Engage your listeners so effectively that they will ride with you to the top floor and accompany you all the way to your office enthralled by what you have to say.

I was inspired again by Jay Baer’s August 12 post about elevator speeches in which he asserted that the typical elevator speech is too long for today’s attention span.

As he put it, "Understand that the Elevator Pitch is Dead. You remember the elevator pitch. The notion that you should be able to describe what your company does in the length of time consumed by the average elevator ride. I’m here to tell you, that’s way too long these days. Elevator rides seem interminable."

I am in absolute agreement that brevity is essential. But, brevity is just the beginning. In fact, the ideal elevator speech should be exactly that–a beginning. Don’t think of your short statement as a traditional speech designed to get a big round of applause at the end. Instead, it serves as an opening gambit that engages your listener so effectively that it begins a dialogue of indefinite length.  It can become the welcoming door to your compelling content.

Your real challenge is to be both brief and compelling.  You must both explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But, so concisely and compellingly that your imaginary elevator ride does not seem interminable.

Jay is right on the money about brevity. However, what’s even more important is to make those few words–perhaps the length of a tweet–so compelling that your listener will insist on learning more and will begin to ask you questions about what you do and how you can help them. The very best of the elevator speech breed will burn itself into your listener’s brain so that he both remembers and enthusiastically repeats it to others.

Thus, your elevator speech is not really about what your company does. Rather, it should describe exactly how we your listener will benefit by working with you.

Your elevator speech can provide focus to every element of your marketing strategy.

I have been very much influenced by a book about giving great speeches, Give Your Speech. Change the World , by Nick Morgan.  Like Jay, he requires that an elevator speech be brief. In fact, he insists that it be a single sentence. The secret of success derives from the content of that single sentence.

As Nick explains it, there are three essential elements to every effective elevator speech:

1. It must contain a benefit for your imaginary elevator companion.
2. It must contain the word you, meaning your listener.
3. It must contain some reference to emotion, because emotion is more engaging and memorable than intellectual information.

Although Nick writes in the context of the opening gambit of a real speech, I’m convinced that his advice applies equally to your content marketing efforts.  Your customers are always asking (even if it’s subliminal), “What’s in it for me?”  In answer to their question we need to be ready with content that is driven by a tightly focused brand promise that can be distilled into a Nick Morgan-style elevator speech.

Most of us probably think of an elevator speech as an afterthought that sits on top of all the marketing stuff we have already done. I think that may be backwards. If you get it right, your elevator speech may very well serve as the foundation for all of your marketing efforts. And, that is most certainly taking your elevator speech to a higher level.

We have just written about a powerful new research study that paints a picture of how thousands of smart companies are already benefiting from the inclusion of social media.  What’s clear from that research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.

Social media marketing is here to stay.  Because you want your organization to be here for the long haul as well, you need to move now.  Not next week. Not next month. But now.

Here are the six reasons that dictate your need to begin social media marketing now:

1. Your customers are using it to make buying decisions. Millions of web users, both in the business to consumer and business-to-business markets, are reading blogs and listening to podcasts daily. They are relying increasingly on social media for buying information in both the b2b and b2c worlds.

2. Smart news organizations are with the social media program. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and almost certainly your local newspaper have made social media fundamental to how they learn and how they report.  If it’s good enough for their information gathering and sharing where it really counts, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us. 
3. Most small and medium-sized companies are still not using it. You won’t always have the chance to get the jump on your competition.  Imagine yourself back in the early days of TV and you were the first car dealer, furniture store or air conditioning company to run local advertising opposite I Love Lucy or the Lone Ranger. You would have demolished the competition. You still have a small window of time to be early enough to create competitive advantage.   Hi Ho, Silver and away!
4. Your smartest competitors are using it. You’re almost certainly paying attention to your smartest competition.  I’d be surprised if a high percentage of them are not at least putting a toe into the social media waters.  Organizations as diverse as law firms, interior designers, real estate agents, and roofing companies are using blogs, podcasts, videos, and user communities such as Facebook to demonstrate their expertise and thought leadership. Don’t let those tough competitors outmarket you via social media.
5. It can be your most cost effective marketing strategy.  The required financial investment in creating a blog, for example, can be close to zero.  The real investment will be in time and thought required to craft a content marketing strategy which provides valuable information to your customers and prospects.  You may need to a hire specific content creation resources either internally or externally.  But this will probably be less expensive than a many traditional advertising outlets.
6. Your old-style marketing is less and less effective. Because buyer behavior has changed, you cannot expect traditional advertising alone to drive buyers to your business as it did a decade ago.  You may certainly want to use it to drive them to your online home. That’s where you can prove to prospective customers that you are a reliable supplier who can be trusted, based on your knowledge and understanding of your their problems.  A regular blog or a series of informative podcasts may be just the ticket to prove that you are the best choice to provide essential solutions. 

