Exactly How to Write a Tagline That Grows Your Business

There's arguably no single bit of messaging, more important to grow a business than a tagline. And I hate the way taglines are used today, especially in small and medium-sized businesses, because small and medium-sized businesses, they use the rules that large enterprise businesses use, and those rules do not work when it comes to small and medium-sized businesses. What am I talking about? You know, if you look at something like Nike's famous tagline, just do it. It's a fantastic tagline, but the reason that that tagline works is because everybody knows what Nike shoes are, they have brand familiarity, they have global familiarity. Everybody already knows about Nike. If everybody already knows about your brand and knows what it is, you can create an elusive tagline that simply makes people feel something, and it works really well. There are so few companies that can get away with that, that anybody who tries to do it pretty much is going to fail. You know, I know what a Coca-Cola is, so have a Coke and a smile makes sense, but let's say nobody knew what a Coca-Cola is. Nobody knows what a Coke tastes like, nobody even knows that it's a drink. If I say have a Coke and a smile, people like what's a Coke? It's not an effective tagline, it's only effective because you have brand familiarity. So the problem is that those of us in small to medium-sized businesses who use an elusive artistic tagline that is meant to make people feel something, it's a complete waste of money. You're just disseminating confusion into the marketplace. In this episode, I am talking about how to create a tagline that actually grows your business and makes you money. You're listening to the Story Brand podcast based on Donald Miller's best-selling book, Building a Story Brand. The Story Brand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide. Each week on the podcast, you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business. Now let's dive in with your host, Donald Miller. You might come away after watching this video, after listening to this episode with a tagline that makes you money and that's important. Creating good marketing that gets results is incredibly hard to do because the consumer market is working against you. It's just really hard to get word out there because people don't want to see it. The average consumer in America sees about 4,000 ads a day and only even notices about 100 of them. That is a very small group of people. The question is how do we get attention? Your tagline is going to play a pivotal role in how you bring attention to your brand and how you create an offer that people respond to. Your tagline is the controlling idea of your campaign. What is a controlling idea? One of the tools that screenwriters use is this tool of the controlling idea and basically the controlling idea means what is the story going to be about? Is it about the dog, Benji, who went with his family on a camping trip, got lost and is finding its way back home? Is the controlling idea when Harry met Sally, that Harry and Sally are good friends but they really should be together and the audience is the one that realizes they should be together and they're wondering how they're going to get together? Having a controlling idea at the beginning of a screenwriting process gives you a great deal. It allows you to filter everything else out. If we start adding, you know, into when Harry met Sally, the fact that Harry wants to run a marathon and lose 30 pounds, we're slightly making the story about something else and the more we break that rule of having a controlling idea, the harder it is for the audience to figure out what the story is about, the higher the cognitive load on the audience, the less pleasure they experience in the story. Stories have to be very fine tuned to be really about one thing. You can have subplots but all the subplots have to serve that one thing. I think one of the big problems in small and medium-sized businesses and big businesses for that matter is they don't really have the one thing that this business is really in existence to do. Sometimes when you create that one thing, you realize that some of your revenue streams need to be spun off into different companies. I've done that myself. I've had a business that had, you know, when I really got into it, I'm an entrepreneur. I have a lot of really good ideas but I discovered that some of these ideas and these spin-off businesses need to leave the mothership and go somewhere else and be given their own legs and their own president and their own LLC and their own controller. And I've done that but the main reason I did it is it's just too hard for the public to figure out that one thing that I offer. So story brand exists to help customers clarify their message because we just believe that people deserve that kind of attention and they can get it through a clear message. We exist. The controlling idea is we help you clarify your message. We help freelance marketers execute on that messaging for customers. We help general business owners create that messaging but it all fits under that one umbrella of the message of the message of the message. So it serves as a filter for all the decisions that we make. That's internal but externally it serves as a way for a customer to know the one thing that story brand offers. The one problem that they solve is that controlling idea. Your tagline needs to summarize the controlling idea of your brand. How do you create a great tagline? This is important because this is the one line that you will repeat more than any other as it relates to your business. Your customer's brain is going to boil your offer down to one idea anyway so why not write that idea for them. Every time I speak somebody in the audience asks me a question that I love to be asked and that question is this. Don loved your talk got a lot out of it took a lot of notes. Hey