Cyber Monday’s online sales hit an all-time high in 2018, capping out at a record $7.9 billion, according to Adobe Analytics. That’s an increase of 19.3% from the previous year — and sales are only expected to go up this December.
Are you ready to hit “go” on your Cyber Monday email campaign? Here’s a content calendar you can use to make sure you’re maximizing your promotion.
Your 5-Email Campaign for Cyber Monday 2019
November 29: Send your “teaser” email. Tease your promotion with a “preview” email sent out three days* before Cyber Monday. Let your subscribers know something big is coming on December 2 — but don’t tell them what. Get them excited for the announcement.
*You don’t want this email to go out more than three days in advance or you might cannibalize your sales leading up to the promotion going live. People may be hesitant to purchase if they know a better deal is just a few days away.
December 1: Send a countdown email. The night before your promotion goes live, send a 12-hour countdown email to your audience. (The anticipation!) You can schedule this ahead of time inside your AWeber account.
December 2 (morning): Launch your promotion. Send your promotion — whether it’s a coupon code that gives your subscribers a certain percentage off their purchase, a free gift with their purchase, or a special giveaway for the first 200 customers who purchase — on Cyber Monday.
December 2 (afternoon): Resend your promotion. Not all your subscribers will engage with your email. That’s okay: Their inboxes are flooded on Cyber Monday with deals. That’s why I recommend resending your message to anyone on your list who didn’t open or click later in the day. It’s another opportunity for you to reach them.
December 3: Post-promotion email. With AWeber, you can “tag” subscribers that go from your promotion emails and hit a certain page of your website. The next day, send that group of subscribers that made it to a certain product page or the checkout — but never ended up making a purchase — a followup email. Let them know the product is still available, reiterate the benefits of purchasing, and tell them that you’ll extend the promotion another few hours just for them!
Creative Cyber Monday Email Examples
Below are a few of our favorite Cyber Monday email marketing ideas from years past. Use them as fodder to create and launch your own email marketing campaign with AWeber this Cyber Monday.
Cyber Monday Email: Chubbies
Chubbies, the brand that’s known for short shorts (think: “Larry Byrd” short shorts…i.e. lots of skin), had fun with their Cyber Monday email campaign. They called it Thighber Monday, and turned it into an event.
A new free gift — like duffle bags, blankets, hats, and more — was revealed every hour of Thighber Monday via email. If you bought a product on their site, you would receive that hour’s free gift along with your purchase.
The campaign kept people coming back to their inbox hour after hour to check out which free gift would be unveiled next.
Cyber Monday Email: Melyssa Griffin
Digital marketer and coach Melyssa Griffin helps bloggers and entrepreneurs grow their audiences and incomes. For Cyber Monday, Melyssa bundled all her online courses together for a fantastic deal. Bundling or packaging certain products can make the promotion feel larger and more impactful than giving a discount for each separate item.
Cyber Monday Email: Taco Bell
Taco Bell didn’t offer a Cyber Monday promotion. Instead, they banked on how hungry you’d be after a long day of online shopping. Taco ‘bout a novel idea.
Remind your customers of how good they always have it! That’s what Everlane did with their “No sale here” email. They called out the fact that their prices are already 50% lower than most retailers, day in and day out.
Motivational speaker and coach, Lewis Howes, focused on “exclusivity” for his Cyber Monday deal. He played up all the benefits of being part of the elite, members-only program and offered a significant discount on his monthly coaching program.
Quickly launch your Cyber Monday email campaign
Try AWeber for free for 30 days, and get access to all of our powerfully-simple email marketing solutions. You can set up an effective, beautiful, branded email campaign for Cyber Monday in minutes!
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Year after year, hundreds of marketers report increased efforts and spending on their content marketing — or the intention to do so.
But great content is a waste if your audience doesn’t know it exists.
Content distribution is an integral part — if not the most important part — of your content strategy.
This guide will equip you with the tools you need to distribute the content you create. By the end, you’ll be able to build a content distribution strategy that gets your content in front of — and consumed by — your audience.
