The secret to writing killer small business taglines
We devote a lot of space here presenting a wide range of marketing plans and sometimes they can be very involved and demand a lot of planning, careful execution, and even financial investment.
However, when I reflect on my success, I have to give a lot of credit to four little words, my tagline: THE Small Business Expert.
While a lot of my marketing efforts change, evolve and require constant care and feeding, my tagline – like the Energizer Bunny – keeps going, and going, and going… (Hey, there’s another tagline!)
So my question to you is: Do you have a great business tagline? Any tagline?
If you already have a tagline for your brand, take a good look at it and see if you think it’s serving you as well as it should. While it’s fantastic to have a tagline that’s so good you never have to change it, it’s not a crime to polish it up from time to time or even start over fresh.
Your noticeable difference
To craft the best tagline for your business, focus in on the one thing you want to be known for…and this isn’t as simple as it seems. Going through the exercise of discovering this “one thing” will take you deep inside of what your small business is all about. You can’t write a great brand tagline without distilling this essence.
Let’s look at a slogan FedEx used for quite sometime: When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight.
If many of us were tasked with writing a tagline that expressed this idea, we would come up with something like: The fastest overnight delivery service! Or maybe we would suggest: The most dependable overnight delivery service!
The difference between okay and fantastic
Why is When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight better than those two merely okay attempts? Here’s the reason: Not only does the FedEx version convey speed and dependability, it adds an emotional element with the words “absolutely positively.” You’ve probably used that phrase before. Remember how your heart was racing when you said it? There was some desperation in your voice.
I evoke some emotion and attitude by my use of capitalization in my tagline: THE Small Business Expert.
When one plus one is way more than two!
The point I’m making is that you need to go beyond merely naming the “attribute” you want to communicate. You want to make it memorable in another way, and adding emotion, attitude, humor, or an appeal to the senses can accomplish this. Let’s look at some of the best brand taglines and see what they add:
- Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Humor and senses.
- What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
- The happiest place on earth.
- Think outside the bun. Humor
- Just do it. Emotion and attitude.
- Mmmm mmmm good!
- Have it your way.
As you look at your business tagline see if you’re touching people in a way that will make it memorable. If you’re able to communicate your main message and leverage one of these other elements – emotions, humor, senses, etc. – you’re touching people in two areas of their brains, and they will remember you!