Summing up

You may still think it’s risky or unproductive to make an investment in core social media components such as blogs, videos,podcasts–or communities such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.  I suggest that the real risk is in waiting too long and being left in the dust. After all, some very smart marketers have already proven the power of these online tools.

Their research, 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study makes it clear that even small business owners need to take social media very seriously indeed. 

The study was designed to assess current trends in the use of social media in North American businesses. Based on 2,948 valid responses to the online Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey during  August and early September, 2009, the results show  how and where businesses, and business people, are finding value in social media.

The study was focused on social media utilization – how people and companies are using social media in a work context today – and not on adoption. All study participants currently used social media in their day-to-day jobs as a resource for business-relevant information and/or worked for a company currently managing, developing or planning social  media initiatives.

In other words, you can learn painlessly from marketers who are already actively participating in social media.

What you can learn from the research:

• Top social media resources used for business information
• Which department – Marketing, Customer Service, Product or other – drives most corporate social media initiatives
• Top business social media initiatives, and how well companies can actually measure the success of these initiatives
• Ratings of top social media sites for business use

Some of My Favorite Takeaways:

• Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are leaders.  MySpace is dragging pretty far behind.
• Companies are using benchmarks to measure the success of their efforts. Website traffic, product feedback, lead generation, and revenue are the top 4.
• YouTube is #1 in showing business impact from a company profile. Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t far behind.
• For listening/research purposes, Google search and alerts dominate with Twitter and Yahoo search coming not too far behind. Microsoft’s Bing has a surprisingly good showing at 21% vs. Yahoo search at 35%
• There is a measurable ROI to social media activities. Active social media marketers don’t see it as an amorphous money pit. They are showing tangible returns.

2 Pieces of Good News: Social Media is Proliferating Quickly and You Still Have Time to Jump Onboard

We’ve all seen the stats that show the astounding growth of Facebook and Twitter. YouTube is now the 2nd most popular search engine.  Your buyers are using social media extensively. You don’t have to worry about being too early to enter the social media maelstrom.  You won’t be one of those hapless pioneers who are so far ahead they wind up with arrows in their backs. And, you don’t want to wait until all the best social media territory is taken.

Fortunately, you will still be an early—if not first—mover in your marketing neighborhood. Only about 1/3 of respondents in the study have been involved with social media for more than 2 years.

It is certainly high time to join the social media movement.  It will deliver affordable and measurable results. You aren’t late yet. But you soon will be if you hang back and let your marketing—and your business—suffer as a result.

Click here for my 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today.

What’s the difference between 2-D marketing and 3-D marketing you might ask? Plenty!

Think of all the junk mail you receive at home or at the office.  Tons of envelopes and a few postcards.  Virtually everything but the bills will be tossed–and much of that without anyone looking at the individual pieces.  There is no depth to all that stuff.

But what if you receive a well-designed magazine that clearly matches your interests, even if you haven’t requested it?  What’s the likelihood that you will spend at least a few minutes leafing through the magazine.  Thus, the 3-D marketer will have made a memorable and positive impact on you and/or your business. The 2-D marketer will wind up in the wastebasket.

3-D analog marketing does very well.

A single page promotional flyer is obviously two-dimensional in a literal sense.  It is also two-dimensional in the figurative sense of lacking real depth.  After all, how much can you communicate on a single sheet of paper? This is similar to a one sheet product sheet sent to a business or an announcement of a 50% off sale at a department store.  Although you can convey important information–and perhaps relevant information, you are extremely limited in how much you can convey.

