Best-practice tips and advice for consultants and creatives from Copel Communications.

How to write a great tagline for your business

5/19/2015

Can you be concise and catchy at the same time?

We often take taglines for granted, because they’re just, well, there. But a great tagline is a triumph of simplification; it’s what you’re not seeing that represents the work that was invested in creating it. Kind of like that great Dolly Parton quip: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap!”

In other words, prepare to do a lot of work to craft just a few words. Here are some tips to get you started on the right track:

Who’s the audience? Often a tagline will need to reach a pretty broad audience, but knowing the gamut of your targets will help give you some guard rails in terms of tone and cultural references you can play on/off of.

Consider the solution. Obviously, your business provides products or services. But what does that translate to in the customer’s life? What’s the benefit in terms of productivity, happiness, or status?

Tune the tone. What emotion best captures how customers will feel when they think of your business? Jot down a big list of emotions, and when you’re done, see which ones leap out at you as the best ones for setting your tagline’s tone. Ideally, you already have a “brand voice/personality” document written; if so, use this as your guide.

Give it legs. If you make green widgets today, what are the odds you’ll offer multicolored widgets next year? Don’t lock yourself in too tightly; you want your tagline to have an effective lifespan.

Develop your keywords. Start brainstorming a list of words that have to do with your product, service, the emotions you want to convey, what the customers will achieve with you, and so on. Go crazy. Write as many as you can. Free-associate. Go wherever it takes you. Make the list as long as you can, then make it longer. These aren’t taglines; they’re more like an inspiration library that will help you later.

Leverage resources. Think your list was done? Wrong. Pick up the dictionary, and see all the entries that flow to and from some of your important keywords: as you scan the lists, cool entries will jump at you. Write them down. Google the good words for common expressions, classic book titles, public-domain lyrics, and so on (you want to find common/familiar expressions you can spin to your advantage). Use a rhyming dictionary or a site like Rhymezone to find rhymes for some of your favorite keywords.

Start tagging. Go through your list of keywords and start brainstorming tagline ideas, using it as your starting point/inspiration. Again, go for extreme quantity. Don’t pre-judge. Feel free to try multiple versions of the same tagline, but with different capitalization or punctuation (you can compare the versions later).

Play with wordplay. One of our favorite taglines from a few years back was “Life Takes Visa.” Not only is it unbeatably simple, but it also plays off of two different meanings of the word “take.” On the one hand, it plays off of the phrase, “Do you take Visa?”, meaning “Do you accept Visa?” and “Life requires Visa,” as in “It takes a lot to get through life.” One we did for a business-development firm was “Let The Gains Begin.” The play off of the well-known (and public-domain) expression “Let the games begin” is pretty obvious, and the client liked it. It had just the right combination of confidence and edge that they were looking for.

Walk away. Go to bed. Sleep on it. Come back to it the next day and jot down more keywords and ideas. Go work out—and keep your smartphone handy to record ideas that come to mind when you’re in the zone. Think of the project in the shower, and keep a diver’s slate handy to write down ideas underwater.

Cull and rank. From your big list, work up a semi-short list. From this list, rank them: put your favorites at the top. See how they look. Speak them aloud and hear how they sound.

Search for conflicts. Google your favorite new tagline(s) to see if anyone else has already used and/or registered them with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office or other body such as the International Trademark Gazette. You might need to toss some you like, but take heart that great minds think alike!

Do it again. Don’t be surprised if you have to start the entire process all over again. It simply takes a lot of work to make a great tagline.

Consider getting help. Some people find working on a tagline to be a liberating and mind-expanding pursuit. Others consider it a daunting task. If you’re one of the latter, or simply want to keep your time free for core activities, consider bringing in expert help. The results will be the best you can get, and the investment will pay strong dividends. Contact us and let’s get a quote in your hands.

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How to make sure your consulting reports generate new business

5/5/2015

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If your deliverables don’t create follow-on engagement, you may be missing a prime opportunity.

You’ve just finished that project, and turned in that final report or outbrief. The last thing you want to hear is the client’s door slamming behind you. Not that you want to keep selling for selling’s sake; chances are, the client has other needs, which you can perceive, where you could deliver more value to help them succeed. But the client won’t know that until you suggest it—and there’s no better time to do it than when you’re working on your “final” deliverables. Here, then, are some best-practice guidelines to ensure that your next report won’t be your last:

Re-state the challenge. It may seem obvious to suggest it here, but too many times, so much progress has been made since you started your engagement that the client tends to forget, or at least take for granted, where they are now, vs. then. Don’t let them. Always lead in with a brief recap of why you were invited to consult. What was the specific problem you were asked to help address? Why was your unique expertise required? Don’t think for a minute that any of this will be top-of-mind until you remind them.

Review the methodology. What was the process by which you’ve arrived at the big conclusions you’re about to draw? The program design was essential to its success, and it didn’t just appear magically on its own. Again, everyone should know this by now, but don’t assume that they do. Feel free to make reference to mid-stream deliverables you’ve already handed in; rather than adding them as a bulky appendix, simply include a parenthetical “Contact us for copies of any of these prior documents.” It’s an easy call to action.

Consider the downstream reader. Assume that your report will get passed along to others (i.e., new prospects) in other parts of the client organization (both up and down), so you’re making your case to these strangers, too. (Good reason to go easy on jargon and be sure to define any acronyms at first usage, regardless of how ubiquitous you may think they are.) And if those people contact you for more information, so much the better.

Get to the meat of the matter. While the steps above are important, they’re also short. The findings are what the client is paying you for. And while you may have uncovered a ton of stuff, don’t present a ton of stuff. Brevity is the watchword here. It may feel painful to leave some details out, but better that your report gets read than skimmed—or skipped.

Make it memorable. Easier said than done. But you truly need to organize your findings into bite-sized chunks with titles/subheads that make them easy to grasp and make the structure of your findings readily apparent. Sweat this detail; it’s worth it.

Define the next steps. This is the key. It’s where you sell-without-selling. Your report will end with conclusions and recommendations; be sure to frame these as action items that the client can easily grasp and work to actuate. But bear in mind how the new to-do’s will each be accompanied by requisite challenges—challenges you may well be able to help address. That’s the follow-on work. But the trick here is to let the client arrive at that conclusion on their own, and on a “delayed fuse”. It’s a subtle distinction: You don’t want them to think that they’re being sold to while they read your report. But you do want them to realize that you’d be terribly helpful to them just as they’re getting serious about putting those next steps into action.

Cross boundaries. How should the client expand upon the vital findings you’ve uncovered? What are the opportunities to migrate this learning to a new department or line of business? Don’t assume they’ll make these leaps on their own.

Nail the executive summary, i.e., the one part you’re sure everyone will read. Do this last; if your report is well structured, it should be pretty easy, since you’ll be working from topic sentences, bullet lists, chapter titles, etc. If your exec summary doesn’t fall readily into place, take a harder look at your underlying structure. It may need fixing. And if that exec summary isn’t tacitly selling your follow-on services the way your “next steps” should, you’re missing an opportunity.

Consider getting help. Following the above best-practice guidelines will maximize your odds of success. But they require specialized skills which may not overlap your strengths. Fortunately for you, we have the unique combination of consulting, marketing, and creative skills which have let us help independent consultants just like you to boost their follow-on work for more than 15 years. Best of all, we’re fast, efficient, and surprisingly affordable, given the value we provide. Contact us right now and let’s talk about that last project—and how to turn it into your next one.

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