Branding Archives - Creative Agency Secrets

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How to Create Brand Name Ideas

21 October, 2022/0 Comments/in Branding /by Rebecca Caroe

Coming up with brand name ideas is no easy task. However, companies like NAMIFY are making it easy for businesses of all sizes to create unique, memorable brand names that will help them stand out from the competition. There are a few things to remember when brainstorming brand name ideas. Below are some things to consider when creating your brand name and why this process is important.

Does My Company Need a Brand?

All companies need a brand, which is a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer.

Take the time to research your industry and target market. This research will better understand what your customers are looking for and how you can reach them. You must know the competition and what sets your company apart to create a strong brand.

It’s also important to clearly understand your company’s values and mission. Your brand should reflect these values and be appealing to your target market. Remember that your brand will be customers’ first impression of your company. Studies show that it takes a mere seven seconds to make a first impression, so first impressions matter to consumers.

Creating a Memorable Brand Name

Brand recognition is the ability of consumers to identify a particular brand. The best brand names are easy to remember and can be easily associated with the company or product. To create a memorable brand name, it’s essential to keep it short, simple, and easy to pronounce.

The better your brand recognition, the more likely customers are to purchase from you. To help you create memorable brand names, use a service like NAMIFY to create bold, easy-to-remember names that can help you stand out from the competition.

Ideas To Create a Brand Name

There are several ways to come up with brand name ideas. The best way is to use a tool like NAMIFY, which can help you create unique, memorable names for your business or product. Another way to generate brand name ideas is to brainstorm with a group. Group brainstorming sessions can help you generate various ideas and get feedback on the names you come up with.

When creating a brand name for your new business, it’s essential to consider the industry or niche you will be operating in. This will ensure that the name aligns with your business and helps establish your brand identity. For example, if you are starting a jewelry business, consider incorporating the word jewelry into your brand name, as it will make it easier to establish your brand identity, including your niche in your site’s domain name, and take advantage of related keywords.

You can also use a thesaurus to find synonyms for words related to your industry. Using a thesaurus can help you create brand names that are unique and descriptive. Finally, you can look at other companies in your industry to see what they’ve named their products or services. While you don’t want to copy them, this can give you some inspiration for your own brand name.

Ways to Test Your Brand Name

Once you’ve come up with a few brand name ideas, testing them out is important, as it can help you see how your target market will receive the names.

One way to test your brand name is to conduct a focus group, which is where you gather a group of people in your target market and ask them their thoughts on the names you’ve come up with. This can give you some valuable feedback on which name is the most memorable and appealing.

Another way to test your brand name is to do a Google search, which will show you how many other companies are using the same or similar names. Choosing a unique name that will help you stand out from the competition is important.

Why Is Creating a Brand Name Important?

Creating a strong brand is important for any company, large or small. The more successful your company becomes, the more your brand name will matter. A brand can help you attract new customers, build customer loyalty, and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Further resources on naming brands

Brainstorming Brand Names

8 December, 2020/0 Comments/in Branding /by Rebecca Caroe

Brainstorming brand names is hard.

As a B2B Copywriting expert, here’s my copywriting method.

Brand names require a different approach

Start with blank paper and write down ANYTHING.

One line per name choice.

Dump down any words which could be part of your brand name.

Then do individual words – and create 2 and 3 word phrases with those words in.

Then stop. Take a day off.

Next day do some research – go to forums, reddit, amazon and read reviews people write for products in your niche, for podcasts, books and discussions. While reading, write down any phrases that seem to jump out at you as having resonance.

Add these to your list – one line per name choice.

Short list brand names

Now comes the narrowing down part. Create a short list and write one option on each separate piece of paper.

Hang them around your room. Every time you walk in or out look at them… add ticks to the ones which resonate. Get familiar with them, edit them, add new ones that occur to you.

When you have a short list of 3, ask your trusted friends what they think. Listen carefully to their replies.

When you have a short list of 2, ask the public what they think. Listen carefully to their replies.

Make your final choice.

