#02: My New Company + Writing Your Tagline

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

Hey, what's up? This is Dave Gerhart and you're listening to DGMG Radio. Okay, what's up? DGMG Radio. We're back. It's called DGMG Radio. Now. I'm out for a walk and today was actually the day that I put out the announcement Monday December 13th that I put out the announcement that I'm going full time working for myself, working on dgmg. DGMG is my marketing, education and consulting business. So I got all the stuff happening and it's all up on my website. Dave Gerhardt.com One of the reasons that I want to do this is just to point out some of the resources on my site. I'm going to be putting more there publicly for people. Not like taking away content that's behind the membership paywall. But obviously as a marketing person, the more content that I do have out on the web will bring in more people. And the reason I'm doing this podcast is like, I love this format and I think this can be the best like top of the funnel to get people to my website and check out all the other stuff. So if you go to my website, it's davegeart.com there's a tab there that's resources and there's a bunch of things that are, I think underused that are there. So I have my blog. I'm starting to put more content on the blog. There's a section for marketing examples. I've been keeping a public swipe file of emails, landing pages, videos. George helps me out with a bunch of my DGMG stuff. And basically like anytime I see something interesting either in the DGMG community or just on my own on social, I try to remember, I send it to George and we add it to the website. And so there's a public swipe file that's up on the site. There's also the DGMG job board. Two months ago there was as many as 300 open roles that basically when I talk about open roles, it's roles that have been posted within the last 30 days because jobs stay up for 30 days. Right now there was like, I think there's 113 jobs. And so if you're a marketing person looking for your next marketing job, it's a great place to go. But it's also a great place to post your jobs for your company if you're hiring. Like it's not magic. You don't just post a job on DJMG and magically get the dream candidate, but it's another piece in the distribution puzzle. Like recruiting. Just like marketing is about having a funnel. You have to promote your message and get it out there. And so can't hurt to post your jobs on your B2B marketing jobs on the job board dgmg jobs.com because it's free to do it. And there's also some other options for like to get your listing promoted. But I just like seeing what companies are hiring and it's cool to see like the notification emails. Like today there's two new jobs from workable. There's like there's new jobs every day. So check it out. I also have you can get your DGMG membership there. So now I offer the for new members I offer the membership includes access to the Facebook community and DGMG University. So Facebook community is like if you work in B2B marketing, you want to be in there because it's a group of peers, people sharing ideas, recommendations. And I'm in the group a lot and I try to really enforce. It's like, it can be stressful just dealing with the online community. But I think it's valuable because the more that I try to like, hey, this comment was invaluable. Can you add more? Or like today somebody posted like something that they had also just posted on LinkedIn. I'm like, no, don't post that in here. I don't want this to become like another content distribution place. I want it to be like a place for discussion where people can be like, hey, has anybody worked with this vendor before? Oh yeah, they're a piece of shit. I think it's really valuable. And so that's a community. Or like, people will send me, it's amazing. They'll send me like anonymous questions like, hey, I'm making $150,000 a year, but I think that I could be making this. If I make this jump. Can you post this anonymous question for me? It's really, it's cool. So you can get access to that and you also get like DJMG University, which is my library of ongoing marketing content. So I have everything, pretty much everything I've ever done is now in there. My Laws of Copywriting course is in there. 50 other videos. There's a, there's templates for setting marketing goals, for campaign planning, for budgeting, for marketing, career progression, for how to run your team. It's, it's really helpful and I try to have tried to add like templates and resources from people other than me that are kind enough to let me put those things in there. So just, it's an ongoing place where there's months that I add one or two things and there's months that I add a ton of things. But it's been a. I think it can be like, if it's something that you might Google, go there first because you'll find probably like a highly curated template or resource that you can use. And if there's something there that you, that's not in there, that you want, leave a comment on a video in there and you can say, hey, I'd also love to see something like this. That's really helpful. And the last thing that I have up under the resources section, I think is my new B2B marketing accelerator course. This is eight hours of one hour video. So it's eight, eight hours of video. A full