5 Tips To Creating An Excellent Converting Mission Statement Or Tagline

Breaking Down My Freebie, The Ultimate Checklist To Getting Your Website Started:

When someone asks you, “So what do you do?” How do you respond? Do you give them a short explanation that provides no exact details or do you go on a long-winded rant on what your business is and how you help people?

One of the checkboxes in The Ultimate Checklist to Getting Your Website Started, is creating a mission statement or tagline. This is something that you need to hone in on before creating your website because it helps create the baseline for a lot of your copy throughout. I like to explain it to clients by telling them to think of a quick two-sentence explanation of what you do, whom you serve, how your business is different, and what your call to action will be. This essentially becomes your online elevator pitch or your actual elevator pitch because why recreate the wheel? 

Today I’m going to share my five tips on creating an excellent converting mission statement or tagline so the next time someone asks, “What is it that you do?” you don’t undersell yourself or talk their ear off! 

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What Do You Do: 

This can be an easy point for you or a little harder if you need to nail down exactly one way to describe what you do. Let’s face it if you are an entrepreneur you wear lots of different hats and titles throughout the week! Ultimately though, what are the services you offer and how do you want someone to know you? This is where your ideal audience or client comes in, because if you know who you are talking to or who you want to work with then you know how to tell them what you do. 

Let’s go into an example mode, If you are an online business coach do you say, “I’m a business coach” or do you say, “ I’m a small business, business coach”. The more description you give, the more you can talk to your ideal audience or client. Another example could be instead of saying “I’m a brand photographer” you could say “I’m a brand specialist or an entrepreneur's next obsession”.

From this point, you want to move towards the next step which is who do you serve. A lot of times you can mix the two points of what you do with who you serve, but it’s still an important tip to include! 

Who And Where Is It That You Serve:

In the tip above you can see that sometimes mixing who you serve with what you do is a great way to condense your sentences, but also just give more insight into your business in general. This is your way to tell your ideal client that you are serving them. Like I stated before, knowing who your ideal audience is is a great way to write your copy because you start to learn who you are talking to and why you are talking to them. Who is it that you want to land on your website and serve? Are you serving women only or are you ok working with men? Are you looking to work with huge companies or small businesses are just your jam! Really think here and if you don’t know play around with it. 

Personally, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to just work with female entrepreneurs or if all small businesses were going to be a good fit for my clients. I’m still experimenting, but that’s why I usually say just entrepreneurs. Don’t think you can NEVER change your tagline after you write it. As your business grows and evolves so will your website or your content in general. Next, we want to start talking about how your business is different or how you want your business to stand out in the crowd. 

The other point you need to add is your location if you are a location-based service. If you are serving clients from all over the world there may not be a reason to state your location unless you want to meet with your clients in person at some point. Let’s say you are a yoga studio, you will probably want to include the location or surrounding area in your tagline to quickly tell your customers where you are.

How Your Business Should Stand Out In The Crowd: 

What’s your secret sauce? How do you want your business to stand out? When writing a tagline for your business you need to be descriptive and dare I say niche down to a specific audience that you are talking to. When you do this, you are able to get creative with the specific needs that, that audience wants to hear about. What makes your business stand out? Is it that you deliver your products locally? Find what the reason is that someone wants to work with you and use that in your tagline. There is only one you in this world so use your special talents to the best of your abilities. 

Again let’s look at some examples! My first one is don’t just say, “I’m a business coach for small business owners who are looking to grow their company”, but try “Are you a small business owner who is looking to organize and scale their business from $0 to $5K a year, then my personalized business coaching can help!”. With this example, you can see that there is more detail in the second option and it should help you as a reader or target audience get more excited about working with you. 

Call To Action:

At the end of this excellent tagline you just wrote, you need to tell your customer what to do after they read it! Where do they go, what are their next steps? On your website you usually have a button with the call to action phrase, saying something like “Ready To Learn More” or “Click This Way To Work Together”. What if you are out in the wild though? How do you give someone a CTA (Call To Action)? A great way to close your elevator pitch is to say something like, “If you want to book a call with me you can go to my website.” or “If you want to connect here is my business card with my name and contact information on it.” Those are pretty formal ways but you get the idea. You need to give someone a closing statement rather than just saying, “Sooo yaa, that's me.” 

Call to action may seem like a small piece of the puzzle but they can be important towards the conversion you are looking for. You want your clients clicking that button or taking your business card and calling you the next day. 

Keeping Things Short And Sweet

Finally, don’t think that this mission statement or tagline needs to be over a detailed paragraph with all the descriptive words possible. Keep things short and sweet, look at writing only one to two sentences. As a bonus tip, look at competitors' mission statements or taglines. How long is there's, what can you take away for inspiration? Don’t copy it just see how you can stand out. Do you notice that no one mentions a specific task you deal with in your business, mention that specific task to show your differences!

As an example, I decided to show you my tagline that lives on my homepage.

My tagline:

Are you an entrepreneur ready to own your business domain, create your webpage, then learn how to maintain it for the future? Let me help you build the Squarespace website of your dreams and teach you how to maintain it after I’m gone because it’s your site! 

Well, there you have part three of the six checkboxes from The Ultimate Checklist to Getting Your Website Started. Stay tuned for the other three points every other week and let me know if you want to hear about any other topics or if you have any questions about writing an amazing converting mission statement or tagline.