Further Resources

Generate Business Domain Name Ideas That Give You a Competitive Edge

How to name your new business

How to Create Brand Name Ideas

How to Successfully Market Your Website

25 July, 2019/0 Comments/in Branding, Content Marketing, Digital media, Marketing, Marketing ideas /by Sudip Mutt

Digital marketing is very finicky. You are not just contending with customers; you have impartial algorithms to contest with, the attention market, your competitors, technological glitches, and so much more. Knowing how to successfully market your website means more than simply knowing the basics. Yes, email newsletters help. Yes, social media marketing is an option. Knowing how to successfully implement these tactics is the real challenge, and to help you overcome the common hurdles of these marketing hurdles we have put together a great beginner’s list to guide you:

Improve the Quality of Your Website

The first step to successfully marketing your website is to improve your website. All marketing efforts will be wasted if you do not improve it. Consider this – if you have a treasure map, and went through the effort of following it, how would you feel if you turned up to an empty field or a busted down house? Your customers follow a similar path to your website. Sometimes it is direct, other times it takes several attempts to get them to your site, but if your site is not worthwhile, they will leave immediately.

Example: A Slow Website

If your website is slow, then all the marketing efforts in the world will be a waste of money. That is why one of the first steps you should take is to switch to Krystal, which offers 300% faster speeds than most other competitors.

Improve Your Social Media Approach

To improve your social media approach, you need to understand how each platform works. Optimizing a post is standard practice, but you will want to go beyond and see how your competitors have succeeded or failed. Once you have that information, work on creating an account that provides users with the experience they are looking for in a company such as yours.

Example: A Technical Social Media Account

Take a company that offers technical service, like computer repairs. How can you possibly market such a company on a social media site like Instagram? What if you were an accountant?

The answer is to provide information. Create simple yet well-designed text posts. Be unique with your photography – a computer repair company has plenty of interesting textures you could photograph, for example. Try to be a source of information so that people follow you to get tips and tricks daily. Collaboration and PR is one of the best ways to market your company, as it gets your name out there and brings in high-quality inbound links.

Example: Collaborating With Another Business

To collaborate with another business, you will want to first see if there are any opportunities in your business model. If you sell high-quality phone cases, for example, partner with local artists that have a healthy, dedicated, and real community of their own. They create phone case designs for you, you give them a healthy chunk of the profits (after costs), and in turn, their fans know about you, buy from you, and then go on and advertise your product to their friends and family.

There are so many ways you can improve your marketing efforts, and hopefully, with these examples, you have a more concrete idea of how you can grow your community and reach.

Business positioning – do this

22 May, 2019/0 Comments/in B2B, Branding, Case Studies, Copywriting, SEO /by Rebecca Caroe

Can a prospect tell “at a glance” whether you are the right business for their needs? Web visits last ever-shorter durations and so your positioning [the message about what you do and for whom] is critical.

I was asked by a client to provide examples of marketing agencies who have good positioning on their websites.

Do you agree with my picks?

Good brand positioning copywriting

https://www.disruptiveunicorns.com/ We specialise in inbound marketing and lead generation on the HubSpot platform. Using design thinking, we help businesses scale in a sustainable growth manner.

One way to find out if you don’t want to work with them, is to re-write their offer in the negative. So if I don’t want inbound and lead generation – don’t go here. If I’m not using Hubspot I probably won’t get well-served either.

https://www.digitalmarketer.com/ Tools and Trainings for Digital Marketers

If I’m not a digital marketer needing tools or training – go away.

Below that they have 3 audiences identified – Teams, Marketers and Agencies so they offer further refinement of tools and training offers.

Digital Marketer agency audiences

https://spur.co.nz/ Creating live experiences that build brand love. We are a full service live-marketing agency. Our areas of expertise include sponsorship, experiential marketing, corporate events and promotional staffing.
We connect brands to people to create brand love.

So if I don’t want a live experience – go elsewhere. Using the bold words allows speed reading to focus in on key services and skills. The “Brand Love” message is lovely and slightly fluffy – who doesn’t want this for their brand?

And just for the contrast here’s one which is too broad in its positioning and non-specific in its offer https://www.interactivesponsor.com/

Which niche suits your brand?

Finding your audience and positioning your business to align is not something to do once and leave. The business world changes frequently and so fine-tuning your language, offering and audience is a useful exercise.

Remember – excluding prospects who don’t fit your ideal customer persona is important too.