deep dive into everything. A lot of people have Asked for like my playbook and it's just too hard to put a playbook into like a set of 10 slides and say this is my playbook because there's so much nuance in it. But this is eight hours of like a deep dive on product marketing, a deep dive on demand gen and marketing ops, a deep dive on PR and comms and creative, a deep dive on marketing team structure and hiring and setting goals and managing up. I've heard the early feedback is that it's been super, super useful and so you can sign up for that. That's the one that, that's not included in the DGMG membership. Anyway, not to like plug all this stuff, but I wanted to explain it for new people. That's all up on my site and just staying on top of my weekly, weekly emails and you're on my email list. Anyway, okay, so let's give you something actually actionable today versus me just promoting all my stuff. Funny today though. Today was my announcement. I had like 300 people join the email list today as the most website traffic I've had. So if only you could make an announcement pop like this all the time, then you wouldn't have to like actively try to grow the business. But the one actionable thing tip that I wanted to share today in this quick episode is about your tagline. And so many people, so many startups get obsessed with like, you know, what's our one liner? And when I think of the one liner, I think of like, what's your homepage headline, right? That's the most actionable version of a one liner today. It's like, that's how people buy, they go to and. Or this could be like your LinkedIn bio, Twitter bio, Instagram bio as a company, like what's that one liner when they go to your homepage, social media profiles, what's in your email signature? What's the one line explanation of the company? And I think people try to do too much with this, to be honest with you. And you can tell when a company has had too much feedback or they're trying to like appeal to six different audiences. Because you have to remember that the goal of your headline, the goal or developing that company tagline is not to, in ten words explain every single thing somebody needs to know about your product and your business. It's to get the right people to nod along and ideally stop in their tracks and say, huh, interesting. Tell me more. And then they keep scrolling your website page or scroll through your social media like, this is your one Liner. Hey, we, we do this problem. For example, you're a golfer and you want to, you want to increase your swing speed so you hit the ball farther next year, right? If I have a company that is called like Dave's golf, add 20 miles an hour to your golf swing in six months, right? If you're not interested in golf and adding, and adding, and adding 20 miles an hour to your swing, then that's not relevant to you. So, so it doesn't matter. But if it is, it doesn't explain how I can do it and why and why all that matters. But that headline stops me and says, yes, I understand enough about what you do in that one sentence and I'm willing to continue to read more. Started working with one company already on, on their website and story and stuff and positioning and you know, I see it time and time again, which is the headline on the website. Tries to appeal to everybody inside of the company. When it's like, no, the point is to have a simple clear statement that explains who you are and what you do and earns you the right to continue the conversation. It's like the copywriting advice that I give a lot, which is first line, second line, which is, hey, what's the goal of the first line of your copy? The goal of the first line of your copy is to get somebody to read the second line. What's the goal of the second line of your copy? And by copy I mean like email, landing page, website, whatever. The goal is to get them to read the third. And that's how I feel about the company tagline and the one liner. The goal of the one liner for your company is to get the right people to say, interesting, okay, how do you do that? And it has to be simple because if it's not simple, it's not memorable. And if the people inside of your company can't remember it and recite it, then there's no way that people on the outside. So just, I know there's a lot of gurus and frameworks and positioning docs and templates, but like, you don't have to have this like perfect textbook one liner. The goal of your company headline one liner. Just in a simple way explain who you are, what you do, ship that, make a decision on it, like get that out in the market, start using it, start having everybody, your company say it. I've also found that there's oftentimes like you have to remember there's often like two or three right ways. Probably there's actually more than that. And so ultimately it's about. Yeah, there's five different ways you could have written that headline. But let's pick one and let, let's go and let's like, let's align everything around this message. So keep it simple. Okay, As a quick update on what's going on all on my website and just a little piece of marketing knowledge on my walk this evening with my pal Daisy. That's the golden doodle. And check out everything on my site davegarhart.com and I'll be back with more DGMG radio soon.

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