Photo by Geoff Brooks on Unsplash

The business name you choose now will be with you for years. A strong name adds value to your business immediately, helps you generate revenue year-on-year, and facilitates growth for the lifetime of your brand. 

How do we know this is true? With 12 years of experience delivering the world’s most innovative naming solutions, 8 years collecting and analyzing real naming data, and 40,000+ naming projects under our belts, no one knows the importance of a great name like Atom. 

A Bad Name Loses You Money

Our revenue loss model of naming is based on international branding research combined with our own experience, a weak business name seriously damages your bottom line over time. 

• Experts estimate that your brand leads to between 9% and 23% of a business’s overall revenue. 
• Your name is the cornerstone of your brand. This means a bad name could easily cause revenue loss of 3% to 8% yearly, or much more.
• It may not sound like much, but over time it adds up.

Based on this, if your goal is to steadily grow your business to $1,000,000 in revenue over the next 5 years, you would easily lose $90,000 – $240,000, during that period if you do not have a strong name. And that number climbs to $1,200,000 if you are looking to reach $5M in 5 years.

A Domain Matters Just as Much as a Name

Your domain, like your name, can make or break your credibility. 

• A domain with a weak extension doesn’t appear credible to many people. You might be able to secure a .ru or .ir extension for less than a .com, but for most prospective customers and stakeholders it will look odd at best and suspicious at worst. 

• A domain that doesn’t exactly match your name makes you look less professional and can cause confusion. Usually, companies end up upgrading if they don’t initially get an exact match domain – Casper mattresses used to use caspersleep.com, for example, before acquiring casper.com.

• Weaker domains are forgettable, so your traffic could end up elsewhere. This is even more of an issue if you have greatchocolate.com, but a competitor has chocolate.com. Those rival treat purveyors will end up with all your customers!

Ultimately, if you don’t secure a great domain at the same time as deciding on a name, your business may suffer. Considering domain availability when choosing a business name is the best way to ensure you get an exact-match domain within budget. Find domains to build a brand around on Atom’s Premium Marketplace and secure an exact match domain as part of the naming process.

Domains Are an Asset

The good news about domains is that they tend to increase in value over time. Domains are more like houses than cars – bar something very unexpected occurring, over time, they’re worth more, not less. This means that many people who buy and later sell domains make their money back or sometimes even make a profit.

What Makes a Good Name

There are two basic rules to follow when naming your business: 

1. Names should be functional. This means they should be easy to say, spell, and remember. A brilliant, smart name idea that sums up your industry? That’s wonderful! Unless it’s impossible for your potential customers to understand, pronounce, or remember. After all, what’s obvious to you as an expert in your area of business may go way over the head of your target audience. Instagram is a great example. It may not immediately strike most people as a combination of “Instant photo” and “telegram”, but it evokes communications and it just sounds good! You don’t need to understand the specifics of why “Instagram” was chosen to remember it when you’re searching for the app. 

2. Names should align with your brand. Because your business name is usually the first part of your brand people experience, as well as how your business is shared person to person, names work best when they show who you are and are designed to appeal to the right audience. No one would call a food delivery app Parsons & Sons, but that’s a perfectly fine name for an accountancy practice or a law firm. Names should signal the kind of business they belong to and the style of brand you want to convey yourself as 

Haven’t worked out all the intricacies of your brand yet? It’s essential before you choose a name! Luckily, Atom’s Build a Brand tool can help you create a brand quickly, accurately, and for free. 

Test Your Favorite Name Ideas

Customers can be hard to understand. But by the time you’re naming your business, you should have an idea of who you’re going to be selling to. You can use this to your advantage when choosing a name by leveraging audience testing.

With audience tests delivered by our leading human insights platform, you can find out which of your shortlisted names your customer base responds to. Testing also allows you to rule out any names that carry unexpected negative connotations, and generally gather data on what names work and why they work. 

Choose a name with confidence by running an audience test today, and get real naming data from real people in just a few days. It’s a simple step, and it’ll allow you to choose a brand name with confidence. 

Don’t Forget About Trademark!

If you choose a name you love without checking for exact match and similar trademarks in your industry, you could end up wasting a huge amount of time and money. If you use a trademarked name, you could get a cease and desist letter from the trademark owner and have to go back to square one and rebrand completely. 

You can run a simple trademark check with Atom’s Free Trademark Checker, but any name you’re seriously considering should also go through full Trademark Research. 

Why Get Professional Naming Help?

To put it bluntly, you aren’t a naming expert. 

Naming your brand yourself will be time-consuming, frustrating, and ultimately less effective than employing a team who are naming experts. Helping business owners out with naming is literally why Atom exists – we’d be happy to help you, too. 

Best Collections of Domains Available Anywhere

If you need help at any stage of the naming process, we’ve got you covered at Atom. Here’s how we created the best collections of domains available anywhere:

• We’re home to the biggest naming community on the planet: 250,000 creatives, spread across the world, from Australia to the UK to Canada and the US, so as a group they’re working 24/7 on naming. 
• Over 7 million names have been submitted by Atom naming experts. 
• Our team of branding consultants, assisted by AI trained on years of real naming data, comb through every name, picking only the best. 
• This has resulted in 200,000 (so far) of the most powerful, brandable names on the internet making it onto our curated marketplace. Names are searchable by collection, keyword, or industry.
• Atom branding consultants have worked on naming projects for Alibaba, Nestle, Dell, and 40,000+ other brands. That’s more projects than any other branding agency!

Crowdsourced Contests

Launching a crowdsourced naming contest is another option for finding a name that will help your business flourish. 

Our contests allow you to work with our brilliant naming community, offering an A-Z naming experience you can be a part of. 

Atom contests aren’t just for naming, either. If you find the perfect name for your business within our domain collections, you can finish your brand-building journey with a logo or tagline contest. 

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