A good slogan can help define a brand and drive customers through the door. A great slogan can last for decades and turn a fledgling brand into a worldwide phenomenon.

The catch? Great slogans are nearly impossible to come up with for a layman, and advertising agencies charge thousands of dollars for their services. Many smaller businesses, therefore, skip the slogan altogether, reducing their potential for growth.

Enter Slogan Slingers. Founded by Rich Davis, a professional writer himself, the site aims to help small businesses market their goods and services with catchy slogans for less.

Davis first created the site as a place for himself and his friends in advertising to compete in writing catchy taglines. As word of the site got out, more users wanted to take advantage of the service. According to Slogan Slingers’ estimates, there are currently hundreds of writers competing in the “thousands upon thousands” of contests that have been submitted to the site.

“At first it was mainly professionals,” Davis told Crowdsourcing.org. “Now my educated guess, based on emails I receive and general correspondence with the writers, is that it's slightly more professionals than amateurs. The low level amateur writers tend to leave after a couple contests of performing poorly. The skilled writers are regulars. They know they have a real shot of winning or placing high so they stick with the site.”

For small businesses, there's enormous appeal in receiving “We have a site messaging system where writers can be contacted by clients for other projects. And that has happened,” Davis confirmed. “We don't proactively encourage or discourage that. Our job is just focusing on slogan contests.dozens of crafty slogans in a matter of days. The price is another drawing point – Slogan Slingers normally charges a $35 administration fee and sets the reward floor at $200. Due to a limited-time promotion, however, the prices have dropped to $25 and $50, respectively, making a potentially great slogan available to any business looking to improve their marketing. The businesses, however, are not the only ones who can benefit from the service.

“Personally, I hope our writers do get larger projects out of this,” Davis continued. “Slogan Slingers gives writers a chance to showcase their creativity and maybe that can lead to writing an entire ad campaign, a website or an annual report. Nothing would make me happier.”

Slogans can be created not just for companies, but also products, services, and events. In order to create the most pointed tagline, Slogan Slingers requires users to fill out a strategy brief. It asks not only about the nature of the product, but also about the target audience, the message the business is looking to convey through the slogan, and the tone of the slogan, among other things. This meticulous process is essential to getting the slogan right, as the writers do not have familiarity with the business or product they are marketing.

“Like any marketing initiative, doing your homework and following an effective strategy is critical,” Davis explained. “Since the process is so easy to initiate and so inexpensive I'm sure there's a tendency for some businesses to not give their contest the forethought it deserves. That would be a mistake.

“A great slogan achieves a goal,” he continued. “To me, nothing is more frustrating than seeing a client fill out their online strategy brief and put N/A for questions like ‘Who is your target audience?’ Like most crowdsourcing sites, it takes good input to get great output.”

In the future, Davis hopes to implement crowdsourcing not only in the creation of the taglines, but also in testing out audience reception.

“For now, once the slogan submission period is over, we encourage our contest holders to use social media to get instant responses on their options before selecting a winner,” said the company founder. “We have been focusing on the core elements of the site so far but I can see a future feature where writers can rank slogans submitted and that input is made available to a contest holder to help them in their decision-making.”

Crowdsourcing is already changing the way large and small businesses brand themselves and market their products, and the future for this field seems very bright.