Your Brand, Your Voice – Personalized Feel in Your Audio

For starters, you will want to choose a voice that matches well with your company’s identity. Whether you need a voice for longer onhold messages or for shorter call center recordings that will address customers with active questions and concerns and direct them where they need to go, you first have to decide what kind of personality you want to present to your customers.

Do you want to communicate steady, unwavering professionalism? Or is it in your brand interest to convey more energy, more pep?

The audio industry has been trending more towards personalization for a while now, and especially in the last couple of years, we’ve seen a marked rise in customers who want their call center greetings and onhold messages to feel more off-the-cuff versus monotonous and atonal. Businesses increasingly optimize creating a friendly atmosphere, but that’s not right for every organization, as we will discuss in just a moment.

Whatever works best for you and your organization, be sure to communicate those needs clearly before the recording takes place. Professional voiceover talent can hit whatever tonal target you desire, but first, you need to be clear on where they need to aim.

Make the Message Match

For many of the businesses that use our services, when they ask for more personalized sound, that means they are looking for a voice that is vibrant, energetic, with a youthful feel. Many of these messages and prompts are devoted to conveying enthusiasm and excitement. Even if the auto attendant greeting is one about a weather closure or regular hours, our clients want their clients to be met with a voice that is bright and endearing.

But that’s not always the case. We have other clients who instead wish to place the emphasis on their authority and longstanding reputation within a given field. These customers will ask for voices that skew older and possess a bit more gravitas. Many of our clients in the healthcare space prefer voices that are calming and project tranquility and ease.

This sort of specificity can be narrowed down not only from company to company but from message to message. The recording used to reassure a customer who has been on hold for an extended period of time should perhaps strike a different tenor than the one that is excitedly greeting a new caller.

One of our recurring customers for a number of years was a children’s hospital using voice recordings for announcements and notifications to patient families. The regular voice talent for this client always made a point of softening her voice as much as possible, with the intuitive understanding that anyone currently using the services of a children’s hospital can use all the comfort they can get.

Know Your Message

Your greetings and messages are a major part of your company’s brand, so your objective should not just be finding a professional voiceover talent to record your voice prompts and messages. Your objective should be to understand what message you wish to send, and craft an audio experience that reflects the image you are trying to convey to your customers, your partners, and your own employees.

If you establish a clear vision for what that message should be, and partner with established professionals who will work with you to get exactly the sound you envision, there is no reason why your audio can’t embody all the best qualities of your business.

Contact us today and we’ll be happy to discuss how we might better create a personalized feel in your audio.

The post Tailoring Your Audio’s Tone appeared first on Marketing Messages.

You.

All our audio efforts mean nothing if there is no one there to hear them. Working with our clients to produce the best professional voice recordings possible is not just our job, it’s our pleasure. There is nothing more satisfying than working hard at every stage from writing to recording to editing and being told by the customer that the final product sounded even better than they had imagined.

So, from the bottom of our collective heart, the staff at Marketing Messages wish to thank each and every one of our clients for a great year. Now I’m going to turn the mike over to some of the other staff members:

Josh Blood, Creative Director
One of my roles at Marketing Messages is Audio Editor. I deliver finished voice prompts and Messages-On-Hold productions that are loaded to our customers’ phone systems. After digital delivery, it’s always great to receive a thank you from our customers. Even better is a note back saying they’ve reviewed the audio and it all checks out. Taking time to slow down and verify the audio on their end conveys an engaged customer that cares about their part in the process and wants to do their best work.

On the rare occasion that there is an issue with a particular voice prompt or on-hold production, I always appreciate receiving that feedback soon after I deliver the job. That quick feedback tells me our customer anticipated the audio and chose to listen to it straight away. I take the feedback and immediately solve the issue – whether it requires an edit or a “pickup” request to the Marketing Messages Voice Artist.

I thank our customers for their conscientious audits and their quick feedback when it comes to our work. Here’s to 2023, a year filled with pristine audio, a tiny error rate percentage, and fast fixes for future voice recordings that require them.