what's the one thing that you would want me to get from your talk? And my answer to that is somewhat confusing. I actually say that's it. What you just said your question is the one thing that I want you to get from my talk. And of course they're confused like what in the world are you talking about. My question is the one thing and I say well think about your question. Your question said Don can you boil it down to one thing. So the one thing that I want you to get from my talk is that audiences, customers, people, the body politic, they want one thing. The brain wants to simplify ideas so that it can understand it. It is dying to just simplify things so that I can understand it. Can you please, I took pages of notes here. Can you please simplify it to one thing I can walk out of this room understanding that will grow my business. And that's it. If you have a business your tagline, your tagline is the one thing that I want you to understand. Now the beauty of having one thing that I want you to understand about my business is that if they like that one thing and if it's interesting to them and it's a good offer, then they want to know more. So what the human brain really wants is the one reason I should continue listening to you in order to learn more. What is the one thing that I should know about your brand so that I may go watch a YouTube video or go listen to your podcast or read your white paper, your case studies or attend your webinar. What's the one thing that you offer? The brain wants it. Now listen to me. If the brain wants one thing, if your customers want one thing boil down and your tagline is elusive and it's hard to understand, then you didn't give them the one thing that makes them want to know more and so they're not going to want to know more. So your tagline has to be really, really clear. It cannot be elusive, it cannot be vague, it must be an offer, it can't be like, but the big brands get away with in terms of just making people feel something. It has to be what we call zero cognitive load. Remember one of those rules, zero cognitive load. Do not make your customers think. Let me give you some examples of taglines that don't work and then what story brand has done to fix those taglines. Marta, Metro Atlanta, Rapid Transit is the transit system in Atlanta. Massive, big, multi-hundred million, maybe even billion dollar organization there. Their tagline was moving Atlanta forward. Okay, this is a tagline that I see this stuff all the time. Comes out of a big ad agency. But what does it actually mean? If I said to you, what's the one thing that you want me to understand at Marta? I'm considering starting to take the bus to work. I'm considering starting to take the train. What's the one thing? And it's moving Atlanta forward. Do you feel in your mind how hard it is for me to understand what that offer is to me personally? Moving Atlanta forward is a way of making me feel something. It's kind of nice about you, but forward toward what? And also, I may live in Atlanta, but I don't identify as Atlanta. I identify as Donald Miller with a job 10 miles from my house and I'm tired of sitting in traffic. It's great that you're moving Atlanta forward. What are you doing for me? I would consider this an elusive or vague tagline that is written by some ad agency that likes to write creative pros and win awards, but does not necessarily grow your business or your organization. So I personally came up with a tagline that I liked and told the chief of staff at Marta about it, and we're friends, and so I said, man, I think you guys should run with this. They ran with it. That tagline is let Marta drive. Three words, let Marta drive. And they can elaborate on that. Let Marta drive this weekend. Let Marta drive you to work. Let Marta drive you in town. Tired of traffic, let Marta drive. You can just do a thousand things with that controlling idea. The controlling idea of Marta is now, by the way, they shipped it. It's in all their advertising stuff. They're promoting that on television. And so what do I want you to think about when you think about Marta? Let Marta drive. Now, do you see how that inspires action? And it's also an offer. It's a very clear offer. Let Marta drive. That is a zero cognitive load, controlling idea, and tagline for an organization. And that's what we need for you. That's what I want you to come up with. If you're listening to this as a podcast, or you're watching this video on YouTube, I want you to come up with a tagline that clearly communicates an offer and a controlling idea of your organization. If you don't, it's not going to be worth millions for you. But if you do, that one idea could really help you. Do you ever wonder why some marketing instantly grabs your attention? Well, other marketing, you just ignore. It's not about luck. It's not about a bigger budget. It's that the marketing that works actually follows just a few simple principles that actually makes it easier to understand, makes it memorable, and most important, impossible to overlook. That's why Storybrand has a free guide, the four rules of messaging that will teach you those principles. In just a few minutes, you'll have a simple framework for evaluating every message you create from your website and emails, to your ads and sales conversations. Download your free copy of those four rules today by clicking the link in the show notes. When I went into the NSA, their tagline, their controlling idea was something like protecting our freedom, defending the future. That sounds really nice, right? Protecting our freedom, defending the future. The problem with that tagline is, what does it actually mean? How do I translate this to myself and the benefit that I get from it? And it's too elusive. That could be the Pentagon. That could be the executive branch. That could be Congress for Crime Outlaw. That could be any branch of the military. So it's not specific to the NSA. What we came up