Knowing the characteristics and needs of your audience can help focus your efforts to come up with the perfect slogan.Every brand needs a slogan. The tagline of your business is the sentence that most of your audience remembers when they recall your brand. Slogans connect with your audience both emotionally and rationally, conveying in one fell swoop everything that makes your brand unique.
Ideally, your brand slogan should be a unified line of text that guides all of your printed and digital efforts. If you are planning a business printing project in St. Louis, keep your slogan in mind at all times. Many printed materials, such as business cards or magnets, offer only limited space to explain your brand’s core benefits to your target audience. Including a brand slogan helps optimize your spacing while reminding your readers about your core value proposition.
In other words, including a slogan in your print marketing efforts makes your design more effective. But how do you create a powerful slogan to improve your print marketing? Follow these six steps to create a slogan that benefits your business and enhances your printing efforts.
Above all, your slogan should communicate the unique benefit your brand can provide. When your target audience reads a yard sign or receives a branded envelope, what is the first thing you want them to know about your business?
Answering that question means knowing your core value proposition. You can build your value proposition using a series of simple steps, such as identifying customer pain points and solutions provided by your brand. Then, use that intelligence to guide your slogan development.
The second variable that will make or break your slogan is your target audience. Who are they, and just what do they expect from a company like yours? If you finished step one, you will already know a partial answer to that question. But now is the time to go more in-depth.
As you might expect, different target audiences expect varying slogans. An electronics conglomerate, like General Electric, for example, can get away with a vague, aspirational slogan like Imagination at Work in targeting business customers. A convenience product like Miller Lite, on the other hand, needs to convey a specific benefit for its low price: Great taste, less filling.
Knowing the characteristics and needs of your audience can help focus your efforts to come up with the perfect slogan.
In most cases, your tagline will appear next to your company logo. That means the two need to go well together, especially if your logo includes your brand name. The slogan will not live in isolation, and needs to make sense when said or read together with your logo and business name.
Centering your slogan around your logo and brand name is easier said than done, however. A long business name, for example, may call for a short tagline to balance it out. A short brand name is more likely to support a longer slogan, as M&Ms showed with their classic Melts in your mouth, not in your hands tagline. That slogan, of course, is also a perfect example for this step: it makes little sense in isolation. But add it to the food brand, and everything clicks.
It’s easy to overthink a slogan. You want to put as much information into it as possible, ensuring that you communicate your unique benefits in new ways. But in reality, keeping your tagline as simple as possible is always the best choice.
Consider the Miller Lite example above, and imagine the slogan as Our beer has great taste, but fills you up less. Clearly, this alternative is not as “sticky” in anyone’s mind. Instead, avoid wordiness, or long words that not all of your audience understands immediately. The best slogans convey a core benefit without your audience having to think about it first.
When creating a slogan, you don’t have time to make a rational appeal about the benefits of your brand to your audience. Instead, the best slogans rely on emotions to make their point.
GE’s aspirational slogan mentioned above suggests a longing for a better future. Nike’s immortal Just Do It urges against procrastination and creates urgency. St. Louis businesses can appeal to their customers’ regional patriotism with varieties of shop local.
At its core, all decision making is emotional. Even supposedly rational business-to-business industries ultimately allow emotions to factor into their buying decisions. Because it both maximizes lack of space and helps potential customers make favorable decisions about your brand, your slogan should, on some level, touch on your audience’s emotions.
Your slogan will never live in isolation. Whether you decide to place it on roll-up banners, brochures, postcards, plastic mailers, or any other type of printed materials, it needs to make sense within the context of the piece on which it lives.
That requires consistency. Your brand should have one single tagline, and not multiple taglines for individual marketing channels. That slogan should be in line with the rest of your marketing and sales messaging, both online, via print, and in person. Focusing on your brand’s core value proposition, it should fit in seamlessly with everything potential customers may see about your brand.
Consistency is what turns such a seemingly small undertaking into a major project. To be effective, a slogan needs time to grow and take hold in your audience’s mind. Once you’ve come up with a tagline, you need to make it an integral part of your brand—and avoid major changes. Consistency, both within your marketing strategy and over time, is the key to success.
Every marketer’s goal is to be remembered by their audience when the buying decision comes. Unfortunately, depending on your preferred print materials, you may not have the space necessary to lay out an intricate argument as to why potential customers should choose your brand. Using the above six steps, you can create a brand slogan that enhances your message and makes your brand stand out on all of your printed materials.
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