With today’s crowded marketplace, a great business tagline has never been more important. Whether for a specific product or for your entire business, an effective tagline can work wonders for your company’s marketing. A tagline can succinctly convey a sense of your company’s ideas and ideals. It can help to define the image you want your company to project. Most importantly, it can help define your company and create a memorable take away for your customers.
Creating a memorable tagline is actually more difficult than it seems. That is why corporations pay advertising and marketing firms tens of thousands of dollars to craft the perfect tagline for their company. Below are some simple tips to help you formulate a tagline for your business.
Vomit
The process for creativity in the branding world is interesting. You must first engage in a process called “Creative Vomiting” where you get absolutely everything out. The bad, the ridiculous, the funny, the obscene, the decent… all of it should go down on paper. Then toss it into the trash and start again. It’s not until you dig deep and keep pushing yourself do you get to the really good stuff.
Simplify
Some companies jam their tagline with so many words that it becomes a manifesto snooze-o describing everything the business does, stands for and hopes to accomplish. Think of your tagline like words on a billboard-The shorter the better. It’s hard to read and recall a ton of words that you see while doing 70 on the interstate.
Focus
Unless you have got a cult hit brand like Apple where people are influenced by and passionate about it they usually don’t care much about your business. You have to appeal to their self-interest.
Energize
Speaking of boring, one of the biggest mistakes is going the safe route and creating something bland. While it may not offend anyone, it almost certainly won’t excite or inspire either. If your tagline appears safe and generic, your brand is going to be perceived that way, too.
Empower
Next, utilize an action verb to make it empowering and give a call to action (Just Do It). Make it about the customer. Remember, it’s about how you benefit the customer’s life and not about how great your company is. A solid approach is to make your tagline empowering.
Relate
The fundamentals of telling a great story are the same for a tagline. Establish a need and paint a picture. Why does this product or service matter in THIS person’s life? Focus on the benefit it provides in their world.
Connect
Catch the customer’s attention. Be surprising, creative and most importantly authentic. If you don’t normally tell a story using the word “game changer” or “turnkey,” then don’t use it in your tagline.
Imprint
Taglines should be short, sweet, memorable and roll off the tongue easily. Just like in a popular song, get that one catchy line that sticks in the customer’s head and you’re golden. You could even try to turn it into a jingle. As old school as it is, if you make a great jingle it could be a great advantage to your business. Your business slogan is like a front door for your business. Potential customers decide to look inside based on what it says to them. Here are a few tips on creating a compelling slogan or tagline for your business. To come up with great slogans for my customers, I always ask these basic questions:
- Who is your main customer?
- Who is your main competitor?
- What do you do for your customer?
The answer to these questions will give you some good ideas. The more you know your customer the better slogan ideas you’ll come up with (Know Thy Customer).
The Big Motivators
People buy for two basic reasons, to gain pleasure or avoid pain. If your target market is older (say over 55), they will tend to want safety. They don’t want to lose what they have (avoid pain). But if your market is young (say under 30), they want excitement, and might be willing to take risks (gain pleasure).
Traits of a Good Tagline or Slogan
Great taglines share several characteristics, first they are easy to understand. Second they are very short (no more than 3 to 6 words). And third they promise big benefits, the customer will get when they buy. And finally, they are easy to remember. Creative advertising can be one of your most valuable weapons to generate the necessary traffic to your website.
People are now smarter about advertising and they can get easily annoyed when you bombard them with too much advertisement.
Advertising creatively is a good solution to get rid of this dilemma and compel your targeted traffic to give your website the attention it needs. It is through this type of advertising that will make your visitors want to seriously consider your offers.