Let’s take it to the next level.  Think of a carefully targeted custom publication with 32 pages.  Best Magazine from Best Buy provides an excellent example. 

As we have written in Get Content Get Customers, Best Buy’s magazine targets their very best customers with an enthusiast’s paradise chock full of product information about everything from iPods to sports cars.

This is an enthusiast’s magazine in the best tradition of favorites such as Sports Illustrated or Car and Driver. As such,  Best Magazine is three-dimensional analog marketing at its best, providing both literal and figurative depth.

3-D online marketing does brilliantly—and for a much lower cost.

Let’s take 3-D marketing onto the Internet. Imagine a well-designed website with content that is a relative to your needs, tells you everything you need to know in order to make a buying decision, and makes it incredibly easy for you to complete that buying transaction.  This is 3-D marketing taken to its logical extreme.

In the analog world, 3-D marketing beats out 2-D marketing, but at a significant cost differential.  As paper, printing, and postage costs increase, it becomes more challenging to generate a meaningful return within the analog universe.

Conversely, in the digital world, 3-D marketing gives you infinite reach with virtually zero incremental cost.  Better yet, the more depth of content you provide, the more powerful this marketing weapon becomes.

Marketers must understand, however, that a Web presence in and of itself is meaningless.  Great content gives meaning and power to the three dimensions. If your site lacks that content, you might as well go back to mailing postcards and product fliers.

It is worth noting, of course, that you do not need to wear special glasses to get full benefit from 3-D digital marketing.

Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget. 

It’s particularly gratifying to watch so many small businesses and independent professionals putting content marketing to work.  Here in SW Florida, Dean Piccirillo of HBK Sorce Financial, realtor, Chris Griffith, and Simply Cupcakes of Naples are three inspirational examples. With minimal budgets and maximum creativity, they are executing content marketing strategies that deliver tangible results.  And, for the most part, they have bypassed traditional marketing and advertising.

If you haven’t read Get Content Get Customers, you can cut to the content marketing chase here with the following 10 top takeaways from our case studies. They may just inspire you to stop procrastinating and to kick start your content marketing strategy now. 

These takeaways apply to companies of every size, but will bring outsized benefits to small companies when they use marketing brains to outmaneuver marketing brawn.

10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Learn from Smart Content Marketers

1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.
2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges that they face, you cannot
   hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.
3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may completely or partially replace traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive
   than doing things the old-fashioned way.
4. Print publications can be a powerful weapon in your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out to your customers with precision, offering carefully targeted messages that are totally under your control.
5. Great design adds significant value to content marketing by making it more accessible, more appealing, and more actionable for your customers.
6. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team that understands how to produce great content and that lives and dies by the
   success of your content marketing program.
7. Drink your own Kool-Aid. Whenever possible, use your own company’s products or services to prove their worth to your customers.
8. Get your customers to participate actively with the content that you create in print and online. Begin a conversation and keep it going in order to earn your customers’ loyalty and
   trust.
9. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning prospects or visitors into customers. You must then make it easy for them to buy.
10. Your small company can emulate most of the best practices from big companies in whole or in part.  It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.

The bottom-line: Content marketing is already working for smart small companies.  Now is the time to put it to work for your organization.  Don’t put off the decision any longer. You’ll find that learning from these 10 takeaways is a great way to begin.

Unless you understand your customers, you risk  painful marketing missteps.

Because we know that effective content marketing depends on a thorough understanding of your customers, regular research should be a core component of your content marketing strategy. 

Of course, it’s possible to do way too much research.  That’s when you wind up with the paralysis by analysis situation.  But, most small to midsize  companies suffer from too little research and too much gut feel. That’s when some very bad decisions get made.

The good news is that even very small companies with tiny budgets can now conduct high quality research that would have been affordable only for multimillion dollar companies just five or 10 years ago

Although it is possible to spend vast amounts of money on research conducted by high profile research organizations, it is much easier than you might think to conduct valuable research on your own.  Today, numerous online tools make it simple to create and deploy research studies–and that even provide guaranteed numbers of recipients.