Although the content distribution process happens after you create your content, it should be step one of your content marketing strategy. You should know where and how you’re going to publish and promote your content before you put the proverbial pen to paper. Otherwise, your time and resources could go to waste.
Take a look at these content distribution statistics:
As you can see, in recent years, we’ve seen a rapid influx of content … met with dwindling demand. With almost 4.5 million blog posts published every day, there’s only so much content we can consume. Marketing influencer Mark Schaefer argues that, because of this “content shock”, content marketing may not be a sustainable strategy for every business.
While I won’t agree or disagree with this theory, I will outline everything you need to know to successfully distribute your marketing content.
Before we dive into the various content distribution channels through which you can share your content, let’s cover the different content types you can create for distribution.
Content Types for Distribution
There are many types of content you can create to market your business. But not all types of content are created equal (literally), and each type typically requires its own content distribution plan.
Ebooks
Distribute your ebook content through a gated form on a dedicated landing page. One example of this is HubSpot’s landing pages through which visitors can submit their information to access and read each ebook.
Distribute your video content through YouTube or Video. One example of this is HubSpot’s YouTube channel, which shares brand content, how-to videos, and written content in video form.
Infographics
Distribute your infographic content through Pinterest, as well as on your blog. One example of this is HubSpot’s infographic blog posts that are shareable on Pinterest. HubSpot also has its own Pinterest account on which it shares its own infographics in addition to other brand’s.
Case Studies and Success Stories
Distribute case studies and success stories through a dedicated page on your website. One example of this is HubSpot’s Case Studies page, where visitors can find all kinds of case studies featuring real HubSpot customers.
Webinars
Distribute your webinar content through a dedicated webinar page on your website, as well as calls-to-action (CTAs) on your blog posts. One example of this is HubSpot’s Webinars webpage, where visitors can browse and access free webinar content.
Blogs
Distribute your blog content through — you guessed it — your blog. You can also send out a daily or weekly newsletter with a round-up of your best or recently published content. One example of this is HubSpot’s Marketing, Sales, Service, and Agency blogs, each which has its own dedicated email newsletter.
Content Distribution Channels
Content distribution channels are the channels through which you share and promote the content you create. There are three types of content distribution channels: owned, earned, and paid. The channels you use to distribute your content will vary based on your audience and resources.
1. Owned Content Distribution
Owned channels are the content properties your company owns. You can control when and how content is published on your owned channels. These include your website and blog, your social media profiles, your email newsletter, or a mobile publishing app.
2. Earned Content Distribution
Earned channels (also known as “shared” channels) are when third parties promote or share your content. These third parties could include customers, journalists, bloggers, and anyone who shares your content for free — hence the name “earned”.
These channels include public relations, social shares and mentions, guest articles and roundups, and product reviews. They also include forums and communities like Reddit or Quora — while posting on these sites is free, the content is owned by these third parties and therefore falls under earned channels.
The following diagram illustrates how these three content distribution channels overlap and how you can combine them to enhance their impact and reach.
Moreover, some marketers recommend that you spend 20% of your allotted content marketing time creating your content — and the other 80% promoting it. Sound like something you’re doing? If not, this is where a content distribution strategy comes in handy.
A content distribution strategy is important for a few reasons:
It boosts your content impact past curation and creation. As I said above, great content is practically useless if nobody’s reading it. A content distribution strategy gets your gorgeous content in front of the right eyes.
It aligns your team and the teams with which you collaborate to create and share the content. Depending on the size of your company, you may have several cooks in the content marketing kitchen. (I know we do at HubSpot.) A content distribution strategy aligns all these different parties and ensures you’re all collaborating efficiently.
It sets goal benchmarks against which you can measure your distribution performance. Content distribution can be vague — a simple press of the “Publish” button, and you’re done. A content distribution strategy helps you set benchmarks and hard goals to chase while publishing and promoting your work.
Here’s how to build a content distribution strategy for yourself.
1. Research your target audience.
Content distribution is all about getting your content in front of your audience — not just any audience. You can’t do this properly if you don’t know where they are and what they like to read. Before you build your strategy any further, research your target audience so you know precisely who will be consuming your content.
