Thinking of a great name and logo for your business can be an overwhelming and stressful process. It’s even harder trying to decide alone. But, be careful relying on opinions of friends and family. This can steer you the wrong direction. A poor business name and logo choice costs more money. You’ll end up having to advertise and market ten times more just to overcome problems from choosing the wrong name and/or a terrible logo.
Whether you are thinking about re-branding your current business or you are starting a brand new business, you want to choose the best name and logo that presents you to the world in a memorable way. It’s important to take the time to choose the right name and logo because as Thomas Dawson from Branding Strategy insider stated, “Naming and verbal identity is such an essential foundation of successful strategic brand development.”
Set yourself up for success by following these 7 tips:
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When choosing a name for your business it’s ideal if you can:
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Keep it short as possible
- This makes it much easier to fit it on tight spaces like business cards. Other formats like t-shirts, print ads, truck decals, and the like are also tight spaces because you have to make the font size as large as possible for people to be able to read the text from a distance.
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Try to include major keywords as a part of your business name.
- Not only does it help people to immediately “get” what you do, but your name itself contributes additional organic SEO find-ability — especially from directory listings with no description only a company name and phone number.
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Take the guesswork out of your name.
- Don’t make it such a mystery for people to figure out what kind of business you are from your name. Pick a name where the general population would be able to easily guess what type of business you are.
This will help any marketing you are doing to retain in the prospects’ minds better. Choosing a name that could be a multitude of different types of businesses sets you up to have to spend more money on advertising and to be super consistent advertising so you can develop brand recognition. A great exercise for this is for you to simply scroll through names of businesses in business listing directories and try to guess what businesses others are in.
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When designing a logo for your company:
Focus on readable typography.
The main thing you want to have stand out are the letters, so that people can read it easily no matter what format it is in. You want a well-done typography design that people can uniquely associate with your company.
- Take a look at brands like Pandora, Netflix, LinkedIn, Facebook, eBay
- Use Color Variations. The logo design you choose might look great in color on paper, but complicated designs and logos with too much detail fail when trying to transfer it in other formats like black and white print, shirts, embroidery on hats, apparel, and storefront signs.
- Try Several Versions. You don’t want the logo to come out looking too busy, too small or too confusing. And if your logo is too busy potential clients won’t notice it anyway, so that won’t serve you either.
- Keep it super simple. This is especially important if you are really tied to having a drawing/image/mascot as a part of your logo. If you want to have a drawing incorporated into your logo look at successful brands like:
TripAdvisor. The owl is super simple.
Another owl is Hootsuite, but even that one is still pretty simple.
In keeping with the animal theme, look at the elephant in Evernote
For graphics – look at successful brands like Nike and Adidas
Take a look at amazon. Their only graphic is a simple arrow.
Looking for some great business advice? Share your questions here. I’m happy to answer your questions in future blog posts.
For more tips for your business be sure to look my previous blogs, like these:
Slow and Steady Wins in Small Business Marketing
10 Things You Can Do to Generate a Buzz to Boost Your Business
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