How To Hide Your Business Address On Google

23 July, 2018/0 Comments/in Branding, Local Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Having your business address easily accessible through Google is a fantastic resource for traditional brick and mortar businesses. However, in today’s world, there are many e-commerce companies or organisations that simply don’t need their address openly available to the public. If you fall into this category, this post is for you.

If your address is on Google My Business and you want to hide it, here are 3 easy steps to get it done.

While I will be using our company, Creative Agency Secrets, as an example, it’s worth mentioning that we keep our address visible to the public since we have a physical office space that many of our clients visit. Nevertheless, this is a very useful tool for many businesses, such as one of our clients, AmCham. AmCham is a virtual company whose employees work from home, and as a result, they don’t want the addresses public. So let’s get started.

Step 1: Get to the “Info” page

The first step is to log in to your Google My Business page. On your Google My Business portal (located on the first page), click the menu bar on the top left corner of the screen and select “Info”

Step 2: Edit Your Address

On this page, select your address and a window should pop up where you can edit your address settings.

Step 3: Change Visibility Settings

Scroll down to the bottom of this window and you’ll see a box saying “I also serve some customers at my business address”. Un-check this box and your address will be hidden from the public.

Bonus – Step 4: Edit your radius of service

Many companies can only offer their services in a certain area. Google gives you the option to adjust your service area in the window to ensure your business prospects are within reach and that you’re only getting relevant inquiries for jobs.

You can either select the “Region, city or postal code” option and add a general area your business operates in, or select the second option, “Within ___ km of my business”, and establish a radius of access for your business. And of course, don’t forget to click “Apply” at the bottom right to make sure it’s all saved.

For example, one of our past clients, MethSolutions, offers meth testing in their clients’ locations. However, they can only service locations that their certified samplers can access by car. They have hidden their main office address, but each sampler stationed around New Zealand has a specific but limited area that they can reach and meth test. They used the “Region, city, or postal code” option to ensure that they will get business opportunities from local and accessible clients, but don’t necessarily have to give their exact location away. As the picture shows, one of the areas the can access is the suburb Pegasus in Christchurch, so Google Maps highlights that region.

We hope this helped you optimise your use of the Google location feature. Good luck and let us know if you have any questions or concerns!

Foster Innovation at the NZ Marketing Summit 2017

16 August, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Branding, Conferences / Exhibitions, Marketing, Marketing ideas, Public Speaking /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Spark ideas, develop strategies, and add value to your brand while joining New Zealand’s leading marketers at the annual NZ Marketing Summit. Listen to our own CEO, Rebecca Caroe, in her session on “Strengthening the brand-agency partnership – how to work with an expert (when you aren’t one)”.

Attend Four International Keynotes

Brigitte Slattery (Head of Marketing – Lifestyle Group @ Foxtel Australia)
Nick Lanzafame (Head of Strategic Insights & Analytics @ Buzzfeed)
Charlotte Dewhurst (Global Marketing Direct @ Les Mills International)
Col Kennedy (General Manager – Brand & Customer Experience @ Country Road)

Explore Three Programming Tracks

Digital & Social
Brand & Content
Tech & Experiential

Along with the 20+ speakers featured, the Marketing Summit offers a choice of two full-day workshops. “The Content Workshop” and “Brand Building Blocks 2.0” will be held the following day on September 22nd.

Join and connect with 300+ fellow industry professionals in generating and exchanging insights to fuel brand development. You can register before 5pm on August 25th and secure early bird pricing.

SKYCITY Convention Center, Auckland

21 September 2017

8:30am – 5:00pm

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5 Reasons Why Unified Branding is So Important for Your Business

15 August, 2017/0 Comments/in Branding, Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

You want your company to be recognized no matter where a person sees it. This counts on all fronts – you want every single social network to have a unified look to them, and you want that look to borrow from your website. Branding is such a crucial aspect of marketing that you need to have for your business. If you don’t have a key theme that permeates every channel you use, you need to start now. When you’re a student you can buy homework and spend more time searching for solutions for your branding.

Here are five reasons why unified aesthetics (or branding) are important for your business:

1. Your Brand Needs its Own Personality

People don’t connect with objects, they connect with the human traits that they assign to them. Companies that have its own personality feel like a friend to a customer. They are a buddy or someone that you look up to. Whatever your brand is, create a persona that permeates throughout all your branding efforts. Your company needs to feel like someone recognizable. Have a specific voice, a specific look, and benefit from being unique.

