Taglines, Conception and Birth- guide to writing a solid Tagline

To write a tagline, start by taking a long hard look at your brand. What is your company, product or service about? Who are you selling to? What are you offering that competitors don’t have? How do you want people to see you? Are you grandpa’s special hot sauce recipe, focused on selling the great taste? Or are you are positioning a social media site, working to attract new users?

To write an effective tagline, understand your product, audience and strengths.

If you haven’t answered those questions do so, then come back to writing the tagline. If you know your product and brand writing a tagline will be much easier. Begin with a general description of your product, what it is and does. Lets use the two products from earlier, the social media site and the hot sauce as examples. For these taglines I want to emphasize what the products do.

“This site was started by my friend and me to offer a platform for people in isolated areas to meet, connect and interact online.”

“My grandpa’s hot sauce recipe has been adding heat and flavor to all our dinners for the last 50 years.”

This first edit is going to hurt because we’re going have to make some tough decisions. while the hot sauce recipe being a 50 years old family recipe is definitely important to the brand, having it in the tagline will distract from the message of what the product does. The same goes for the social media site being started by friends. With those parts cut we will be left with just the main idea.

“Helping people connect”

“Adding some spice to dinner”

Much better but lets take a bit more off the top. This will be easier since we are just finding the right words.

“Connecting people”

“Bring some spice to your life”

These are perfectly acceptable taglines, but the social media site sounds a bit generic and the hot sauce tagline is clunky. We’re going to try messing around with what we have, maybe rephrase and swap a couple words.

“Making friends”

“Bring the heat”

Much better, now we have two solid taglines for completely different businesses. Writing a good tagline is about saying what the product is or does with the fewest words possible, in a way that people aren’t used to hearing.

If at all possible avoid clichés and unnecessary adjectives. The worst taglines try to0 hard to sound pleasant like “Happiness you can trust” or are so generic they are actively hard to notice like “The best in business.”

Once you have your amazing original one of a kind tagline. Test it, show it to others and see what they think about it. Be prepared to answer the question “So what?” You will have to explain why you chose your tagline and the message it sends. If you find flaws just revise and edit as necessary. When you are done you will have written a tagline that represents your product well.