If you want to open a brick-and-mortar business, it might seem strange to think about building an online presence for your store at the same time. However, if your business has a street address, but no web address, your company isn’t available where most of your potential customers are—online.
Trying to come up with a distinctive name for your store that hasn’t been used by similar businesses and has a relevant web domain available can be frustrating, but using a store name generator like Namify makes the process of both naming your company and finding a unique web domain easy. Your name is the foundation of your business’s identity, both online and off; read on to see how your company can get it right.
Namify allows you to get much more creative with the naming process than other name generators do because it lets you input specific, descriptive keywords to create store name ideas that are directly related to your business’s points of differentiation. If you run an urban boutique that sells home décor to young millennial women who rent, your name needs to convey those attributes to your customers; if they misperceive your store as one that caters to older men or families with children, they may never even look into your storefront windows.
The right combination of keywords lets you ensure that the suggestions Namify generates are pitch-perfect for your intended audience. Select the “interior design” category and use keywords like “modernist,” “chic,” “feminine,” “airy,” or “apartment” to ensure that Namify only provides names centered around those topics. With several options to choose from, naming your store will be a matter of shortlisting your favorite ideas and reserving the right name and domain.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of having the right name for your store, but humans are visual creatures, so the next step after choosing a name is spending some time thinking about how your store should look. That means deciding on the visual elements you want to include on your website, social media, and advertising campaigns, not to mention the styling of the store itself. Visual branding might sound like it’s for big businesses, but there are plenty of options for creating memorable, professional designs that evoke your small business’s personality.
Designing a logo and choosing a name are often hard for the same reason—both of them have to say a lot about your company, but by definition, neither one can have a lot of detail. If you choose a premium domain through Namify along with your store name, you can build a logo for free on BuildMyLogo.co—no design experience needed.
Local advertising for a local business makes sense, and you shouldn’t neglect press releases, regional publications, and other traditional brick-and-mortar advertising techniques. But even local life is lived online, with sites like Yelp and Foursquare driving web-based discovery of local businesses. For restaurants, offering online booking through OpenTable or similar services is an essential part of accommodating digital-first customers. You might be intimidated by the prospect of jumping into the world of online marketing, but it’s an excellent tool for small, local companies to find new customers. You can use social media to advertise specifically to viewers in the region you serve, start a locally-focused blog to establish yourself as an expert on your area, and use call-only search ads to encourage customers to dial your number as soon as they find your business via search engine.
Branding and marketing are often the most challenging parts of running a small business, but with tools like Namify that make creative work easy and accessible to all, they don’t have to be! You can give your store the perfect moniker and get back to doing what you do best: running your business.