Dan Nelson, Technical Director
Last year certainly had its ups and downs, but overall I feel overwhelmingly blessed to have had the opportunity to work with so many warm and wonderful customers.

We’ve all had numerous experiences with delays. In our case often a voice talent would be unable to record for a week or more due to illness. Everyone involved became agile and helpful. We’d find an alternative voice as a placeholder, get the job delivered on time and then loop back around later with a fresh recording when our voice talent was back in action.

Each encounter like that last year made me thankful for our clients enduring patience with the process. And we were able to adjust to meet their surprising needs as well.

With each natural disaster there are often utility outages. We record so many messages after these events, often expedited, and this leads me to my next bit of gratitude:

Thank you to all of our wonderful Voice Artists! (I know, first I write “talent,” then later “artist,” but that’s only because they’re all both. Our voices represent a cultivated set of talented artists. You’re a solid group of everyday heroes that make our lives easier through your professionalism, efficiency, accuracy, and timeliness. We couldn’t provide professionally recorded voice prompts, auto-attendant greetings, onhold messages, narration, and e-learning audio without each and every one of you. I’ve worked with some of you for 25 years now and dang it, y’all feel like family.

Goodbye 2022, hello 2023! Let’s see what we can do together this year.

Onwards and Upwards
None of us know precisely what 2023 will hold in store, but Marketing Messages is excited to face each fresh obstacle and opportunity alongside our clients, no matter what future voice recordings they will need.

Whether you’re a brand new client or an old friend who knows and trusts Marketing Messages implicitly, we’re so grateful to be of service for all your audio needs, last year, this year, and all the years to come.

The post A Thank You from Our Team appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Reevaluate Your Audio – Practical Considerations

One simple reason why it might be worth revisiting your customer-facing audio during the holiday season is really quite obvious: Your company or store’s hours of operation might be different, especially during the weeks of Christmas and New Year’s. There may be days where the office is opening or closing later or earlier than usual, or operating with small staff with limited availability, not to mention those days when the office is fully shut down in observance of the holiday.

Having this updated information readily available whenever someone calls and gets an onhold message or an auto attendant greeting helps customers and partners plan their communication in advance, and it’s also one less thing to worry about during your own holiday season. You don’t have to concern yourself with customers sitting on hold all day or all evening.

Also, if you live in an area that gets a lot of winter weather, the holiday season marks the start of a period where snow and storms and bitter cold may start to impact hours and availability. It is a good idea to have audio at the ready that you can deploy to let anyone who calls know that the office is closing early or working short-staffed.

Season’s Greetings

Beyond these practical concerns, giving your customer-facing recordings a seasonal touch-up is a great way to connect with customers. Update the music to something Christmas-themed, throw some “Ho Ho Ho”s into your script. This is a time of year when we are all encouraged to spread good cheer and embrace feelings of warmth and community, and even something as simple as an onhold message can be a part of that.
And if you have year-end deals and offers, these holiday messages are a great way to promote them to your existing client base. Why expend effort on email or online campaigns when you can just update your messages so that anyone who calls in for any reason can hear what you’re offering to close out 2022.

Act Now!

The holiday season doesn’t last long, and before you know it 2023 will be in full swing.

If you want to reevaluate your audio and give things a festive spin, or an end-of-year update, now is the time to act.

Give us a ring or shoot us an email, and Marketing Messages will be happy to do our part in making sure 2022 ends on a good note.

The post Make Your Voice Messages Merry This Holiday Season appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Why Change?

Look, if your company continues to do outstanding numbers and get positive reactions from the majority of your ever-expanding client base, then enjoy your success and keep on trucking.

But I think most companies, in any field, can look back on any given year and identify things they wish they’d done better, areas they wish to improve on, and opportunities they wish they had been able to seize. For companies seeking to continuously improve, change is an important element of growth.

The most obvious benefit to refreshing your brand with new material (whether that be on your website, your social media, or your onhold messages and other voice prompts) is tacitly proving to your customers that you still exist and are still active. Post-pandemic, numerous companies folded entirely or reduced their hours and capabilities.

