Choosing a Memorable Business Name

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Resources

• Best LLC Formation Service: Northwest 
• Best Business Name Generator: TRUiC’s Name Generator

  Articles

• How to Name a Business

Strategies for Choosing a Business Name That Sticks

This section explores different strategies to create a business name that will resonate with your target audience and reflect your brand's identity. From understanding your brand and industry to considering legal aspects, we'll guide you through a thoughtful process that helps you pick the perfect name for your business.

Choosing a Memorable Business Name – Transcript

Coming up with a business name is one of the most important steps in forming a business. Your name affects your branding and the image of the company, as well as how many people will be able to find you when they're looking to take care of the problem that your business solves. Let's get you started on the right path to picking a business name. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a larger course dedicated to helping small businesses cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. That sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe.

In this first section of the course, we're gathering everything that we need to start a business like a pro. In the next few videos, we're going to be focusing on creating the name and the domain name for your business. While these naming videos are primarily helpful to someone starting a business. there's some information here that could be helpful to any established business as well. 

For those of you who are just starting your business, taking time to name your business well could have substantial impacts on your marketing efforts and your business’s success. The wrong name can do worse than to fail to connect with customers. It can also result in insurmountable business and legal hurdles. 

In contrast, a clear and searchable name can be highly helpful in your marketing and branding efforts. So here's 13 quick tips on how to come up with a winning name for your business. 

Pick a business name containing at least one major keyword. Keywords hold a significant relevance to a company's brand, its target market, or the industry in which it operates. They often play an integral role in search engine optimization, As potential customers frequently use these terms during online searches, Using pertinent keywords in a business name can enhance visibility, recall, and relevance in the digital marketplace. For example, if you're starting a food truck business, “taco truck” or “mobile cuisine” could be your keywords. These terms reflect the nature and service of your business. 

Avoid hard-to-spell and hard-to-type names. You don't want potential customers getting confused about how to find your business online. I never understood why Flickr was pushed as the name of the photo-sharing site. You want to avoid having to continually correct the misspelled version of your name. 

Just keep it simple, and also be sure to avoid hyphens, slashes, and other characters that are less frequented by your fingers on your keyboard. Also, avoid “2.0” shortening like “LAUNDRY4U.” These are unprofessional, and they won't build trust in your products or services. 

If there's any potential that you're going to be selling your products or services outside of your town or city, don't pick a name that could be limiting your business as you grow. Picking too narrow of a name can cause you problems down the road. Imagine if Jeff Bezos had picked the name “Online Books” instead of Amazon. 

So if you have any idea that you may expand your locations or product distribution in the future, avoid names like “Wedding Dresses of San Francisco” or “Lug Nuts Unlimited.” You don't want to limit your business to a specific product or service or a specific city. And if you're planning to grow this business and hold it for a long time, avoid including any trendy words in your name. 

But if you're 100% sure that you're going to limit your products or services to your specific city, make your name as specific as possible to your products and your city. A business name like “Wedding Dresses of San Francisco” is extremely searchable, and it clearly communicates what you sell and where you sell it to your clients. This really helps your search engine optimization and popping up in local searches. 

Conduct a thorough Internet search. Once you've determined the name you like, do a web search on the name. More often than not, you'll find that someone else is already using that business name. While that may not be a total showstopper, it should give you a reason to pause. 

Choose a name that will allow you to get the .com domain name. Our strong preference would be that you secure the .com domain name for your business rather than alternatives like .org, .biz, .net, or other domain extension alternatives. Customers tend to associate a .com name with a more established business.

Undoubtedly, someone will almost always own the first several .com domain names that you try to find. But you can either continue to rethink your name to find a domain that's open, or you can reach out to any of these domain owners who may be willing to sell you the domain name for the right price.

When you're relatively confident in a name for your business, check to see if it's available with your preferred hosting provider. We'll be covering how to select a hosting provider for your website later in the course — and in that video, we'll be giving you all of the reasons why we prefer GoDaddy as a hosting provider.

At TRUiC our mission is to offer all our resources and information for free - but we support our work by using affiliate links, meaning we earn a commission on many of the amazing deals we’ve negotiated for you. Full transparency, GoDaddy is one such affiliate partner. Link in description below. 

Lastly, once you decide on a name, be sure to grab that name on popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. 

Use a name that conveys some meaning. Ideally, you want your business name to convey something meaningful and positive about your business. Can people instantly get what your business is about?

While meaningless names like Google and Yahoo have some appeal because they're catchy, these kinds of names will cost you a lot more to brand, whereas a name like DollarShaveClub.com or OnlineTickets.com clearly conveys some meaning of what the business will offer and is helpful for search engine optimization. 

Conducted trademark search. Do a search on USPTO.gov to get an idea of whether you can get a trademark or a service mark for your name. 

Conduct a Secretary of State search. Since you'll likely want to structure your business as a corporation or LLC, you should do a search of the Secretary of State's records to make sure that your name won't be confusingly similar to a name that's already registered. If it is too similar to an already existing name, the Secretary of State may not allow you to register it. 

Get feedback on the name. Come up with 5 to 10 names and run them by your friends, family members, and trusted colleagues and be sure to get feedback from your target audience as well. And make sure that the name doesn't have any negative connotations, such as when GM named their new car model the Nova without realizing that the name means “doesn't go” in Spanish. 

Make sure the name sounds good when said aloud. Sometimes names seem fine on paper but sound awful when set out loud. And when it's said aloud, make sure that people aren't confused as to how it's spelled. 

There are a number of websites available to help brainstorm names, including the TRUiC free online business name generator, which is one of the most advanced A.I. tools available to create a name for your business company or brand. It's a great companion for brainstorming business name ideas that would appeal to your customers. To use it, enter at least two keywords associated with your company that you would want in your name. These keywords could reflect your product, service, or values. The more specific your keywords, the better the results. These keywords serve as the foundation of your unique business name ideas, helping our AI generate names that are relevant and meaningful to your business. 

Make sure that you're personally happy with the name. As a business owner, you'll have to live with the name of your business for a long time. So make sure that you're happy with it and that it will resonate with your customers. Take the time to get it right from the start. 

So there you have it, these are our top tips for naming your business. 

Before ending this video, we'll go ahead and remind you that the name we picked for our imaginary barbershop is “North End Barbershop of Bloomington.” We picked this name simply because it conveys what the business does and where it's located. The business doesn't plan to expand its services outside of Bloomington, Illinois, and the name is very searchable to people in that city looking for a haircut. The domain for the name was available, and we felt that it was simple, clean, and on-brand. No need to do anything crazy with the name — quick and easy. 

In the next video, we'll take a look at how the business name you chose affects finding a domain name. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that provides business owners all of the essential information to start and operate their business. We've provided a link for you to get access to all of the free and discounted business tools that we mentioned in the course below this video. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next video, and if you have any questions, let us know.