with, actually, I came up with intelligence prepares us to win. And we shipped that to the leadership there. General Hoff, back when he was the director, came up with intelligence means victory. I really hate it when my clients come up with a better tagline than me, but he did. And those three words tell you why we need the NSA. So when the director goes into congressional hearings, he can actually just say, hey, the reason I'm here is because intelligence means victory. And if we don't have intelligence, we're not going to win. And if we're not going to win, Americans are going to be killed. Our infrastructure is going to go down. Our cyber attacks are going to go up. Intelligence just plain means victory. Let me tell you how we are collecting and curating intelligence and protecting our intelligence from outside threats. Because, again, intelligence means victory. Well, now, Congress goes, we should give them the money that they need because it means victory instead of protecting our freedom, defending the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In one ear out the other. No, it needs to be very, very specific, not unlike let, mar to drive. And you need the same thing. Here's another example. This is a tagline example, a checking account for every win. When I leave the studio, I drive home. I drive by a bank. In the window of the bank is a poster of a guy with a backpack on hiking through the woods. And it literally says, a checking account for every win. A checking account for every win. I can't even fathom what you're trying to communicate here. If I win a cake walk or something, I go open a checking account. If my kid wins a soccer tournament, I go, hey, I won something, we should go open a checking account. But this is the stuff that ad agencies come up with. They charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for these taglines. And then they distribute them to no result at all, because it's so elusive. No, I don't think you should say that. I think you should say something like checking with no surprise fees. Now, here's the problem. You go to an ad agency, you pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to go, well, you should just do checking with no surprise fees. And they're like, well, we could have come up with that. Instead, they've got to come up with something poetic and elusive that sounds valuable, but doesn't move the needle on your business. I would rather work with an ad agency that says, look, if you just say checking with no surprise fees, or your kid just turned 18, open a checking account here. You're gonna have lots of parents go, I guess you're supposed to open a checking account when your kid turns 18. In fact, it's probably time to start teaching them about money. Let's go open a checking account. Honey, I solved today, you know, these 18, we should probably open a checking account. It's literally on the list of things to do when your kid turns 18. Do you see how that would make you money? But what is this? A checking account for every win, wouldn't? Another one is Calvin University. Calvin University is our client. They've been one of the most dream-like clients we've ever worked with. They're so disciplined, so good at execution. Absolutely fantastic team over there at Calvin. We went into Michigan and met with them. And they didn't have a tagline necessarily, but they had like a mission statement. And it was something like serving as Christ's agents of renewal in the world. It was even longer than that. Serving as Christ's agents of renewal in the world. But that is inside elusive language that is a deep theological concept that's just gonna go everybody's head. And what we recommended, and they have changed it to, where Christians launch their careers. Where Christians launch their careers. That's an offer. Launch your career. It's zero cognitive load. It makes the customer the hero. It's memorable and repeatable. You see what I'm saying? It obeys all four rules of messaging. Now, a tagline has those four rules, but also some other ones. One is make sure it's actually an offer. Is your tagline an offer to improve somebody's life? I once bought a bottle of liquid plumber while looking at a counter that had, or a shelf that had 20 or 30 bottles of different kinds of liquid plumber. I bought one just because it had two words. Dissolves hair. Well, Dissolves hair is actually an offer. And it's an offer I understood. I've got seconds here to make this decision. I'm not gonna sit in research and get on chat GPT and figure out which one is the best. The other taglines were things like proactive patented enzymes. Proactive patented enzymes? Does that really your tagline? I mean, what am I a scientist here? I need to dissolve hair. I don't need proactive patented. Probably the one that Dissolves hair has patented enzymes, but they're smart enough not to say it because it's not gonna be easy to understand as an offer. Number two, don't make it elusive or confusing. This is the number one rule I see broken when it comes to taglines in the marketplace. They're elusive, they're poetic. They think they sound so sophisticated, but I can't get my head around what the actual offer is. Rule number three, make it repeatable. If I say it to somebody, the next day I need to say, hey, what is our tagline? And most of the time they just say, oh, it's this, right? Intelligence means victory. Like, it's just so short, simple and zero cognitive load that I'm able to repeat it, and your customer is able to repeat it. Your tagline is also only one part of a messaging and marketing campaign. I've created something called the story brand messaging canvas. That canvas allows you to put your entire messaging and marketing plan on one single sheet of paper. Your tagline is one of several parts of a messaging canvas. It's one of several parts of your campaign. By the way, if you want it, you go to messaging canvas.com and get a free copy of that. So if you're