Start by collecting demographic data from your website visitors, email subscribers, social media followers, and customers. Take a look at your audience’s gender, age, income, location, education, and related categories. You can pull this information from Google Analytics or your social media analytics tools.
Next, collect feedback directly from your customers, email subscribers, and social media followers. Ask them about their pain points and needs as well as how they feel about your current content and distribution efforts.
Use these two data points to create your buyer persona. Your buyer persona(s) act as models of your ideal customers and content consumers and represent their pain points, information preferences, and motivations as you build out the rest of your content distribution strategy.
2. Audit your content.
You may already have some published content out there, such as blog posts, videos, social media content, and more. While your new content distribution strategy doesn’t involve removing that content, you should perform an audit to understand if it’s helping or hurting your distribution efforts. Auditing your current content will also remind you of which topics you’ve already written about and which ones you can expand on.
A thorough content audit is comprised of three main parts:
Logging your content. Logging your content can be done manually or with a tool. (We recommend the latter, especially if you’ve been publishing content on multiple properties and channels.) Tools like Screaming Frog can help you crawl and collect your content, listing each URL, title, and description in a spreadsheet. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. If you opt for a manual content audit, follow the steps in our blog post here.
Assessing your content impact. If you crawl your content with SEMRush, the tool will also list content length, social shares, and backlinks. This information can help you assess the impact of each piece of content, alerting you to anything that needs to be updated, rewritten, or erased.
Identifying your content gaps. You can also identify gaps in your content using the Ahrefs Content Gap tool or by performing keyword research to discover new keywords or keyword phrases to add to your content, thus helping it rank higher and for more terms.
Check out this blog post for 30+ more content auditing tools.
3. Choose your content distribution channels.
Your content distribution channels are arguably more important than your content itself, hence why this step comes before content creation and after target audience research. Once you know your target audience, you’ll have a much better idea of how to get your content in front of your followers and customers.
Depending on your analysis, you may post on forums and communities like Reddit or Quora — and pay to promote your content on those sites, too. Alternatively, you may choose to exclusively share content on social media channels, or perhaps you find that traditional PR is your best route.
Regardless of which content distribution channels you choose, ensure they align with your audience’s preferences and behaviors.
Also, be sure to optimize your owned distribution channels — your blog, email newsletter, and social media profiles — as these are relatively inexpensive and in your control. Even if research shows that your audience prefers forums to social media or news sites to company blogs, never neglect your owned properties as these reflect on your brand and product.
After you determine your distribution channels, consider what types of content you’d like (and have the resources) to create.
Many companies choose to publish all of their content on their blog and then repurpose and re-publish it. Blog posts are universally consumed, easy to repurpose and localize (i.e. translate into other languages), and simple to share — not to mention that almost 50% of buyers read a company’s blog while making purchase decisions.
For these reasons, we recommend building a business blog and then expanding your content types from to share on other channels.
Consider the content types we discussed in the beginning of this guide, and think about how you’ll repurpose and distribute them.
5. Set your content distribution KPIs and goals.
Goals help us recognize where we’re going and what success might look like when we get there. Your content distribution strategy should involve setting goals for your content key performance indicators (KPIs) and their subsequent metrics:
key performance indicators
related metrics
Traffic/reach
Unique page views by channel and source
Engagement
Bounce rate, average time on page
Top content (and falling content)
Top page views, top exits
Impact
Click-throughs, conversions, backlinks
Sentiment
Comments, social shares
These metrics may vary based on your distribution channel (i.e. you can’t track comments on your email newsletter or top exists on your social media ads), so be sure to choose the metrics that correspond best to each channel. It might take a few months to establish a baseline for each channel, especially if you haven’t used it before.
Set SMART goals for your content using these metrics. Here’s an example:
Specific: I want to increase our blog’s organic traffic by boosting backlinks from other reputable websites and blogs. This will increase our search engine ranking, thus bringing in more organic traffic.
Measurable: I’d like 30 new backlinks to our blog.
