Small businesses often come up with slogans that aren’t descriptive of what they do. When you hear that a company brings you “the best service” without describing what that service is, then that tagline is very forgettable. Or you may hear that a company offer “the lowest prices in town” but doesn’t specify which town that is, that company risks losing the attention of the consumer. Worse still is if you take your current slogan or tagline and cover up your company name, then ask yourself, could this be applied to any one of my competitors, and the answer is YES, what then? All too often, a company will develop a tagline based on the same tired cliches that the creator hears everyday on TV, radio, or reads in print.
This video has almost nothing to do with this blog post, but I thought that this sock puppet was funny!
At AMM Communications, we started our company 3 years ago with the tagline “The St. Louis-based Public Relations Firm” because we wanted potential clients in St. Louis, MO to know that we were based here but we had a nationwide reach. Ann Marie and I sat down last week to reassess our slogan and we decided to tweak it a bit. I did a Google search for keywords and found that “Public Relations”, “Consultant”, and “Greater St. Louis” were search terms that come up often, so we have changed our tagline to, “Public Relations Consultants of Greater St. Louis”. Because we have released so much content over the past year with “St. Louis” and “Public Relations” from our original tagline, we still receive positive hits for our search ranking on those terms, and our new tagline serves to further differentiate us from our competitors in St. Louis.
So, as you rethink your slogan or tagline, ask yourself these questions:
- Does it says what my company does?
- Does it tell people where my company is located?
- Is it different from my competitors?
After you have developed your tagline, start using it in all your sales materials, on your website, and other places potential clients may see it!