Business names no matter how easy it looks do get a lot of entrepreneurs worried and can even cause a level of disagreement among team members and partners. During the acquisition and merger process, which of the business names should be adopted and which should be dropped or how can the business names be combined to drive new purpose? Choosing business names shouldn’t be difficult and shouldn’t be a herculean task. There’s a way to get business names right. Here is a step by step guide to help you come up with business names to drive growth.
1. Throw away sentiments when seeking business names.
Don’t fall in love so much with the name that you want to create your business name around your personal name. It’s not really bad to name your business after your name but it should be done for a more purposeful reason than sentiments. One reason could be that the business is a family business you wish to pass on immediate family.
2. What does your business stand for?
Some successful business might seem to have contradicted this. Companies like Apple taking up the name of fruit as a business name when it doesn’t sell fruit and not even an agro company but a tech company. Speculation had it that the name was coined from the Eden experience where a lady looked at the tree that was so irresistibly appealing that she had to take a bite disobeying God. So the idea is to create products with physical features, components, and beauty so much that people can’t resist buying the products.
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3. Who’s your target market?
Yes, it matters sometimes who your target markets are when choosing business names. Why? Some local names can drive home the point and essence of your business for easy pronunciation and acceptability. Your market might have a name associated already to such operations or services like the popular word in Nigeria used to describe bike riders “Okada” a company redefined this service operation in an Uber-like way and added the letter G to the Okada making it Gokada. Everyone in the market space hearing the name instantly knew what the business stood for and it was easy to be adopted.
4. How easy is the pronunciation?
Some names are hard to pronounce and others are easy. When creating a company, you need to reduce the barriers keeping customers and investors from buying into your vision. If your company name is hard to pronounce, difficult to spell, or makes little sense in relation to your product, you’ve unknowingly created a barrier to your own success says LinkedIn Influencer, Ilya Pozin.
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5. Domain name availability and online factors:
Some businesses capitalize on their online platform to penetrate the market. The purpose of this is to use names that will make it easy for your business to be found online. Some names have high search competition online and some others have high search volume but low competition. What does this mean? High search means a lot of people are searching for related info around that names which implies you can have all those audiences attracted to your platform with little effort if there are no other sites competing for same related names or keywords. If there are no much sites fighting for the same keyword it means there is low competition. Whichever way, the key is to find names you can easily rank for on search engines if online presence means so much to your business. (keywordtool.io, kwfinder.com, and semrush.com can help you search for these keywords or domain names.)
In conclusion, Names that are easy to remember, pronounce, spell, easy to rank for online and related to your business service or operations would go a long way to helping your business. These 5 step by step guide will help you so much. However, there are no dead rigid rules to follow when searching for a name for your business, these are only some suggestions to help one come with names that easily would penetrate and stay in the market and heart of customers. Names don’t entirely determine the success of a business but it sure contributes.