I know that when I am looking up a client or partner, the first and most telling tip-off that they have gone out of business is if their customer-facing material is old and static. If a website looks like it hasn’t been updated in years, or if their recordings are of terrible quality or totally out-of-date (i.e., a message-on-hold detailing a company’s Christmas hours…still active in July), it communicates that either no one is around to make any changes…or no one actually cares.

What Major Role in Rebranding Efforts Should You Make?

To be clear, ‘rebranding’ doesn’t have to mean some huge expensive campaign during which you change everything about your business or how you operate. When it comes to voiceover recordings, ‘rebranding’ can simply mean choosing a new voiceover talent.

Have you previously used a male talent? Try a female one. Usually use a female talent? Try a male one.

Have you previously preferred a voice that sounds older and more authoritative? Maybe go with one that’s younger, with an emphasis on energy and enthusiasm.

The new year might be a great time to experiment with conversational scripting and create a more informal and personalized caller experience.

Beyond any one specific change, being creative and forward-thinking with changing up your branding reminds customers and partners alike that you are active, you are proactive, and you are not satisfied with staying put and getting stagnant.

Let Us Help

If you are looking to make some changes in the new year, voice prompts and onhold messages can play a major role in rebranding efforts. Conversational scripting is becoming more and more popular, so by all means get in touch with us today for a free guide in writing a more informal script.

With whatever audio effort you’re attempting, Marketing Messages is here to help this year, next year, or whenever you need.

The post Thinking About Rebranding in the New Year? appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Passing Praise Around

But we did not come here to brag…

Well, not entirely. But we’ll brag just a little bit. Compliments like the one this customer provided mean a great deal to us here at Marketing Messages, as we really do prize the customer’s satisfaction, above all else. This praise really speaks to the whole organization, from the accurate and timely script, to the proofing and validating process, through to the great audio editing, and the overall administrative efficiency and accuracy. And, most obviously, it speaks to the skill and efforts brought to bear by the wonderful voiceover talent who turn in such exemplary work, day after day.

What Your Recordings Say About You

But we’re not here to brag! No, instead let’s talk about the other major element of this customer’s comment: That in doing surveys of their brand, they discovered that their customer-facing voiceover recordings were a surprisingly large factor, and the excellence of those recordings (fine, we’re bragging a little bit more) had a major influence on their customers.

We’re always trying to impress this point upon our clients and prospective clients, and this customer’s survey results serve as an affirmation to that point.

And you don’t have to take it from us. A recent Forbes article states, “Through a set brand voice and tone, your audience can get to know and understand your brand, as you create a dialogue.”

That article goes on to state: “It is the chance for business leaders to express their brands’ unique persona and seamlessly build up relationships with the audience… Particularly during the introduction stage, customers instinctively recognize the way they are addressed and spoken to, which then significantly impacts their entire view of a brand.”

Communicating Company Identity – What You Want Others to Hear

The question now becomes, how do you determine what voice will go well with the brand you are trying to communicate to your customers?

A 2016 study by the Norman Nielsen Group determined that, “there are indeed measurable effects of tone of voice on users, specifically on users’ impressions of an organization’s friendliness, trustworthiness, and desirability.”

So, what tone are you trying to strike with your onhold messages or other customer-facing recordings? Do you wish to be seen as youthful, friendly, and energetic? Or are you looking to be viewed as authoritative and experienced? Do you wish to excite your callers, or reassure them? Are you looking to educate your audience, or keep them entertained while they wait?

These are all totally valid approaches, and we’ve seen companies across dozens of fields take different attitudes towards what they want their professional voice recordings to do. There’s not necessarily a wrong way to go about communicating a company’s identity as long as you know what identity it is you want to communicate.

Let’s Hear from You

We’ll be happy to help you determine what voice goes best with the message you are trying to send. We have dozens of voice talents to choose from, so feel free to check out our library containing audio samples alongside descriptions of each talent’s immediate qualities.

Get in touch with us today, and let’s start the conversation about how you can use professional voice recordings to truly tell people who you are.