Attainable: We’re already generating 10 new backlinks each month without an intentional strategy, so I believe 30 new backlinks this month with our strategy is feasible.
Relevant: This goal aligns with our broader organic content marketing strategy and could also boost our earned media as we get mentions from press outlets and third-party bloggers.
Time-bound: I’d like to receive these backlinks within the next month.
6. Build an editorial calendar (and include distribution).
Content marketing and distribution require lots of planning to be successful. This is where an editorial content calendar can come in handy. You can create one in Excel or Google Sheets, or even use Google Calendar. Tools like CoSchedule, Asana, and Trello are helpful, too.
Your editorial calendar, like your content distribution strategy, helps your team stay aligned and work towards common goals. It also gives your writers and editors a roadmap for what they’ll be working on in the coming weeks and months.
Here’s what your editorial calendar may look like (using this post as an example):
Your editorial calendar is the perfect place to include your content distribution plans and goals. Here’s what that may look like on your editorial calendar:
See how the right-hand columns now include categories like “Publish Destinations” and “Repurposing Plans”? Your editorial calendar should serve as your hub for all content creation and distribution plans.
After you research your audience, audit your content, decide on your distribution channels and content types, and build your editorial calendar … it’s time to create your content. Content creation will vary based on your resources, team size, industry, and brand, so to get the most pointed, applicable advice, check out our Guide to Content Creation.
As you work on your new content, check out these tools:
AnswerthePublic, which can help you flesh out topics and understand what your audience is searching for
Canva, which can help you build gorgeous infographics and images
Vidyard, which is a video hosting and publishing platform made for marketers
Anchor, which is a free podcasting tool for beginners
You’ve created your content … now it’s time to put it out in the world. Following your editorial calendar and chosen distribution channels, publish and market your new content. As for any marketing channel, be sure you follow rules to optimize your posts on each channel.
As always, be sure to keep an eye on your content distribution results. Remember those KPIs, metrics, and SMART goals you established in step five? Time to pull those out.
After you’ve published your content, take a look at Google Analytics, your social media analytics dashboards, and your blog performance — depending on where and how you distributed the content. Make sure you set a routine time to measure and analyze (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) so that you can establish a baseline and know which numbers you can beat the following week or month.
Whew! So, that’s what it takes to build a content distribution strategy. Be sure to iterate on this process; these guidelines may change as you expand your content efforts and scale your team. Now, let’s talk about the tools you need to get it done.
Content distribution can be an arduous process, but thankfully there are many content distribution tools out there to help you get your work discovered and consumed.
Content Tools
These tools help you publish your content on additional networks and forums to reach broader audiences.
1. Medium
Medium is a content platform that individuals and businesses alike use to publish content. You can use Medium in addition to or in lieu of your traditional blog. (We recommend in addition to your blog as this will give your content the broadest reach.)
Medium is where thousands of readers consume content. It’s a one-stop-shop platform for all kinds of content … kind of like Amazon is for products. For that reason, consider publishing to Medium to increase the number of people who see your content.
Price: Free and paid
2. LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn Pulse is similar to Medium except it lives on LinkedIn. While there isn’t a homepage that aggregates all the published content, it’s still a helpful tool for getting your written content in front of your followers (for free). You can publish on LinkedIn Pulse through your personal or company LinkedIn pages by simply clicking “Write an article”.
Note: LinkedIn Pulse is also a mobile application that you can download to receive daily headlines and trending news.
Read more about publishing on LinkedIn Pulse here.
Price: Free
PR Tools
These tools help connect you with journalists and publications to help expand your earned distribution channels and gain backlinks.
3. PR Newswire
PR Newswire is a press release distribution network. The platform helps you target and contact journalists and outlets by specific industries, geographic areas, and topics. It offers packages for state and local, regional, and national press.
Price: Paid
4. HARO
HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, which is an online platform that connects journalists and sources. In this case, you’d be the source.
When you sign up for HARO, you’re sent daily emails with journalist queries. Respond to these queries to be potentially featured in an article. This is a reactive content distribution tool, but it’s helpful for getting press mentions and backlinks.
