Wisely choosing a business name is one of the best business decisions you can make as an entrepreneur in 2018 whether you’re thinking of starting a new business or adopting a new business or company name.
If you’ve ever searched for a business, company, artist or song online without success due to spelling errors, you'll appreciate the value of getting your spellings or pronunciations right.
For many entrepreneurs, deciding on a business name is an unnecessary waste of time, they even submit business plans with company name yet to be determined, which can affect venture capital funding for some start-ups.
In truth, some entrepreneurs waste too much time deciding business or company name which ought not to be so; not with tools like business name generators that can help you generate relevant business name ideas in minutes.
For the next 3 minutes or so, we'll be looking at 5 more reasons to choose your business names wisely in 2018 and upwards but first:
What is a Business Name?
Your business name is the alias or name with which you do business, a.k.a. your DBA (doing business as) name, which is different from your legally registered name.
What’s in a Business Name?
Because we see lots of business or company names in newspapers, magazines, handbills, flyers, billboards, products, etc., we tend to not pay much attention to their intrinsic value. However, businesses and brands that understand the value of a good business name spend time and money to get it right. In recent times we’ve seen companies spend millions of dollars to acquire domain names. The domain name www.cars.com, for instance, was sold for a whopping $872m, the largest such sale in history. Here’s a list of 10 other domain names that recently sold for at least $8.5m.
7 Benefits of a Good Business Name
There are many benefits to choosing a good business name including:
- Brand awareness
- Brand recognition
- Brand recall
- Brand loyalty
- Word-of-mouth marketing
- SEO benefits like easily being typed in the search
7 Consequences of Choosing the Wrong Business Name
- Lack of brand awareness
- Lack of brand recognition
- The difficulty of brand recall
- Poor brand loyalty
- Poor mileage from word of mouth
- Difficulty typing your company name in search engines
- The high cost of business name change/rebranding, etc.
Now that we’ve seen some gains and pains of business name selection, here’s
How to Generate Business Name Ideas Quickly
There are several ways to come up with business name ideas such as:
- Business name generators
- Hiring copywriters
- Asking on Quora
- Asking friends and family
- Asking on social media
- Using mnemonics
- Using the founder’s initials
- Brainstorming
How to Validate Business Name Ideas
After you generate a company or business name ideas, it is a good idea to validate them before adoption.
Here’s a checklist to help you validate business name ideas. A good business name is:
- Available
- Agreeable (with your core values)
- Adjustable
- Brandable
- Explainable
- Recognizable
- Memorable
- Relatable
- Lovable/Likable
- Communicable
- Spell-able
- Pronounceable
- Translatable
- Sensible
- Trademarkable
- Marketable
- Sellable
- Buyable
- Scalable
These will help you select the best business or company name possible.
Now here are
5 More Reasons to Choose your Business Name Wisely in 2018
The following trends provide sufficient reasons for entrepreneurs to think twice before choosing a company or business name, in response to the changing ways by which customers discover businesses.
1. Google Search
With the number of Google searches performed daily at over 3.5 billion, and many businesses relying heavily on traffic from organic search, not optimizing business names for search is suicidal. Smart businesses adopt business names that are easy for searchers to spell and pronounce, that way they get into more search queries, and generate organic traffic to their websites or businesses.
2. Voice Search
Similarly, voice search is beginning to find its voice in the search engine space. 2016 reports indicate that 1 out of every 5 Google searches in the US was performed by voice. There’s also a corresponding increase in voice-enabled devices powered by AI and ML for speech-text conversion.
It is essential to choose a business or company name that customers of any tribe, ethnicity or accent can pronounce clearly for voice search purposes, especially if you conduct cross-border commerce.
3. Alexa
Due to the rise of voice search, many believe that Amazon’s Alexa, among others, will give Google a run for its money. However, many argue that in terms of contextual accuracy of search results, Google ranks better, citing accent, vocabulary, and pronunciation as factors that can affect Alexa voice search results. That’s why you want a business name that’s voice-search friendly.
4. Programmatic
Which leads us to programmatic commerce, that allows you to program repetitive online purchases. If your chosen business name is rather difficult to pronounce and spell, it’ll be problematic for your programmatic commerce.
Assuming a voice purchase request requires Alexa to search for your products and place an order using your brand name, but it’s hard to spell or pronounce correctly, you’ll likely miss a sale or sales plus a potential customer with high AOV (Average Order Value) and LTV (Life-Time Value).
5. Multilingual SEO
Another step businesses can take to improve discovery by the search is to render their business names or website copy in different major languages. Multilingual websites have a wider reach and can bring in new traffic sources that monolingual sites can’t.
Doing this can make a huge difference between success and failure in business especially when combined with multiregional SEO.
Conclusion
Before selecting your next business name, consider Search Engines, Voice Search, Alexa, Programmatic Commerce and Multilingual/Multiregional SEO, in addition to the other steps discussed. These are all important ways to find or discover businesses, do not ignore them.