The post The Best Voice for the Best Brand appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Shortcut Pitfalls

Part of any successful project is, from the start, acknowledging the things you do not know and making an effort to either close those gaps in your knowledge or at the very least to engage people and services who have a proven track record, and trusting them to help you.

This is a long way around to reiterating a stance that we have repeated ad nauseum: Do not think that you can just plug your text into Google Translate or some other free service and it will spit out coherent translations. Do not think that you can just have a co-worker who took a couple years of Spanish in high school record your self-produced translation and that this will in any way meet professional qualities of sound and coherence.

These shortcuts may result in complete auto attendant prompts, IVR prompts, or on hold messages, but the recordings will be of pronounced lower quality, may very well prove to be unintelligible to native speakers of the languages you are attempting to address, and communicate only disregard and disinterest to your customers and partners. There is, simply, no substitute for putting in the time and effort to make sure voiceover recordings are not only done, but done right. And the best way to ensure that they are done right is to engage with professionals who have done this work before.

A Global Network for Voice Recordings – Multiple Languages

Here at Marketing Messages, we not only have our own decades of experience to bring to the table, but we in turn rely on a global network of translators and voice over talents to bring their own expertise to each project.

Whether we are discussing the intricacies of the numerous variations on the Chinese language, or determining which words and phrases should remain in English in a script, the value derived from this kind of personalized service with a local perspective is incalculable. And beyond the practical benefits of your messages and prompts sounding better, when this amount of attention is paid to things like IVR prompts, items which your competitors may dismiss as unimportant, it tells your global customers that you care about them, and that you will go the extra mile to be of service.

Marketing Messages has developed our network of global talents over decades, and we only work with proven, trustworthy voice talents and translators who are reliable and credible. And should a voice talent become unavailable, we have replacements and alternates ready to go, making us prepared for just about any request that comes through the door.

We Are Here to Help

Professional voice recordings in multiple languages are a complicated matter, especially if this is the first time that you have been charged with creating them. Maybe you have been moved to a new role in your company and recordings have suddenly fallen under your purview. Maybe your company has only recently begun to expand to global considerations and you are facing an audience and scope that your business has not had to face before. These projects can absolutely seem overwhelming and intimidating.

Marketing Messages is here to help. We have a wealth of experience across virtually every kind of audio recording project you can imagine, and a trusted network of professional talents that can handle dozens upon dozens of languages from across the globe.

So make your life easier and give us a call or shoot us an email today to talk about your multilanguage project. Put our expertise to your work.

The post Let Our Multilanguage Experience Benefit Your Company appeared first on Marketing Messages.

“Diacritical markings” are the accent marks attached to letters within a word that tell you how that letter should be pronounced. As an easy example, the dash above the “e” in the café tells you that the “e” should be read like “ay”, rather than being silent. Purée, flambé, pièce de resistance, déjà vu, these are all examples of diacritical marks and how they impact the pronunciation of a word. Also, a super-fun list of words to read aloud whilst doing an only somewhat offensive French accent. But now that we have a working understanding of what diacritical marks are, let’s talk about why professional voice talents love them and how to use them.

Pronunciation

It should go without saying that in the industry of professional voice recordings, it’s generally important to pronounce things correctly. It is in fact, arguably, the most important part of any professional voice recording.

We’ve spoken in the past about the various strategies we deploy to capture or represent difficult names that customers need to read in their voice prompts. While effective, these strategies can be time-consuming and do usually require a great deal of back and forth with the client to make sure that every syllable is written out exactly as it needs to be said. This process becomes exponentially more complicated when dealing with larger multi-language orders, as different languages have different relationships to letters and grammar.

Something that makes perfect sense to an English speaker may be completely baffling to a non-English speaker, and vice versa. Try as we might, there is no one all-purpose perfect way to guarantee that a voiceover talent will say every single word and name exactly right on the first try every time. But there are some simple tricks that can be a great deal of help.

This is where the word of the day comes in handy.

Professional Voice Talents Love Diacriticals

In episode three of our Voices Carry podcast, excellent voice artist Liz explains that diacritical markings are a huge help to her when she is looking at a pronouncer for a name or word she doesn’t immediately know.