Price: Free and paid
Social Tools
These tools help distribute your content on social media and amplify your posts.
5. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software, meaning its useful for email marketing, analytics, and social amplification. I’ve placed it in the “Social Tools” section because its Social Inbox is incredibly helpful for content distribution.
From your Social Inbox, you can monitor, schedule, and post content to your social networks. You can also access information from your email marketing campaigns so you have the big picture of your readers and customers.
Price: Free and paid
6. ClickToTweet
ClickToTweet is a tool that equips your readers to share soundbites of your content on Twitter with a single click. You create your content soundbites, and ClickToTweet provides a link. When readers click that link, the tool opens their Twitter with the content soundbite already ready to post.
It also links to your Twitter account and content — allowing your readers to distribute your content for you.
Price: Free
7. GaggleAMP
GaggleAMP is a social amplification tool that allows you to aggregate your employee’s social networks and post company content directly to them. Employees have the option to review and improve content before it’s posted or allow it to go through automatically. This is a great alternative to constantly bugging your staff to post on about your business.
You can also use this tool to link to social networks from partners, customers, brand advocates, and more.
Price: Free and paid
8. AddThis
AddThis is an on-page social sharing tool. It allows your readers to share your content without bouncing from your page (and potentially getting distracted). You can also integrate AddThis share buttons into your email newsletter and other assets.
Price: Free
Analysis Tools
These tools help you measure and analyze the impact of your social posts and other distribution efforts.
9. Mention
Mention is a social media monitoring tool that provides social media listening, publishing, crisis management, and more. You can use Mention to monitor any mentions of your brand name, content, or social networks and respond accordingly. This is a great tool for measuring the impact of and engagement around your content and see who is promoting it for you.
Price: Free and paid
10. SharedCount
SharedCount is a tool that helps you measure the engagement of your social media posts. Simply input a URL, and SharedCount will report on its likes, shares, comments, and other engagement measures. While it can’t help you distribute your content, it can alert you to which pieces are performing well and which pieces may need to be updated or scrapped.
Price: Free and paid
Additional Tools
These additional tools help with your content distribution efforts.
11. Outbrain
Outbrain is a paid amplification tool that aggregates your content at the bottom of other articles. You can set up content campaigns with an RSS feed or specific URL(s), and Outbrain will place them under related content, encouraging readers to click and read yours.
Outbrain works with an impressive network, including digital publications like NYT and Mashable.
Price: Pay-per-click
12. WiseStamp
WiseStamp is an email tool that allows you (and your employees) to share your latest content in your email signature. Your email signature is often a forgotten but important piece of digital real estate that practically everyone who opens your emails will see. WiseStamp helps you make the most of that space.
Price: Paid
Distribute Your Content to Grow Better
Amazing content is a waste if no one is consuming it. Content distribution is a critical piece of the content marketing puzzle. It’s is also the key to boosting your brand awareness, collecting loyal followers, and encouraging your readers to click, act, and become customers.
Put these content distribution tips and tools to get your content in front of your audience.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
WeWork, the ambitious office-sharing startup valued at more than $47 billion earlier this year, is planning to lay off “thousands” of employees as its financial woes mount. According to the New York Times, at least 4,000 employees could lose their jobs, with cuts expected to come from both WeWork’s core subletting business and its ancillary…
These days, we live in a world of infinite supply…
In just a few clicks, anyone can start a business. Anyone can create products, build an online store, publish ads, and reach an audience online. This means that every market is becoming flooded with businesses offering similar products, features, and solutions.
So to stand out you need to have a brand that your customers connect with, and care about deeply.
Before we jump into some strategies and tactics for creating a brand your customers will truly care about, let’s first look at what exactly a brand is.
The word “brand” is used a lot in marketing today. But what exactly does brand mean? That question that might sound simple… but is actually pretty complex, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.
David Ogilvy describes a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.”
Marty Neumeier, an author and speaker who writes about branding and innovation, says “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”
And Camille Baldwin, one of the Pattern Brands founding team, and star of Breaking Brand, says “brand to me is identity. It’s all of the things that make up identity, your values, your principles, who you are, your characteristics and your intention.”