watching this video on YouTube, and if you're listening to it as a podcast, pick sure to go to YouTube and watch the video. This is a story brand messaging canvas. It has several parts, the four rules, the five sound bites, your cornerstone tools. When you create your canvas, you'll have your entire messaging and marketing campaign on one sheet of paper. And your tagline is one of the foundational parts of your entire campaign. Let me just go through the parts of the messaging canvas. You can understand how it helps you clarify your message. At the very top of the canvas are the four rules of messaging. Every line you write must obey the four rules. Those are make it zero cognitive load, link it to survival, make it memorable and repeatable, and make the customer the hero. If your message passes all four filters, customers are going to stop ignoring you. All of your messaging has to obey these four rules. And as you go down the canvas, you have your five foundational sound bites. They are problem, empathy, answer change, and end result. Those are going to cast your customer as the hero in the story and your product as the solution to their problem. So if you get these five foundational sound bites right, the rest of your campaign practically writes itself. Following the five foundational sound bites are what we call the cornerstone tools. These are built directly from your five sound bites. These three tools form the backbone of your entire campaign. Every other piece of collateral that you create will be written using the same words that are in your five foundational sound bites, keeping your message clear and consistent across every channel. Those three cornerstone tools are your tagline, your elevator pitch, and your brand story. So your tagline, it is one, of the three cornerstone tools that are on that messaging canvas. The next thing is your elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch exists right under the tagline on your story brand messaging canvas. It is a bit of an elongated version of your tagline. It's almost like your tagline says this and then you elaborate on that tagline with your elevator pitch. It is also though a very clear offer. It just uses three or four sentences rather than one statement. And then your brand story is all five of your foundational sound bites stitched together, edited together to create a bit of prose that explains why your company exists. The problem you solve, the result your client gets to experience, the transformation the customer has, it's all inside of that brand story. These are the three cornerstone foundational tools in your messaging canvas. All right. Here's your assignment. First of all, once you go to messaging canvas.com, download the messaging canvas. Look at that one box that says tagline. That's what you're going to fill out. You're going to fill that out after watching this video. Here's the process for doing so. One, reread the five sound bites that you created on the messaging canvas, circle the strongest one. 50% of the time your tagline already exists in one of those sound bites. Write it until you can't cut another word. Then actually write three more candidates. I came up with intelligence prepares us to win. I still like that. But intelligence means victory is better. It is actually shorter, more repeatable. Victory is a more dramatic word. You can put it on a bumper sticker, on t-shirts, all that kind of stuff, tighten it. Come up with some candidates, shop those candidates around, test them. Which one can somebody repeat back? If you actually say it, and then ship the winner to your canvas, you ship that winner to your canvas and you've got your tagline. Now write your five foundational sound bites first, then come up with your tagline. Then you're going to write your elevator pitch, your brand story, and then you're going to create a messaging campaign all right there on the canvas. Let's talk about where you use that tagline. Use it everywhere. Use the same words and say it the same every time. Here's some ideas of where you can put your tagline. Put it under your logo. Literally, just put those three words or four words right under your logo everywhere it goes. It's a way of shipping that tagline. Make it the home page hero section of your home page on your website. That or the elevator pitch work really well as the header on your website. If your elevator pitch is a little long, go with the tagline. Use the elevator pitch as the subtext of the tagline itself. Every single employee's email signature. You're going to employ from any of my company, you're going to see our tagline. On your social media bios, your ad sign-offs, in your packaging, on your booth banners for events, your pitch decks, your swag, your on hold message, the campaign theme itself if you're launching a campaign, and the list goes on and on. Get your tagline. It's an offer. It's a hook in the water that is designed to catch a fish. Put a trillion hooks in the water and you're going to catch a lot more fish. Use it liberally everywhere you possibly can. Your tagline can make an enormous difference in your business. By the way, if you created a great tagline and it's working well, make sure to leave a comment. We'd love to read it. Feel free to comment on other people's taglines. Hey, maybe you can help somebody improve their tagline. I really hope you write a tagline that works. All right. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the Story Brand podcast. No matter where you are in your marketing and messaging journey, get the tools, the training, the support you need to start clarifying that message at storybrand.com. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. If you're watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and then leave a comment letting us know what resonated with you and what we can impact to help your business grow in a future episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]