A strap line clarifies exactly what you do; it quickly explains to your audience at a glance what you do. Helps your potential customer decide if they need your services or products and then if they want to do business with you.

A strap line is a short statement about your business and generally falls into one of four categories:

1. Benefit
2. Service/product
3. Customer
4. Idea

Benefit

This will tell potential customers why they should buy from you.

“Image Connect takes the pain out of successfully marketing your business”

Service or Product

This describes your product or service.

“Image Connect connects you with your customers via the internet, website design, marketing and printing”.

Customer

This targets specific customers only

“Image Connect design web sites and marketing strategies for health care professionals”

Idea

An idea based strap line is exactly what it says and is generally the least effective and should be avoided, as you can see in the example below it is very vague, tells you nothing, in fact XYZ Company could do almost anything.

“XYZ Company – we build relationships”

Now writing your own, decide which type of strap line you are going for: benefit, service/product or customer focused. Unless you are a really large company with different divisions you should just pick one.

If you decide to have more than one strap line, this significantly increases the complexity of your marketing and the expense, because effectively you need two of everything; business cards, letterheads, marketing materials, web sites, the list goes on.

Your strap line should explain what you do in about 12 -15 words, it’s like a miniature advert for your business.

So now you have yours, you should include it on:

* Business cards
* Letterheads
* Web sites
* Invoices
* Statements
* Brochures
* Catalogues
* Price lists
* Ads
* Company vehicles
* Signage
* PR
* In fact just about anywhere you company is mentioned

Vanessa Hodge is the owner of Image Connect, a web design, marketing communications and printing company for new start up and small businesses. You can read further articles, hints & tips and more at Image Connect Web, Marketing, Printing or Image Connect London Blog

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