Everyone loves a bargain, right? But do bargains sometimes end up costing us more?
A small Waitrose has just opened at our local petrol station and they sent me a lovely voucher: £5 off when I spent £15. Sounds great! I LOVE vouchers. I also needed petrol, so off I went to fill up.
Now I know Waitrose can be a teeny bit more expensive than other supermarkets, but – well, I wasn’t quite prepared for the petrol station mark up… Still, a fiver off fifteen quid, that’s a third. There has to be something within this miniature version of the store that I can use this voucher on.
I actually wasted about 10 minutes of my lunch break going up and down the aisles, frantically doing maths in my head and looking for fifteen pounds worth of things I didn’t really need, simply to use the voucher before it expired. In the end I concluded that it was taking more time than it was worth. Perhaps I would come back later in the week when I actually NEEDED something particular. Or I could just shop in the big Waitrose in town at the weekend, and get the things I actually needed.
How does this relate to voiceover?
There are a ton of bargain voiceovers out there. People with home set ups just waiting to record your script and ping it back to you within the hour. It’s quick and it’s cheap, but is it a bargain? I suppose that depends on your perspective. On another day, with different needs, that £5 voucher might have been just what I needed. But I was so swayed by the idea of saving money, that logic went out of the window and I almost ended up with 10 boxes of chocolate jaffas.
So, if you love a bargain here are some things to think about when you are looking at the range prices charged by different Voice Artists:
- What’s included?
- Will you end up spending extra on an audio engineer to edit and tidy up the file?
- How much prep will they do to understand the purpose of your project, and get the right tone and feel?
- Can they connect with your intended audience or are they just going to read the words off a bit of paper?
- Will they ask relevant questions, and respond to your questions promptly?
- Will you waste your own time fiddling about with the audio, trimming and adjusting bits?
- Will you need to ask for (and perhaps pay for) a re-record because the read sounds flat or unnatural?
- Will you end up going to another, more expensive voice artist who has better overall sound quality and technical skills?
You can learn more about the costs of Voiceover work in this article about voiceover pricing
I have many good friends in the Voiceover industry, and always happy to recommend good folk if you need an accent or style that I can’t offer myself – feel free to get in touch!
Photo by Viki Mohamad on Unsplash
British Female Voiceover Artist 