I know what you are thinking.. It was hard enough coming up with a name for the business, now a tagline?
Creating a meaningful tagline that grabs your audience’s attention and also explains the vision of your business is not a simple task. It takes patience and a lot of “wrong” one’s before you nail it down!
I outlined 4 simple steps to make this process a little less daunting.
Brain Dump
Eliminate all distractions, gather yourself a few pieces of paper and a pen and set yourself a timer for 20 minutes. Write down everything that comes to mind when you imagine your ideal business. Include words, phrases, sentences, drawings and whatever else you need to get out on paper. Continue writing until your time is up.
Brainstorm with Others
Now it’s time to gather your team. Grab your business partner, your best friend and your biggest supporters for a fun and engaging brainstorming session. There are a few ways you can do this, get creative or try what we did with Parkinson’s Pointe, a nonprofit I co-founded. I invited 6-8 of our biggest supporters, our most honest and creative friends over to the house for appetizers, drinks and a brainstorming session. We told them ahead of time that we were requesting help with writing a tagline for our new business and would love their input. We structured an hour to “work”. We started by giving a brief overview of our vision for Parkinson’s Pointe and our goals for the session. On postcards we had written single words that came out of the “brain dump”. We asked everyone to grab cards and help to put them together in a way that described our vision for the nonprofit.
Nail it Down
After about an hour of brainstorming, we had a few ideas but nothing solid. We shifted the evening over to a social gathering and put the tagline business aside. We decided over the next several weeks to continue having discussions with people who were unable to attend our brainstorming session, but were eager to help. One of these conversations led to us saying “that’s it”. Other options were good, but once we found the one that worked, we knew it!
Try it Out
The next thing to do was to share it with the world and see how everyone would respond. Slow down… Let’s try this strategically. Share your tagline with your trusted acquaintances (yes, those same people from the brainstorming sessions) and get some initial feedback. It should all be positive, these people are your supporters. Now try some of your harshest critics. You know, the person who will be brutally honest with you. Lastly, publish it to the public, providing consistent messaging across all of your methods of communication. Gather feedback and suggestions regularly, re-assess if necessary.