Brand to me is identity. It’s all of the things that make up identity, your values, your principles, who you are, your characteristics and your intention.
Camille Baldwin, VP of Brand, Pattern Brands
So to summarize… Your brand is the identity of your business, and how it makes people feel.
Now, let’s dive into some takeaways from Breaking Brand to help you build a buzzworthy brand that stands out against your competitors.
4 Ways to build a memorable brand
1. Know what your consumers care about
Most people are really good at explaining the “what” and the “how” of their business. For example, say you’re an accountancy company, describing the what and the how is pretty simple…
What you do is you help individuals and businesses to ensure their finances are in shape.
How you do it might vary, but it tends to involve some form of account management where you assist with invoicing or balance the books every month or quarter.
And the thing that will help one accountancy company stand out from its competitors is moving from the what and the how to the why.
The “why” is what will make a potential customer choose your business over another. The “why” is your differentiator.
In general, consumers aren’t too fussed about how you do your work — the tools you use, your internally processes, and things like that. What consumers care about is “why does this business matter in my life?”
And to go back to the accountancy example — we already explained the what and the how — but the “why” might not be so obvious. For example, if an accountancy company mostly serves small businesses, the “why” might freeing up time for the business owner to spend with family and friends.
So how do you find your why?
Customer research is a great place to start.
At Buffer we often do research interviews with customers to learn how our product helps them, and to better understand how they describe the benefits of Buffer. We’ve even had teammates spend the day with customers at their offices to see first-hand how Buffer fits into their routines and workflows.
And in Breaking Brand, Emmet Shine, co-founder of Pattern Brands, talks about the importance of knowing the customer when it comes to building a brand consumers will care about.
Before starting Pattern Brands, Emmett helped over 50 businesses launch to market, and one of those businesses was Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain selling healthy salads and grain bowls.
When working on the Sweetgreen brand and trying to understand its customers, Emmett and his team spent countless hours at Sweetgreen restaurants. They would watch how the staff would prepare salads, listen to how customers would place orders and immerse themselves in how the company works.
Essentially, they were trying to understand every tiny detail about what made Sweetgreen unique and special.
This enabled the team to craft a brand that really emphasised what customers were looking for from Sweetgreen and helped them to find their “why”.
Now Sweetgreen has over 75 restaurants and reportedly generated in excess of £100 million in 2018. So they clearly have a brand that fits what consumers are looking for.
2. Find the technical, functional, and emotional benefits of your business
Once you’ve done your customer research, you can begin to think about the various types of benefits your business offers consumers.
In episode one of Breaking Brand, Pattern’s VP of Brand, Camille Baldwin shares how the brand pyramid framework can help you to define those benefits.
Brand pyramids have been around since the late nineties, but still play a key role in brand strategy. Pyramids help you to answer fundamental questions about your business and its place in the market. Here’s an example brand pyramid from Insead Knowledge:
Three of the key elements of any brand pyramid are the technical, functional and emotional benefits your business offers consumers.
Technical benefits
At the bottom of your pyramid, you’re thinking about the technical benefits of your brand (labeled ‘Features and attributes’ in the above image). Essentially this will help you to define what you do as a company. At this stage you’ll want to ask questions like: How is this business benefiting the consumers? How will it make money? What are we offering?
For example, at Buffer we might say the technical benefit of our product is to manage all of your social media content and profiles in one place.
Functional benefits
Then, with the technical benefits of your brand defined, it’s time to look at the functional benefits you can offer consumers. Functional benefits are essentially what your customers get when they buy your product or service.
Functional benefits tend to focus on things like how a product can improve your life, help you stay connected to others or help you to make forward progress.
At Buffer, a functional benefit might be not having to hit publish manually every-time you want to share to social media. Or in the case of a car: a big, spacious family car will offer the functional benefit of space for your whole family to travel in comfort.
Emotional benefits
Next up, are emotional benefits. And these are really what makes one brand stand out from another.
Emotional benefits are how your brand makes someone feel based on the stories you tell consumers.
