Why Your Brand Name Could Massively Impact Your Startup’s Performance

Every business wants a cool sounding name attached to its brand. Along with the logo the brand name is usually the first impression potential customers have with your startup; and we all know how important first impressions are.

However, when you are building a business from scratch, finding a good sounding name should not be your priority. There are other factors that should be considered first as they can massively impact your startup’s performance, especially in those crucial first years when your brand’s awareness is still in the making. Here’s why:

1. Attention Spans

If your business name has no indication as to what you are offering, it will take longer for people to understand your business. Studies are showing that our attention spans are massively declining due to increased media consumption in particular on our smartphones. The implication is that we tend to give up trying to understand something if it is not clear to us in the first few seconds we interact with it. The same goes for your business: If the business name does not connect to your product or service, you are likely to lose customers.

2. Online Performance

Your online performance is probably most affected by the above point. Not only will a clear business name positively affect your rankings on search engines for relevant search queries, but it will also help with your website performance with a lower bounce-rate and higher dwell time. People will know what to expect when they find your business online and click on your website link. You will have less visitors who visit your website by accident and have no interest in your offering. This will result in higher quality traffic on your website, which in turn is rewarded by Google & Co. with better rankings in their search results.

3. Domain Ending

Another positive effect of choosing a relevant business name is that you will have very good chances of securing the .com domain to your business name and don’t have to settle for another less popular domain ending. This adds credibility to your brand in a bigger way than you would think. Also, it helps your search engine rankings.

Now, finding a name relevant to your product or service does not have to mean that you can’t have an awesome sounding brand name. It just means that you should add a little something to make it clear to your audience what you do. E.g. Instead of calling your bycicle brand “Bazinga” you could just call it “Bazinga Bycicles”. You could still refer to your brand as “Bazinga” in conversation, but you will have a .com domain and you will not waste a second in explaining what it is that your brand does.