Express your brand digital-age-appropriately

Part 7 of Build an Awesome Brand Month. See all other articles here: Build an Awesome Brand

By Jim Morris

As you watch the marketing world grappling with our ever-morphing digital reality, you may feel like you’ve lost whatever tenuous understanding you may have had about how to prioritize your marketing dollars. Apparently, traditional media have become dinosaurs, and the holy grail, which a few years ago was banner ads and email blasts, has become social media. Meanwhile, you’re just trying to figure out how to keep your current customers engaged and attract some new ones somehow. You’ve got a website, but it feels invisible.

What to do, what to do? I can’t begin to answer most of these big picture questions. But can suggest one simple, understandable, doable thing that is impervious to digital obsolescence. In fact, this thing, while not itself inherently digital, increases in value and becomes more indispensable as the world becomes more and more digital.

What is this thing? Well, given that this is Tagline Jim talking here, you may have already guessed that the answer is . . . umm . . . your tagline. Or rather, a really good tagline to replace your current tagline.

Just think about it for a minute. What’s the overall communication trend in digital land? Your communications with current and prospective customers need to be shorter, quicker, more condensed, more agile, more adaptable, more able to evoke an emotion or action in fewer words, a shorter time, a smaller space. Bytes, not blather.

Print ads, brochures and direct mail pieces we reduced to emails and banner ads, then texts and tweets. It’s the incredible shrinking message.

So guess what form your most condensed, concise, potent and “media infinite” brand message takes: why, it’s your tagline. The smaller your opportunity is to connect, the bigger the role your tagline takes on.

While the rest of the world tries to grasp the value of viral marketing, textvertising, appvertising, tweetvertising and the like, your potential customers simply need to grasp your brand. So give them a “brand handle.” Give them a good, engaging, differentiating tagline and you’ve taken one tangible, step toward communicating your brand in this brave new digital world.

Jim Morris is a tagline specialist. You can find him on the web at TaglineJim.com

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