One emotional benefit of Nike, for example, is that its equipment will make you feel like a professional athlete. And at Buffer we might say the emotional benefit of our product is peace of mind knowing that your content will be posted to social media platforms at exactly the right time every time.
As you go through everything you’ve learned during your customer research phase, start looking out for emotion-based words your customers, or potential customers, use to describe your company or the problem you’re solving.
Whenever someone says “I feel” or “it made me.. happy, relaxed, proud, or healthy”, for example, this helps you to identify the emotional benefits your company delivers.
3. Craft a simple tagline and message
Just Do It, Think Different, I’m Lovin’ It…
Those are all examples of great brand taglines. By saying just two or three words, I bet you knew exactly which businesses I was talking about. And that’s the power of being able to boil your message down to something simple, and memorable.
In episode three of Breaking Brand, Emmett Shine, co-founder of Pattern Brands explains: “The thing about branding and marketing, is you can do years worth of research. But if you can’t boil it down to this thin sliced tagline it doesn’t matter.”
The thing about branding and marketing, is you can do years worth of research. But if you can’t boil it down to this thin sliced tagline it doesn’t matter.
It took the Patten Brands team months of ideating and back-and-forth to land on their tagline “Enjoy Daily Life”.
But now that simple statement acts as a guiding light for everything they do. From the content they post on social media to the products they sell.
Boiling your whole business down to one sentence, or even just a couple of words can be very tough. And you can’t force it. One of the best ways to craft the perfect tagline is to facilitate brainstorms and create space for idea sharing. Another thing the Pattern Brands team has done was to journal about their business and riff on ideas in private too.
And sometimes the best ideas will come to you outside of the office. So don’t be afraid to think outside the box, and away from your desk.
Communicating a clear message in just a few words is very difficult. One way we’ve found to come up with taglines at Buffer is to start long and edit down.
So to begin with, write exactly what your business delivers for customers in as many words as it take — this could be a paragraph or two, maybe even longer. And remember to think about the emotional benefits here too, not just the technical and functional benefits you offer.
Next, you’ll want to take what you’ve just written and edit it down to just one or two sentences. Repeat that process to make it one sentence, or just a few words. Then take that final piece of copy and play with a number of different versions: Rewrite it, change out words, and experiment with different lengths. This process will help you to distill all of the thoughts you wanted to share about your business into a short, memorable tagline.
Now you might be wondering: “Why is a tagline so important?”
From personal experience, I know I’ve never bought a Mac because their tagline is “think different.” But having that tagline in places means that Apple has a clear mission, and everything it does — from the adverts it makes, to its keynote launches — is guided by that vision.
4. Ensure your business lives and breaths your brand
To be successful, and for consumers to trust your message, you have to live your brand.
For example, Nike says its mission is to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” And the company sees every single person as an athlete, not just the pros.
But Nike doesn’t just say that, it lives by it.
That’s why the company focuses on creating the most innovative clothing and footwear, and why its advertising revolves around inspirational messages and stories.
Nike’s brand is reflected in every piece of content it puts out on social media. Just before writing this, I jumped over to Nike’s main Instagram account, here are just a few posts I spotted:
An IGTV video with Saquon Barkley sharing where his NFL dreams started.
A photo of women’s marathon world record holder Brigid Kosgei with former record holder Paula Radcliffe.
A photo of Rafael Nadal sharing his ambitions as a child.
Of course, not all businesses will have the resources of Nike, or the access to global superstars for that matter. But it still serves of a great example of ensuring the essense of your brand shines through on every platform.
To go back to the accountancy example I mentioned earlier. If your “why” or emotional benefit is giving small business owners more free time to spend away from work, you could ensure all of your messaging and content supports this mission. This could mean Instagram posts with clients enjoying themselves away from the office or blog posts about disconnecting from work. It could even mean you rethink the imagery and copy you use on your website.
As I mentioned right at the start of this post, your brand is the identity of your business and how it makes people feel. So every single touchpoint where someone can interact with your business should represent what you want your brand to be, and how you want people to feel.
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