How to formulate your business tagline

You surely have seen that short sentence which is consistently associated with certain companies names and brands. A tagline is and must be an, expressive, memorable, engaging, meaningful, short catchphrase that communicates concisely -preferably in no more that 4 words- the mission and essence of your business, why you exist and strive to deliver to clients, using the voice and tone of your brand and personality to set your business apart from the crowd.

Taglines or strap lines as referred to sometimes, might be incorporated into the design of company’s logo or detached from it. When built into the design of your logo, it can be a highly effective way to complement, simply communicate or reinforce your core message and mission, and this tends to be beneficial in case of small businesses that don’t have large budgets to support their brands and run brand and marketing campaigns, but want to capture the attention each time prospects and audiences are being exposed or come across their business name.

You should not however mix a slogan with a tagline and neither with a company’s mission statement, which are all different from each other (maybe to be covered in other articles) but just on a quick note, a slogan is rather associated with a particular product, service or marketing campaign.

Writing a three or four-word long tagline can surprisingly be a painful and time-consuming thing to do. When formulating your tagline, there are few practices and things to remember. Yes you must keep it short and very short, as a simple trick you may well think of it first as a message you want to build into your logo design, which you want to keep simple, clean and definitely not getting it cluttered with loads of text. This trick should help you to visually think of the extra and small space you want to allocate and squeeze in some text next to your logo build while all elements of your logo (graphic or typographic or a combination of both) should remain visible and readable even in the smallest size.
Verbs and action verbs are highly recommended as they not only engage but also help communicate in a more personalized manner and create momentum. Try to visualize the core value you want to offer, the challenges you want to solve for you clients and make the visual vocal. Your tagline must be relevant and consistent with your business and brand personality and by no means misleading or crossing roads with other existing brands and businesses, so do your research and avoid nasty surprises. It should live up to the expectations, perceptions and promises you make, and speaks to the right audiences in the right language.
You may want to be bold sometimes and let your imagination go wild but it is worthwhile remembering that simplicity and relevance are your best friend, particularly for small businesses that often lack the resources to constantly nurture and sustain a brand with super creative messages which are hard to decode and let people who are not familiar with the brand assume what’s the message and the purpose you are serving. Yet to to keep it simple you can resort to couple of plain words that best tell what you are business is about just as seen in some of the examples below.

Below we have chosen some examples of taglines that show how they have nicely integrated some of the above-mentioned elements:

– Holvi “Banking for Makers & Doers”
– Nokia “Connecting People”
– Nike “Just do it”
– Leggero ” email marketing”
– Accenture ” High performance. Delivered”
– Nosto “Connect with your customers”