Tag You’re It. The Importance of a Tagline.

The Importance of a Tagline.First of all what is a tagline?

A tagline, positioning statement, strap line, slogan whatever you choose to call it is essential to building a brand and increasing your sales.

Today in our over-advertised society the theory goes that you need something more than a name to build a brand. You need a short statement that sums up in five words or less (“or less” is better) what you do and why people would want you to do it for them. It’s the key phrase that identifies your business by capturing the essence of three elements:

Your purpose

 Your promise

 Your concept

Coming up with a great tagline is a struggle many people face. More often than not, they get it wrong by focusing on what their product or service is and neglecting what it offers. By offers I mean the benefits of what you do for the reader.

To capture a reader’s eye at a glance, you need to combine all three elements of mission, promise and brand to create a great tagline that really works. Here’s how:

Step One – Your Purpose

There’s a saying in the copywriting world: Be clear, not clever. What is your purpose? Tip, it can’t be to “make money for the owners”. Purpose is why you do what you do. It could be to improve quality of life, or help improve our client’s business. Purpose usually revolves around what you do that “helps” the customer. What is your intention, to make things worse for your customer? No, it does not matter what the product or service is, the purpose of the company is to help your customers in some way.

What is help? Help is assistance, aid, to improve something. It is just being able to communicate how you help that is the trick. For example, GE had a tagline for a while that said GE “We bring good things to life”.  It was a pretty general tagline that could be used across their product lines. You read it and you had a good idea of what the purpose was of the company.

Step Two – So What?

It was once said that when it comes to advertising everyone listens to the exact same radio station. The stations call letters are WII-FM. The call letters are an acronym for “What’s In It For Me”. The benefits of what you are promoting are more important than what you are selling. People want to know how it will help them. If you can sum up the answer to WII-FM in the tag-line it will go a long way to making it memorable and effective.

If you’re looking for an easy yet memorable way to differentiate your products and services from the competition, a tag-line will help you. A tagline is a brief, one line descriptor phrase that sums up a company or product. Taglines are a great way to communicate how you can solve customer problems, as well as promote ways that your company is unique.

Whatever your tagline is, it must communicate. When someone sees your tagline they must instantly be able to know what it is and why they would want it.

A tagline ties in your print marketing, postcards, brochures, all the way to your Internet marketing, web site, pay-per-click ads, to your stationary and business envelopes, to the sign in front of your building. Everything you do is projecting the same message. Having a tagline helps to tie everything you do together which adds impact and meaning to your logo.

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