How to Get Started on Your All-Important Customer Research

1. Inexpensive e-mail is the method of choice.  Most research has moved away from snail mail or even faxed questionnaires.  Each of these alternatives was relatively time-consuming; a mailed out study could easily take four to six weeks before results could be compiled.  You can have great results in just a few days.

2. If you need to make a decision in a hurry and are worried that research will take much too long, not to worry.  Within a week or less you can create a questionnaire, deploy the survey, and analyze the results.
3. Early PC research tools were very difficult to use for us non-geeks.  You now have several inexpensive and easy to use online tools with surprisingly rich functionality.  You can now do a filter or a cross tab in a few seconds that would have been agonizing five to 10 years ago.
4. It may help if you or someone in your organization has research training.  However, online tools such as Zoomerang, Constant Contact or Survey Monkey make it easy to devise a reliable questionnaire.  In addition, they provide tutorials which teach research best practices.
5. Even if your universe of potential customers is huge–say several million–you do not need a huge sample of respondents.  Three to four hundred respondents will provide reliable and projectable data. This is why Nielsen can project television viewership for such a small sample.
6. You probably have a sizable database of e-mail names that can be used for your research studies.  Even if you don’t, companies like Zoomerang will give you access to a huge databases with highly detailed demographic data.  Moreover, Zoomerang will actually guarantee the number of responses that you want.
7. What you need to budget for your research?  Here are some ballpark numbers:
   • annual licensing fee for access to online research tools–$400-$600
   • use of your own e-mail list for research–free
   • use of vendors’ e-mail list with guaranteed response of 300– $1500-$3000
   • hiring of an affordable outside firm to conduct the research–$2000-$5000

Is the time, effort, and expense worth it?  Absolutely!

Whether you are starting a business, launching a product, or creating a content marketing strategy, you must understand who your best customers are and what is most important to them.  Otherwise you’re flying blind.

In 2009, conducting reliable research is almost painless.  On the other hand, failing to conduct that research may be one of the most painful business mistakes you will make.

Building a solid business blog-powered website is challenging for all of us. But it’s even more difficult for anyone who lives in the financial services universe.

Because financial services professionals must adhere to strict compliance regulations, they must be very careful about what they say and how they say it.  Dean Piccirillo a principal in HBK Sorce Financial, LLC, manages to convey relevant and compelling information while maintaining essential compliance.

Even more impressive is the quality of his own site’s design which manages to be simultaneously newsy and professional. To build DeanPiccirillo.com, Dean used a WordPress theme called Live Wire that can be significantly customized for the needs of an individual business.  Perhaps most impressive of all is the fact that Dean did almost all the work himself. Although this may be beyond the capabilities of many of us, it shows what a non-technical businessperson can achieve using the power of a tool like WordPress.

Among my favorite elements:

• His horizontal navigation includes both page links and links to the most important categories so that visitors can search intuitively for exactly what information they want right from the top of the page.
• He has a featured blog post in the upper left which changes periodically to keep the site fresh.
• He includes a tabbed news feature which lets visitors choose from: latest news, popular, and latest comments. This makes Dean’s site look as professional as a major newspaper or magazine.
• The quality of his articles is first class. For example, he writes thoroughly and compellingly about the need for long-term care insurance. That’s a topic that is or should be top of mind for all of us as we approach a certain age.
• He includes both RSS links and social media elements so that we can connect with Dean pretty much anywhere.

Dean is relatively new to the blogging and social media arena but has found it an extremely valuable tool in establishing his credibility and that of his company among prospective clients in Fort Myers. So I asked him how he’s benefited and what he has learned from his experience. Here’s what he had to say:

A Q&A with Dean Piccirillo

What tangible benefits have you gained from your business blog?

