A tagline is a succinct phrase that communicates some of
the basics of your brand. Ideally, your tagline is also
memorable and helps your target audience relate to your
business.
If used correctly, a tagline can be a powerful part of your
marketing strategy. Creating a phrase of a few words to
uniquely identify you (or your business) in all of your
marketing materials helps you to cover two of the major
ways that a prospect can immediately gather information in
your business communications – the prospect sees both the
images of your logo and Visual Vocabulary and the text in
your tagline to learn more about your brand.
The advantage of adding a tagline to other text that
describes your business is that a tagline can appear on all
of your marketing materials, including your business card,
stationery, and other applications, where descriptive text
either will not fit or is not appropriate.
Here are some tips on using a tagline in your marketing
materials:
Pick one tagline and run with it.
It can be very difficult to settle on just one tagline.
However, choosing one tagline and using it consistently
throughout all of your materials will help your marketing
materials to look consistent. The repetition of the tagline
will also make your materials memorable. This consistency
makes your business appear well-thought-out as opposed to
scattered. Using a single, unified logo and tagline
combination in all of your materials will help people
recognize your business at first glance.
Decide: short tagline or long?
In general, short taglines are more memorable than long
taglines. If you were to sit down and make a list of the
taglines that you know, these taglines are likely to be
three or four words long. The difficulty with using a short
tagline for a small business is that you must then teach
clients and prospects to identify your tagline with your
business, which can be a difficult process, especially if
your tagline is not descriptive of your business.
Although it might be more difficult to remember, a long
tagline can be much more descriptive of your business. You
must evaluate tradeoff between instant recognition and
precision.
Should you put the tagline in the logo…?
Your logo’s graphic will be stronger if it’s enhanced with
the words in your tagline, and the words in the tagline
will be more memorable if they are reinforced by an image.
However, there are a few other factors to consider. A
tagline in a logo must be rather short – otherwise, it will
have to be placed in the logo in a small font size, and
that will reduce the scalability of the logo to a text size
that is legible.
Also, if your business name consists of more than two or
three words, including the tagline in the logo might make
the logo too wordy, which can lead to your business name
being skipped over or ignored.
…or apart from the logo?
Another option is to use both a logo and a tagline in your
materials, but to position the two apart from one another.
This is a great option to consider because then your logo
and tagline aren’t linked quite so strongly – if you need
to eventually change your tagline, it will be easier to do
so. You won’t lose as much brand equity if you change a
tagline that is not directly attached to the logo.
When the logo and tagline are not positioned together, you
can use a longer tagline – you won’t be limited in your
ability to scale your logo by the legibility of the
tagline. Still, be careful that your tagline isn’t too long
- it should still be easy to remember and short enough to
roll off potential clients’ tongues.
You’ll also be able to use your tagline as an element of
your visual vocabulary, to enhance the design of all your
marketing materials. It will be another visual element to
make your materials look great.
We recommend that small businesses follow these tips in
developing a unique, descriptive tagline, and that they use
it in their marketing materials. A tagline can communicate
to prospects in ways that a logo alone cannot, and a
tagline will enhance your brand identity.
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Erin Ferree is a brand identity and marketing design
strategist who creates big visibility for small businesses.
Through her customized marketing and brand identity
packages, Erin helps her clients discover their brand
differentiators, then designs logos, business cards, and
other marketing materials and websites to reflect that
differentiation, as well as to increase credibility and
memorability. http://www.elf-design.com
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