Branding Tips for Naming Your Health or Wellness Business in Houston
When it comes to building a brand, everything starts with a name. Brand names are more than just a unique string of words. They’re powerful symbols encompassing everything consumers think, feel, and know about your business. In addition to communicating a brand’s promise and symbolic identity to consumers, they also carry larger, linguistic associations. Brand names must be able to handle the rigors of many different kinds of marketing campaigns in order to ensure that your business can be successful, which is why getting the name right is so critical.
You probably already knew that a good name was important to your business, of course. The tricky part is learning how to pick a good name. In the modern, digital era, some of the old rules of branding have to be thrown out—They don’t apply anymore. In Houston’s competitive health and beauty market, brands have to be able to both stand out and welcome potential patients online at a mere glance. Getting it right the first time can be a real challenge.
That’s why Creative8, the premiere digital marketing and branding agency for health and beauty brand in Houston, Texas, has created this handy guide to naming your business. It won’t tell you everything you need to know to succeed, but it should help you get started on the right foot. We use the same guidelines when we make recommendations to our branding clients, so keep them in mind while you’re building your new practice or business:
1. Start with a plan.
Brand names should be created to achieve a specific goal: evoking the proper emotions within your target demographic. In order to make this goal explicit, start by creating a naming brief. In it, outline the brand identity and positioning that will help you achieve your goal of attracting the right patients or customers.
Make sure your naming brief answers these questions:
- What brand personality, brand image, and associations do you want?
- What kind of emotion do you want to evoke?
- What’s your target segment?
- Do you want a mass-market name or a more sophisticated niche-market name?
2. Keep it short and sweet.
These days, your business name is also typically your Web URL. For this reason, it’s best to keep it as short as you can—longer URLs are a pain to type and make it less likely that users will visit. Domain names of seven characters or less, excluding the “.com” or other suffix, tend to yield higher traffic. Visitors to a website can decrease by seven percent if the domain name is expanded to 10 characters—more so the longer the URL gets. Don’t do that to your brand!
3. Keep their thumbs in mind.
Did you know that more than half of all Web traffic comes from smartphones and other mobile devices? That number is likely to continue rising, as well. More and more, people seek out doctors, clinics, and other healthcare or beauty services on their phones. If your name and logo are hard to read or click quickly on a smartphone screen, you’re putting yourself at a real disadvantage.
4. Ask Siri.
As voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and others continue to rise in popularity in usage, it becomes more critical than ever that your brand name be easy to pronounce and understand. If your potential patients and customers can’t ask Alexa for directions to your practice because they can’t pronounce your name, they might never arrive at all.
5. Choose a sociable brand.
Much like the importance of choosing a brand name that doubles as a good URL, keep in mind that your health or wellness business will need to be available as a profile name on the social media platforms critical to your industry. Is your name available for the taking on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms? Ideally, your brand name will be consistent and easy to find across all of them, boosting your organic search engine optimization (SEO).
While these five concerns are practical considerations that any brand should keep in mind, don’t forget that your brand name should also be personal, relatable, and inviting, as well. Choosing the perfect name can be quite the balancing act between all of these factors. If you’re struggling or would simply like some professional advice, contact the experts. The award-winning team at Creative8 assists healthcare, wellness, and health and beauty clients across the Houston area craft complete brands primed to compete in the modern marketplace. Contact us today for a free audit of your current marketing ideas or initiatives, and we’ll make sure you’re headed in the right direction.
