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5 steps for choosing a creative business name

21st June 2015 Print

Before you launch a start-up company, rebrand, or order marketing materials from sites like Helloprint, it’s essential to choose a creative business name. This will give your organisation an identity, so take your time to come up with something that’s not only clever and innovative but will help you stand out from the crowd. Here’s a five-step guide to help you out:

1. Step one: Brainstorm

If you’re looking to find the perfect name for your company, be sure to hold a brainstorming session. Start by handing out Post-it notes and asking everyone (be it friends, relatives, colleagues or associates) to write down anything that comes to mind when they think about your industry or line of work. Stick all ideas to a large sheet of paper.

Next, choose five words from the initial brainstorming session that interest you and which you want to explore further. Stick each word onto a large sheet of paper and restart the brainstorming process, encouraging people to walk around the room sticking Post-it ideas onto each sheet of paper.

2. Play with your words

After a successful brainstorm, you should be left with a host of creative words that could potentially help form your company name. The trick now, is to go through them one-by-one, sticking the very best ideas onto a whiteboard/sheet of paper. You can then experiment with word combinations and sounds by moving the notes around until you find something that sounds good. You could even make the most of the portmanteau, which is essentially combining two words together to form a clever name – think Groupon, Comcast, Brangelina and such like. Clever word merge sites will help you out.

3. Think SEO

If you want to have a strong online presence down the line, you should try to choose a company name with industry-related keywords that can also be used in your website’s URL. This is great SEO practise and will also help customers to identify what it is you do. There are many ways to improve your Google rankings, but choosing words people are likely to type via search engines is a good place to start and worth thinking about when selecting your name.

4. Make sure your name’s not taken

The last thing you want to do is spend a fortune on marketing materials only to discover your name has been taken. So, before you take things further, ensure the URL you want is free to use and that the name is available on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and other social networking sites. To save time, make the most of sites like NameChk.com - which will help identify if your name is available or not.

5. Test it out

So, you’ve got a name you’re really proud of. You think it’s the bee’s knees – but do other people agree? It can be easy to get caught up in your own creativity so try testing it out on other people to see if they like it as much as you. There are several ways you can do this from asking friends and family outright, to popping your company name down on a survey form and asking colleagues, clients and such like to write a comment about what they think.

Finding the perfect company name should be a fun, creative process, so let your imagination run wild and come up with a strong brand identity.