• I think blogging makes you a better professional as you are compelled to write regularly about topics of importance within your field.  Blogging challenges me on a daily basis to think carefully about the issues that are faced by my clients.  Part of this process involves considering and researching solutions to these challenges and writing about possible courses of action in a concise manner.  For this reason alone I would recommend that professional advisors blog.
• By paying attention to the statistical information available about my blog from tools such as Google Analytics, I am gaining extremely valuable information about what topics business people are interested in relative to my field.  For example, I have learned a great deal by monitoring which articles visitors to my blog are reading and what keywords they used in their search that brought them to my site.
  

What are some of the most important lessons you have learned from the process of building your site?

• Design matters – I invested a considerable amount time examining the blogging tools and platforms available, reviewing other successful blogs and thinking about layout and design.  I also invested some dollars with a professional designer for my site’s header.  Additionally, I purchased a “premium” Wordpress theme rather than using a free one.  I think this effort has paid off as the feedback I’ve received related purely to site design, layout, organization, etc. has been excellent.
• Spend a significant amount of time monitoring and listening online to successful bloggers – I spent months reading other blogs, considering style, word count, etc.  I don’t think I’ve really found my “blog voice” yet, however, this research was extremely useful to me when I actually began to create content for my site.
• Consider how you’re going to integrate social networking platforms and tools – Social networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn are a significant source of traffic on my site.  They serve as “outposts” that allow me to easily promote the content on my site.  Because Google Analytics shows me the sites referring visitors to my blog, I know that social networks play an important role in promoting my site.
• If you’re in a highly regulated profession such as financial services, work closely with compliance and get them involved early in the planning process – Communications in financial services are tightly regulated and in most cases must be preapproved, monitored and archived.  This doesn’t preclude financial service professionals from participating in social media and social networking; it’s just more challenging and requires a considerable amount of pre-planning.

The bottom line: I believe it’s almost impossible to overestimate the power of a terrific blog powered website like DeanPiccirillo.com.

Here’s why: Of course, I can learn a little bit about Dean from his business card and from a brief conversation in a social setting. That doesn’t take him from stranger to trusted advisor, however.

On the other hand, his blog-powered website will almost certainly be the differentiator when it comes to comparing Dean to his financial services peers. His site conveys so much compelling information so professionally that it immediately generates a level of confidence in his knowledge and capability. That level of trust would otherwise be extremely difficult to achieve in so short a time.

Be sure to check out his site and see what you think.

I was perversely inspired to write this because of a recent gorgeous direct mailing I received from local French restaurant.

They did a lot of things right. There was some beautiful photography that captured the essence of this charming little bistro. They described how the restaurant and its cuisine were uniquely appealing. They shared some impressive awards and recognitions for their excellence. They included their Web address. And, they even provided a little map that showed me exactly how to find it.

There was only one thing missing. But it was the most important thing: They failed to make me an offer that would entice me to dine at the restaurant. In fact, there was no offer at all.

So here’s a lesson we all learned long ago from the Godfather: make me an offer I can’t refuse and I will respond promptly and positively. For this restaurant, there were certainly plenty of possibilities. It could’ve been free appetizers, free glasses of the house wine, buy one entrée get one free, 50% off a bottle of wine or free desserts. But they offered me nothing.

Even worse, there was no call to action, offer or no offer. On one side of the 3" x 7" promotion piece the name of the restaurant served as the headline. On the flipside, the only thing resembling a headline was "recipient of many awards".  They didn’t ask me to take any action at all.

For me and I’m sure for most of the recipients who aren’t familiar with this restaurant, we will probably toss the promotion piece without taking any action. It appears to be a pretty expensively produced item so that means between postage, design, and printing they have spent a lot of money. But, I think most of that money was wasted because they neither asked me to come to the restaurant nor offered me any compelling reason to do so.

I am not a direct marketing expert, but I do know this: If you make me an offer I can’t refuse, you increase the likelihood of taking the action you want me to take by orders of magnitude. Moreover, if you had told me to bring an offer-containing promotion piece to the restaurant, you could have measured the results of your marketing efforts precisely. Finally, whatever you gave away would have been more than balanced by the money I spent on everything else during my visit–not to mention the money I would likely spend on future visits.

The direct marketing lesson: When you make your prospective customers an offer they can’t refuse, it will work for you just as effectively as it worked for the Godfather all those years ago.