This is especially true for bilingual voice talents who might be called in to complete a recording in French or a recording in Spanish along with their standard English work. While diacritical markings are not very common in English, they are regular features of Spanish and French and as such go a long way towards clarifying how a name should be read.

In Liz’s experience, using diacritical markings is a good, simple trick to ascertain the correct pronunciation of a particular name, and with her years voicing for both English and French across numerous industries, she’s certainly something of an expert.

The Easiest Way

But in Liz’s expert opinion (and in our own experience as well) the easiest, fastest, and most foolproof way to get across the correct pronunciation isn’t diacritical markings or exhaustive breakdowns of written-out syllables or any of our other tricks and processes.

Nope, the best and easiest way to go about it is for a customer to take out their phone, record themselves saying the name or word in question, and then simply email that short audio file to us so we can then provide it to the voice talent. With a direct, primary source to replicate, the professional voice talents now know exactly what is required of them and can get right to work recording.

Getting It Right

Whether you are putting together longer projects like onhold messages or voice narration, or shorter items like IVR prompts, your recordings are a major part of the identity that your company shows to the world, and it’s important to get them right. We take any number of approaches and strategies to verify the pronunciation of unfamiliar names and words, but ultimately there’s no substitute for simply taking ten seconds to record yourself and sending that audio down the line to the professionals.

If you’ve got a recording that you need to be crafted, contact us today!

The post Professional Voice Talents Love This One Simple Trick! (Hint, the Word Is Diacritical) appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Be Direct

Don’t be afraid to have a specific vision (or, I suppose, a specific ‘ear’) for how you want your recordings to sound. The reason you are using professional talent for your voice prompts and messages is so you can have the highest quality possible audio, delivered with the utmost reliability. As professionals, voice over talents are used to receiving directions and guidance, and are able to adjust their performances to fit whatever tone and pace is requested of them.

Direction and guidance are not frustrating. What’s actually frustrating is when clients know what they want but can’t or won’t give those specifics and instead force the creation of multiple iterations of the same script until finally the voice talent stumbles over the correct intonation. But good, clear direction is always not only welcome, but actively encouraged.

The key is knowing what you are recording and who you are recording it for. Are you putting together outbound IVR voice prompts meant to interact with actual customers? Are you creating contact center greetings that will be the first aspect of your company that a client or customer experiences? Or are you crafting an onhold message that a client may have to listen to on a loop for several minutes while they wait? Knowing what you want goes a long way towards helping you get what you need.

Capturing the Conversation

But how to go about communicating the tone, pace, and energy that you want?

One super easy approach that we like to take is to host a live recording session with the client, the talent, and the engineer. In this session the client can speak directly to the talent, coaching such aspects as pace, energy level, and tone, allowing us to really zero in on the ‘conversational’ tone that the project leads are looking for. Sometimes, that can mean making adjustments to the script as needed to make it flow better while sounding more casual.

And once we are all locked into the desired sound, future recording sessions won’t require the same level of hand-holding. The voice talent can reference the existing audio and know the correct pitch and intonation they need to hit to line up with what has come before.

If a live session isn’t an option (be it from calendar conflicts, time zone discrepancies, etc.) we have several sample documents which detail the above mentioned ‘specific direction’ that you can use as a starting point. We’ll also examine whether script refinement is an option (sometimes this is a simple as converting a ’we will’ into a ‘we’ll’).

You’d be surprised how the slightest of changes can alter the flow of a script and take text from formal to informal.

Conversational Scripting Part Two

For everything from lengthy hold messages to short IVR recordings, conversational scripting is the trend that we are seeing across all the various industries that utilize our services for their professional recordings. If you would like to start your own conversation with us on this subject, you can download our free PDF here.

The post Conversational Scripting Made Easy, Part Deux appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Our Customers’ Response

And our customers have made it clear that they appreciate all that effort and care that we put into every project. You don’t have to take our word for it, just check out our Google reviews page and you’ll see that Marketing Messages boasts a perfect 5 out of 5 rating and 40 different positive reviews from grateful customers.

