Create a Tagline for Your Small Business Tips & Tricks for Creating an Impactful Tagline

A tagline can do wonders for marketing. Hundreds of companies, from Apple to Nike, have used taglines to supercharge their marketing and sales and get customers to associate a message with their brand. “Just Do It”, “Melts in Your Mouth Not in Your Hands,” “America Runs on Dunkin”, and “Got Milk?” are just examples of excellent taglines that have stood the test of time and are instantly recognizable. But how do you create a tagline for your business?

Taglines can be tricky to come up with and require a good amount of creativity, which can lead to an overwhelming and time-consuming process. If you’re going through this experience, it’s important to know what you’re getting into, why you’re doing it, and how to successfully create a tagline for your business.

Let’s get started.

A tagline is defined as “a catchphrase or catchy slogan, especially as used in advertising, or the punchline of a joke.” In marketing, a tagline is often a reiterated phrase identified with an individual, group or product. Businesses create taglines in order to capture an audience’s attention, and leave a lasting impression after only a short encounter.

It’s important to note what a tagline is NOT, and that is a slogan. A perfect slogan or perfect tagline encompasses a company’s mission, what it stands for, and even how it’s helping customers in the individual campaigns the company might run. Slogans are often longer than taglines and focus more on the company than the quip.

The purpose of a tagline is to create a positive, memorable phrase that sticks in your customer’s head and helps them identify your brand and your marketing message. A good tagline should offer quick, digestible information that is easily remembered for many years.

Before diving into the process for creating a tagline, it might help to know helpful tips and tricks for what the end product should be.

• Keep it Simple:  Most successful slogans are only 3-6 words long and get the point across without much thought. Ideally, your tagline should be six words or fewer.
• Give it Meaning:  A tagline shouldn’t be made just because you saw some famous companies have one. If you’re going to invest the mental energy and marketing budget to craft a catchphrase, it should truly bring meaning to your brand.
• Make it Clear:  There should be no guessing as to what your tagline means. In addition to being simple, it should clearly state the meat of your company without any guesswork. If you ask some friends what they think, and they ask questions back, you did it wrong.
• Focus on the Benefits:  Customers care about benefits, not features — and that goes for your tagline as well. It should tell your audience the main benefit of your brand or product without sharing “features.” For example, convenience is a benefit, whereas a removable part for easy cleaning is a feature.
• Tell a Story:  Storytelling is a huge part of marketing. The stronger your story, the easier it is to make more sales. If your slogan tells a story, it can become an integral part of your marketing and brand.

If you’re attempting to create a tagline or refresh your current one, we strongly suggest starting with the following exercises:

Be as descriptive as possible. How can you best describe the benefits of your business? What are the values and truths that make your company what it is today? Instead of focusing on what your business is, focus on what your business offers. Are you faster, cheaper, stronger, more reliable? Be specific and tell people exactly how they will benefit by purchasing what you’re selling.

The best marketing taps into people’s emotions; your tagline is no different.Ask yourself and your team: What do you want people to feel when they think of your business? It could be a simple emotion, like happiness or pride. But it can also be something more complex, such as “refreshed”, “confident”, or even “hungry.”

Take that list of benefits, and focus on what truly makes you different from the competition. Don’t simply list out what makes you better, but think different. AVIS is a great example with its “We Work Harder” tagline. That tagline came as a result of recognizing that they were not the biggest in the business. Instead, they leaned into what could be seen as a weakness by highlighting what being second means for the customer.

Once you have your benefits listed out and a clear idea of which of those benefits makes your business different, start assembling phrases. Avoid being clever, and instead focus on efficiently communicating your value proposition. A tagline should be short, direct, powerful and easy to remember.

By now, you should have a comprehensive list of phrases that could be potential taglines. Approach this list from a fresh perspective and start testing them out. Can you use them in a variety of ways? How do they sound after the name of your business? Do they need to be explained? Edit the options you have and continue cutting them down until you have two or three great candidates.

Once you’ve narrowed it down to a few solid options, let them sit. Sleep on it and then come back a day or two later to see if anything sticks out to you. Chances are, one will feel better after you’ve taken a step away. The right one should leave you feeling excited and brainstorming how you can plug it in to your future marketing tactics.

Ultimately, your goal is to develop a specific tagline that answers why should I care? It should be focused and common enough for people in real-world scenarios to think about and automatically tie back to you. If you follow these steps and intentionally put time and effort toward creating your tagline, it can be a transformative foundation for your brand, expanding into every part of your business.

If you’re struggling to get started, it’s okay. we’d love to help you throughout the writing process.