You might think that Realtor.com, Yahoo real estate, the Yellow Pages, either of the two local newspapers or all of the big area real estate companies would trample an individual realtor on Google. But, you’d be wrong.

In fact, when you search for "Bonita Springs real estate" in Google, you pull up a total of 557,000 results. But, standing at an impressive #4 is LifeinBonitaSprings.com. That’s the blog powered website of Chris Griffith, a realtor with Downing Frye real estate. It’s worth noting that, although Downing Frye is a successful, well-established local realtor, their company website doesn’t show up until page 3 of the listings.

Although Chris gets a terrific ranking, does that translate into business for her? You bet it does.

Chris says that she currently gets more than 90% of all of her real estate business directly from the Internet. Just five years ago only half of her business came from the Web.

As she tells it, a typical first-time phone caller will refer directly to houses they have seen via her website or to information that she has conveyed.  It’s also worth noting that Chris does absolutely no traditional advertising to generate business.

By integrating both blog and website functionality, Chris has the best of both online tools. She shares her insights, her knowledge of, and her love of Bonita Springs within the blog component. Simultaneously, she enables her visitors to search comprehensive real estate listings within the website component. In this way, she meets the needs of those visitors who just want to learn more about Bonita Springs as well as those who are ready to think seriously about making a real estate investment.

In case you think that only a high-powered realtor with a giant team and a huge budget can replicate Chris’s success, you should know that she built her website by herself for zero dollars using WordPress. 

Chris’s success is an object lesson to what’s both possible and essential based on three key content marketing realities:

1. In just the past five years buyer behavior has changed dramatically. The vast majority of serious buyers for real estate and other major purchases are using the Internet as their primary information and research source prior to selecting what to buy and who to buy from.
2. Because buyer behavior has changed so much, traditional marketing and advertising is significantly less effective than it was before we all began to rely on Google and other search engines to find what we need before we make a buying decision. This reality is reflected in the catastrophic drop in advertising revenues throughout the print publishing world.
3. Technology empowers even non-technical people like Chris to create a professional blog powered website that has all of the core functionality that you would have seen from even a local newspaper 10 years ago. For example, if you look at the image of the 1999 Naples daily news, you can see that Chris’s blog powered website replicates pretty much everything they were doing.

What a difference a decade makes: An individual in 2009 can outshine $1 billion corporation from 1999 at a fraction of the cost

Hundreds of thousands of dollars invested by media powerhouse, Scripps, delivered this website just a decade ago –The Naples Daily News:  October 1999

An individual real estate agent today can deliver the kind of polish, power, panache that a publishing powerhouse achieved online circa 1999 –Chris Griffith’s  21st-century blog-powered website, LifeinBonitaSprings.com: 2009

Summing up: If you are still waffling about the need to create your own blog-powered website, you can take comfort in the success Chris has generated in the past five years. She shows us that by substituting knowledge, passion, enthusiasm, and technology for big bucks, you can generate great results on Google search and on your bottom line. You won’t achieve these results overnight. But you will achieve them over time with a consistent, compelling content marketing strategy.

Think Google. Think Bing. Think Kleenex. Think Nike.  But most of all think carefully before you attach that all-important brand name to your shiny new product.

That’s the essential advice from Caitlin Randolph of BrandBucket.com in this guest post. BrandBucket teaches companies how to build new brands with a bang by choosing just the right name.

6 Keys to Turning a Terrific Idea into a Successful Product by Leveraging Just the Right Brand Name.

For many start ups, naming a new business or product is even harder than coming up with the perfect name for your firstborn child. By the time your idea is ready to become a product you may find yourself in desperate need of a great brand name. But you may also find yourself a bit too close to your baby to give it the perfect brand name.

We know how hard and how important it is to develop that name so let us shine some new light on the naming of your future brand.

An idea in Need of a Name

In April 2008, Edward, a young entrepreneur needed a unique, meaningful, and memorable brand name for his ready-to-launch product. He had created a scheduling service/widget that makes life exponentially easier for the thousand of professionals who need daily help booking appointments. His challenge was to create a name that was both out of the ordinary and easy to remember.

