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Business Names: What's Popular?

By: Robert F. Abbott

Ever been in a situation when you had to choose a business name or title for something, and had trouble making up your mind? Perhaps you created a new product or report, and wanted to appeal to as many potential users or readers as possible?

At meetings of a publishers' association to which I belong, for example, publishers often ask for feedback on proposed titles. That sets off a round of suggestions based on intuition, experience, and insights. Only rarely do we get any evidence-based suggestions. Yet, evidence is available, at little or no cost, and with little effort.

Consider the service offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture and GoTo) and Google Adwords, pay-per-click search engines, to their customers. After a couple of clicks, you reach a special search page in which you enter a keyword or key phrase. In just a matter of seconds, they return related words and phrases for which their millions of searchers looked in the previous month.

I recently did a search on Google Adwords for a couple of 'communication' names. I'm particularly interested in the distinction between 'communication skills' and 'communication strategies'.

I see that searchers looked for 'communication skills' 246,000 times, while they looked for 'communication strategies' only 22,200 times. Obviously, 'communication skills' is a more popular term for online marketing, and probably more popular for offline marketing, too.

But, I'm not sure, so I'll use another service as well: WordTracker, which offers both trial and pay-for-service plans. It's considered the big-daddy of keyword tracking, because it brings back results from a number of search engines (including Yahoo! Search Marketing) and not just one.

Checking on MSN searches, for example, it found that 'communication skills' was the 35th most frequently searched term under the umbrella of 'communication' while 'communication strategies' ranked 88th. This confirms it makes sense to build an advertising and promotion campaign around 'communication skills' rather than 'communication strategies'.

Now, in the course of researching these two keyword phrases, the services returned a number of other words and phrases. And, as I review them, it's quite possible that I might find another word or phrase that I like even better than those I started with. For example, 'business communication' ranks highly and it certainly ranks above the comparable phrase, 'corporate communication'.

But, there's another factor to consider: How do the terms integrate with your goals? In my case, I wanted to emphasize the strategic part of communication, rather than the skills part, because that better differentiated my newsletter from other newsletters. And that takes me back to the hard decision.

Summary: Whatever your situation, the key is to remember that creating names doesn't have to be solely intuitive any more; we can gather evidence quickly, easily, and inexpensively.

Next, go to the marketing communication page, or visit our home page Communication Skills .

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Business names, Copyright Robert F. Abbott 2009