2. You Need to Be Recognizable Wherever You Are

When you are a large brand, or even just online, you will be seen from people all over the world. You want people to be able to recognize the branding of your company, even if they cannot understand the language. It is for this very reason that McDonald’s is so successful worldwide. The same goes for other large companies like Starbucks. The unified branding means that, if anyone, anywhere, were to visit another country, they can be assured that they will find the same food and experience at any McDonald’s they come across.

3. Branding Builds Loyalty

Branding means having a look and persona that people recognize and know. As a rule, people will always use the brand that they know over a new, unknown brand. That is where the strength in branding lies. You want people to register your product as something they know and trust. Once you do that, you have a loyal customer.

4. Branding Helps You Convey Information

You can convey a lot of information about yourself, your values, and your vision through visuals. Bright, primary colors convey different information than dark natural tones. Use visual cues to tell your customers and visitors who you are without even saying a word.

5. It Will Grow Your Business

Loyal customers will provide repeat business, and happy customers will provide word-of-mouth marketing for you at no extra charge. Have your customers vouch for you, and focus on building your relationships with them to cultivate that loyalty.

Branding is everything from your website to your social networks to your marketing campaigns. Use marketing automation to couple your unified branding with tailored experiences that will increase your customer loyalty and repeat business through uniform emails. You want to be a brand that people trust and return to. To do that, you need to be recognizable on all fronts. Be familiar, be professional, and people will return.

Your home page is failing its purpose

20 October, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Branding, Digital media /by Rebecca Caroe

I had to write to a client recently to tell them that their home page was failing. It was not delivering value, it was not doing its job and was actively causing problems for the business. And this made me realise that few businesses understand the job a home page does.

Hanging Gardens home page

What should a good home page design do?

If you are an online shop, the home page has the job of showing the specials for the month or new product lines. It is often a straightforward design to implement.

If you are a software company, the home page is usually a sales page promoting and explaining your principal products.

But most business websites have a different challenge, especially those who do not sell by ecommerce. They have had a website for a few years; they may have had a couple of redesigns and the business website has probably grown to tens, hundreds or thousands of pages over this period. The priorities of the business shift over time and the website home page needs to support the new business goals and objectives.

This throws up questions

How often should I change my home page?
Should the home page have all the information about the business?
What should the home page prioritise?

The job of a website home page is to get the visitor to her destination in as few clicks as possible.

Why do visitors come?

Your entire website comprises a heap of different information, advice, products and services and a visitor may be interested in all, one or none of them. So how can you guess what the latest web visitor wants?

This is where intelligent home page design comes in.

Home page as sign post

The principal task of the home page is to signpost the visitor FAST to where she wants to go. So let’s work out what this means for your website.

Go to your web analytics account and find two reports created from your actual visitor traffic this year. These are

a) the pages visitors went to on the site. This shows which are the most popular

b) the search queries people typed into Google which had your website showing up in search results (this comes by linking Search Console to Google Analytics – here’s how to set it up).

Your job is to line up b) with a) so we get the maximum number of people coming to the site and getting quickly to the exact page they are looking for.

Designing for Destination

You now know the top two to five pages on your website (after the home page itself). I’m going to offer some advice here which will help you brief your designer on the changes you need to make to your home page.

Firstly – simplify the main menu. Can you remove any of the top menu items? Give the visitor as few choices as possible, stay focused on those top destination pages. Can you reduce your menu to 5 options? (Home, About, Contact Us plus 2 others?). Can you remove sub-menus or drop-downs? We advised Armour Safety to put icon images of their popular product groupings on a side menu; ordered by popularity. Clicks followed immediately we made the change.

Secondly – highlight popular destination pages in the home page design. Make it very obvious in the home page design elements what these are. You can use images, boxes, icons, buttons, large text – all are useful devices to focus attention. By repeating these popular destinations in the home page design and the top menu, you increase the chances that the visitor will choose an already popular pathway. Coxmate.com.au now does not show its products on the main menu – they send visitors direct to the shop which has its own home page and details all the categories. Similarly, Apartment Specialists has 3 buttons on the home page, I’m Buying; I’m Selling and I want a Valuation. All three are on their menu, but the buttons make it easier for visitors to quickly decide where to click.

