Avoid Platitudes

Taglines are pretty ubiquitous, but often they’re unintentionally meaningless.  We recommend our clients avoid platitudes in their taglines because they often just make readers roll their eyes.

You need to avoid platitudes if you want to hook visitors on your website and convert them into paying customers.

A quick case in point

A company that provides marketing services to law firms recently blogged about a client:

I recently ran into a lawyer who was all excited about his firm’s new tagline. When he told me what it was, I asked, “What does that mean?”

He spent the next five minutes explaining what the new tagline meant to him. Apparently, the firm had hired a local advertising agency and spent a good deal of money to develop a “brand,” and this tagline was one of the components received…

I was concerned about the need for this attorney to spend all this time explaining his firm’s new tagline. An effective tagline conveys an obvious client benefit. If it needs explanation, it’s not going to work because prospects won’t get it.

 

Is your tagline a meaningless platitude?

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Avoid platitudes

Certainly one thing a tagline should never be is incomprehensible. But a more common mistake is to use a tagline that’s a platitude. A friend who’s a marketing consultant said it best: If your reaction to a tagline is “Well, I should hope so”, you have a platitude: a throwaway line that just takes up space. A local moving company has a tagline of “the caring moving company”. Isn’t your reaction to that line, “well, I should hope so!”? That’s a platitude.

Effective taglines are difficult to craft. That’s why so many turned out by copywriters sound good but mean nothing. Here are some real-life examples we found on the web:

• We provide free of charge estimates.
• We provide quality service to our customers.
• Experience…knowledge…quality.
• We offer our clients on-time service, replacement and repairs done right the first time with courtesy, convenience, cleanliness, competence and character.
• Our goal is to provide you with courteous, safe, comfortable and professional service
• We Provide Quality Service!
• We will provide courteous service to all customers …
• Brakes and Brake Service – We do it right.. We do it complete!
• We provide quality service through our well trained staffs … (grammar is another topic altogether)
• We provide quality service and products on time, with no defects.
• Caring and Knowledgeable Staff
• We believe in doing it right the first time.
• We give honest service at fair prices.

When there are lots of web sites out there offering similar products and services to yours, you can’t afford to waste web space on platitudes. You need to avoid platitudes and differentiate yourself from your competition. That’s how to capture the attention of your visitors. And that’s an essential first step toward converting them into paying customers.

Your thoughts? I’d love to see them in the Comments section below.

Need help with your search rankings? We get great RANKings in Google, almost like MAGIC. See what I did with our tagline there?