Here are the lessons you can learn from the steps he took and the missteps he avoided in developing his brand name.

1. Don’t pick a common industry or category keyword name. This is the most common branding blunder. Many people have in mind an industry based domain that defines their start up. Common keywords can limit future expansion, not to mention the insane waiting list and price for a name like appointment.com. Edward needed to avoid names like "Simple Scheduling", "Advanced Appointments", or "Book Now" for the scheduling service. These keyword names initially seem helpful and self explanatory but are not only boring and generic, but may also limit future expansion. Instead of the obvious, we came up with Setster.com. The name Setster when broken down has ’set’ and ’ster’ – ‘set’ implies stability, finishing, and putting anything into place. And, ‘ster’ refers to one that does such actions. Setster.com now defines the product and sets a tone more memorably than a keyword could.
2. Pick an available .com domain for your brand name. Why? Today, your web address is more important than your brick and mortar address.  Avoid the nightmare of building a foundation on a name only to have your .com dreams crumble into a pile of disappointment at the only available .org. Although the lack of a .com address may not spell disaster, .net and .org lack the online clout you need.
3. Pay careful attention to your word components. In terms of length, the shorter the better. If directory listings will be critical, keep alphabetical order in mind. Choosing the right word parts will bring intuitive meaning to your brand name. These technical details are what gives the name its look, tone, and memorability. Giving your brand a short yet familiar sounding name will make it memorable. The parts of the word are what gives the unique name a strong connotation that relates to implicit benefits or positive outcomes. Using familiar pieces of a word allows you to avoid standard keywords. For example, ’sym’ or ’syn’ when attached to the beginning of a word will automatically make prospects think of togetherness and collaboration. The name symbiota.com and synovum.com are perfect examples; they have a strong connotation while still being a unique word and name. Use classic roots of words and good old Latin as you brainstorm the creation of your name.
4. Make your name memorable in a positive way, even if it doesn’t have an obvious connection to your product’s functionality. Names like Google and Bing are memorable because they are short and roll off of the tongue nicely, even though they have no obvious intrinsic product connection. Google’s name came from a spelling error of the word googol and bing.com is a sound effect.  Neither really imply what the business does. But, now we can’t get them out of our minds. Even better, Google has become a verb. 
   If your name is easy to say, to spell, and to remember without sounding silly, your customers will happily spread the word for you all over the net and into the real world.  You don’t have to spell your new word/name a specific way but spell it how it naturally ends up – flickr.com misses their ‘e’ but we don’t need it.
5. Pick a name that will retain meaning as you grow and evolve. Southwest Airlines began with a perfect name for its initial Texas route structure. Now it flies all over so the name itself no longer fits. Edward’s scheduling service, Setster, has developed into more than just a ‘book now’ service, but hasn’t outgrown its brand.  Make sure that your name will allow you to expand beyond your initial market without needing to consider a painful rebranding.
6. Be careful of trademark conflicts, even if the domain you covet is available. Find out if anyone has staked a claim over the name. Searching for the .com first often helps speed up the trademark process. You should avoid any conflict with an existing trademark to avoid expensive future legal issues.

These six elements give you the keys to creating a memorable, meaningful, and long-lasting name. They add up to powerful brandability that will accelerate your product take off and develop even more strength over time.

Want to know how your name ideas stack up on brandability? Use our handy tool to grade your web-based brand name.

For those of you who want to know how your current or future names rate in terms of brandability, we can help you score your domain mathematically. Visit us at: http://www.brandbucket.com/tools.

Summing up: Your brand name can make all the difference in transforming your big idea into a huge success. Use our 6 secrets to tap into your creative side. Don’t be afraid to be bold and inventive. Naming is the first step in branding. So make that first step a big strong leap.

Note from Newt: If you are like a number of my clients and could really benefit from easy online scheduling and related functionality, be sure to check out Setster.com, which can now help you with booking, payments, and e-commerce transactions. Their software now also works collaboratively with Quickbooks and Freshbook.

Needless to say, you’ll be able to learn even more about branding issues from Caitlin and the team at BrandBucket. Give them a visit, too.