs we usually think of commercial presentations, but
here again most website businesses truly miss the boat when it comes to
utilizing Sonic Personality. We all know that text on your website is important
in order to attract search engine indexing, unfortunately from a marketing
effectiveness point-of-view, text alone lacks impact.
People are impatient and generally do not want to read volumes of text
information, and besides, most people find it difficult to read on a computer
screen. Even if they do read your material, how much of it is retained, is it
associated with your company, or does it just get confused with all the other
stuff people see during their busy, business day?
As a solution why not turn all your website copy, including articles, into audio
delivered by a professional signature voice, providing people the option of
reading the text or sitting back and listening to your words of wisdom?
Voice-over is not the only audio method available to the savvy website marketer.
You wouldn't write something without using punctuation: it's what makes the
words meaningful by providing the cadence necessary for maximizing the impact,
but punctuation does not have to be limited to periods, exclamation marks and
semicolons. Punctuation can be added in the form of sound cues and audio
effects.
Professional audio engineers know what kind of sound to add to a
presentation in order to draw people's attention to certain key phrases, words,
or points. In the same way a composer arranges the music score for a movie to
enhance mood and build excitement, so too does the commercial audio producer
turn a dry read into an authentic, memorable experience.
Sound punctuation and audio effects should not be taken lightly; audio sound
design, when done properly, is one of the most complex and technical areas of
multimedia, far more sophisticated than video and just as important if not more
so. Where and how to use trumpet swells, rim shots, and volume variance is not
just art, it's science, and it has a profound psychological and emotional effect
on the listener.
If voice-over is the most under-utilized Web-marketing tool we have, then music
is probably the most abused. No doubt music like sound design is an enormously
powerful method of enhancing mood, and drawing attention to specific points and
images. Unfortunately slapping on an over-used royalty-free sound loop that's
been used on everything from breakfast cereals to incontinence products is not
the answer.
For music to be effective it should be unique enough to be associated with your
company and arranged in such a way that it increases the presentation's thoughts
and enhances its experience. In the silent movie era music was the only method
of creating this kind of emotional impact, and despite today's full range of
visual presentation techniques and special effects, music scoring is still one
of the most crucial elements of memorable movie-making.
In today's multimedia Web environment, your sound logo is every bit as important
as your visual identity.
