Writing a product one-liner can be one of the most challenging definitions for a category creating product.
Your product one-liner answers the question “What is your product?”
Having a product one-liner creates clarity to your audience:
Who your product is for, what your product does, and what benefit it creates for your potential customer? Unfortunately most businesses do two things instead:
- Avoid using a product one-liner
- Use many different one-liners to define their product, defeating the whole point of having one.
What ends up happening is nobody – not your target audience nor your internal marketing and sales teams – knows what your product actually is or does.
Your product one-liner defines why potential customers need your product in one phrase.
When you don’t define your product in one simple, clear phrase, the following can happen:
- Your marketing message is a mess because there is no definition of what your product does, who is the ideal customer, and what customers’ problems it solves
- It’s unclear what category your product is in
- Your customers never discover the pain point you solve for them
- The media consistently misinterprets your product functionality and gives you poor or incorrect media coverage
Let me show you how to create and test your product tagline.
Use the framework: “We do X solution for Y target audience to solve Z pain point” to create your own one-liner.
We use this formula because it aligns everyone in your company to the same target audience, customer pain point, and solution.
Your product could solve a lot of different problems. Write them all out. See which ones are going to solve the most pain in your customer’s life.
Pressure test the one-line in your social media and content marketing to see if its sticky and attracts your ideal customer, before you commit to rolling out marketing materials around it.
Your product one-liner may change whenever you expand your product, your product narrative changes, or your category changes. It’s not static. It’s always evolving, but you do need to get enough buy-in across your company that the one you’ve landed on is going to stick around for a while. Revisit it quarterly if you are in a fast-paced, changing market, or bi-annually if in a stable market.
Ideally, your product one-liner becomes the tagline that anchors your messaging framework for your product.