Thirdly – you have to reinforce the already popular page destinations – this may sound counter-intuitive. Don’t try and encourage traffic to pages that are not already popular i.e. double down your bets on the well-performing pages. This is the 80:20 rule in action. For the visitor who does want something unusual if they cannot find it from your menus, be sure to make it very clear how to get in touch to ask the question.

So go check how your home page is performing in its duty as a sign post – and don’t be afraid to make changes iteratively – one small change at a time so you can measure the effect before altering other elements.

We use our 8 Step New Business Development process and each has a category – this blog post is related to Step 1 – State your Business.

Click on the icon to see more posts in that category.

This article first appeared in Marketing Online Magazine

Shuttlerock | New Zealand Software for User Generated Content

24 March, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Branding, Content Marketing, Digital media, Marketing, Marketing ideas, Social Media /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

PLEASE NOTE: Some of the details in this article have been rectified per recent conversations with Shuttlerock. These new details are noted below! Thanks for your feedback, Shuttlerock!

We’ve come across marketing software created by a business here in New Zealand called Shuttlerock. It sounds sort of science fiction-y and futuristic – something you might see in a Rae Bradbury novel. In a way, it could be next gen technology in content sharing and revolutionize how businesses aggregate and manage user content to their benefit.

What Shuttlerock does with user generated content…

If you’re a business and have social media channels, have you ever wanted to capture all your customer feedback and testimonials in one place? Sure, leaving it in the platform from which it originated is perfectly acceptable. But, what about putting it in the one place in which your put the majority of your efforts, i.e. your website. Right now, this information has to be collected manually and configured in an appealing way so that your traffic, your customers and followers, can see: Hey! Other people like this product and have gone so far as to say something about it on the internet!

Including content aggregation, Shuttlerock takes it a few steps further

Besides collecting user content for your team to sift through, sort, and put on display on your website, Shuttlerock also helps you promote your brand to get more user generated content. How? Contests and promotions, of course! We know that one of the best ways to get engagement online is to incentivize your followers to promote you and your brand. You can get them to share their visual content promoting your brand and reward them for doing it. If done right, you’ll get a flood of content that you can then share, directly on your site. Not only do you get to share their excitement with your other followers but they’ll also be excited to see that their content is being shared with the world. What better way to encourage and reward loyal followers!

Who is using it and how.

Shuttlerock operates in its home country of New Zealand and now Japan and the US. In recent Shuttlerock news, Lady Gaga used the program to allow her followers in Japan to upload their content to her website. These photos, directly from the source (her fandom), will be collected and used to create a poster for her Japanese ‘Cheek to Cheek’ album. Now, that’s innovative.

What I find interesting about it.

This program puts power into the hands of your marketing team in a way that can really make a difference for the brand. For one, your team can manage the content via apps, as well as share their own related content, which gives the brand a more approachable, human aspect that’s approachable. And, for two, they will have social proof of what is and is not working for the brand that can be shared with upper management. I find that extremely valuable for businesses to really make a dent in their market and bring exactly what their customers want based on their feedback.

The cost.

So, the only thing that I’m hung up on is this bit: the flat fee of $500 per month. For big businesses with marketing budgets that would make you swoon, $500 a month is a drop in the ocean. However we can’t forget about smaller businesses with much tighter marketing budgets – to whom $500 a month is completely unattainable. Shuttlerock, there’s nothing inherently wrong with your fees. I’m just suggesting you have a tiered option for businesses big and small. It could be based on company size, or social media following, even the amount of content that gets shared. Just saying.

UPDATE: From our recent contact with Shuttlerock we’ve been informed that the fees are $5,000 per month and are focusing on enterprises… BUT! they’re currently powering their way through some key partnerships with the goal to, eventually, have options for small and medium enterprises. Until then, we’ll look on Shuttlerock with starry eyes!!

But, way to go!

In a world where brands are continuously vying for attention from consumers, having visual, word-of-mouth content directly from other individuals on your website is amazing. And, as a consumer, seeing that other people just like you or from all the way across the globe also like this particular product, it just makes it more endearing! You want it, seeing and knowing that other people want it and are willing to share their opinions about it, all over the web.