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Creating a Tagline That Rocks: Part 1
 Taglines. They are everywhere. From small furniture stores and car dealerships to the big guys, like USP, Wheaties and GE.
Taglines capture a company's spirit in one clever little phrase. When you hear a catchy one, you think, how simple. The good ones feel like they must have just popped out of someone-in the shower, maybe.
But does a solopreneur need a tagline? While you won't go out of business without one, a tagline can be useful in briefly communicating your uniqueness and developing brand and name recognition.
There are two types of taglines:
1. Descriptive- explains what your business does
2. Emotional- creates a tone or feeling about your business
The type you choose will depend on your business name. Use the descriptive type when your business name does not describe your product or service. For, instance, for our first (and still existing) business, Cat's Eye Group, our tagline is: Winning Words. Bold Images. Smart Marketing. It tells what we do -copywriting, graphic design and marketing support-something that our name, while memorable, does not.
On the other hand, our second business, MarketingYourSmallBiz, says perfectly what we're about. In this case, we went with a tagline that conveys a tone, a feeling: Not just what to do. How to do it. We wanted to tell our subscribers that they won't be frustrated with just more of the same old marketing advice. That we'll take them by the hand and show them how to implement it, step-by-step.
5 Tagline Tips
What makes an effective and memorable tagline? The good ones are:
1. Simple and short. 10 words or less; the shorter the better. Make it something people don't puzzle over. If you understand it, but nobody else does, it's not doing you any good.
2. Positive. This is the general rule. However, I have seen some negative taglines that work very well. Take Biznik, the online networking site, whose tagline is: Business networking that doesn't suck. It's a message that attracts people who hate traditional networking. At MarketingYourSmallBiz, we have "not" in our tagline, but it still works.
3. Memorable. You want to stay in your customers' minds. To make them remember you and want to know more. Sometimes rhyming can be effective, sometimes using words that people can get a visual image of. Often it's memorable if it shows how unique you are.
4. Timeless. You'll probably be using it for years, so stay away from anything that will date your company, unless you plan on changing your tagline often.
5. Tested. Involve key staff in tagline development and be sure to try out your choice on colleagues, business partners and friends before you make the final decision.
In the next issue of Marketing Hotspots, we'll take you through the steps in creating the tagline that's perfect for you, the one that pulls in your target customer. |