These reviews cover a vast spectrum of different industries, but for our purposes let’s just focus on one. We do quite a bit of work for the transportation industry, and many different forms of transportation at that. Planes, trains, and automobiles…this is not just the name of Steve Martin’s best movie, they are all industries within the larger scope of ‘transportation’, and we have provided everything from call center voiceover to messages on hold to individual prompts.

High Quality Professional Audio Production

But again, you don’t just have to take our word for it.

Here is a shout out we received from the Montachusett Regional Transit Authority:

“The Marketing Messages team was fantastic to work with. They were responsive, thorough, and quick. The end product was fantastic. I highly recommend them.”

And here is a commendation we received from the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority:

“I have had the pleasure of working with Marketing Messages. The staff is very friendly and accommodating and the choice of voices and background music is vast. The quality of work they deliver is outstanding.”

Our Commitment to You

It is our business to always deliver a high-quality audio production to our customers, no matter the size of the production or the industry that a customer represents.

Over the years, we have made our reputation on quality professional audio production and the trust that our customers instill in us every time they submit a new order, and as such we are proud of every review that we have received that stands as a symbol of that trust being repaid through the final product.

Please take a moment to look over some of our reviews from across multiple industries, and call or email us today to start the conversation about how we can provide quality voice prompts for you and your business.

The post Learn About Us Through Our Customer Reviews in Transportation appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Why Is Conversational Scripting Growing in Popularity?

Conversational Scripting makes the voice the caller hears on the other end of the line more naturalistic and empathetic, and can result in better outcomes for the caller. Having this more humane approach also reflects positively on a company’s brand and allows a company greater opportunity to communicate the personality they wish to convey to customers and partners. It can be applied across all “voice enabled” applications.

For IVR systems used in a call center environment, conversational scripting helps connects the IVR prompts into a natural interaction in a way that ensures that problems are solved and information needs are seen to. And for onhold messages, it makes the words the caller hears sound less like a radio ad and more like advice from a reliable source or a good friend.

A company’s contact center greetings, IVR systems, and onhold messages are some of the areas where customers and partners will spend the majority of their time, and more and more customers and partners have made it clear that they want and expect a human experience even for these automated processes.

How Do You Create a Conversational Feel?

Great voice talents can deliberately speak in a more informal, conversational manner, but if the script itself is using very formal language, there’s only so much a voice talent can do to make it less so. There are any number of techniques that you can use to give your script for voiceover that extra little human touch.

You can use contractions to take the formality and stiffness out of messaging.

For example:

Before: We are sorry, but we cannot come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and we will call you back as soon as we are able.

After: We’re sorry, but we can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back as soon as we’re able.

You can also write your messages in such a way as to convey real empathy for your caller. Don’t just give them information, but actually try to put yourself in their shoes and be as communicative as possible.

Before: The office is currently closed. No one is available to take your call. Please try again later.

After: We’re sorry we’re not able to take your call right now. We’re currently in a regularly scheduled meeting, so no one can grab the phone at the moment. We should all be back by 2 PM, so please give us a call then!

Communicating With Your Voice Over Talents

If there is a specific tone, pace, or energy that you wish to convey through your professional voice recordings, the best and simplest way to get those results is to communicate those preferences to your voice talent. Trained, experienced voice talents know how to modulate their performance to suit whatever a script calls for. While the industry standard has long been crisp, clear, and somewhat monotonous, voice talents are capable of injecting whatever emotion you would like to hear into their performance.

At Marketing Messages, we encourage our clients to not only give specific instructions in terms of pitch and cadence, but to sit in on coached sessions or to utilize demo recordings. That way, everyone involved in production, from the customer to the voice to our production team, can be working together towards the same established goal and steadily and effectively dial the performance into the exact tempo and style that is desired.

Check Out Our Comprehensive Guide to Conversational Scripting Made Easy

For more on conversational scripting made easy, download our guide here. We’ll be more than happy to have that conversation (see what I did there?) about what you want your professional voice recordings to be.

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