Eat your Own Dog Food: How We Increased Business By 286% with A|B Testing

Once upon a time, Digital Astronauts was known by a different name. We had operated under the name BeauVue (Pronounced: Bō – View) Marketing for quite some time, but felt we had outgrown the name. I’m not suggesting that a massive rebrand is the best decision you can make, but if your gut is telling you that it’s necessary, then it may be. Sometimes, through acquisition or partnerships, you’ll even see some rebrand moments. With our rebrand we were able to increase new business inquiries by 286%! I’m not suggesting the way to increase business is by changing your company name every 6 months, but if you plan on rebranding, then do it right.

Why Did We Want to Rebrand?

This is the obvious question right?

When we spoke to clients we had a fairly positive response. We were told that the brand name: “exuded elegance,” “sounds like marketing for wineries,” and “very high end and expensive.” This all sounds great, but we were starting to see some issues.

1. People were mispronouncing the name.
2. While sounding expensive was great, we also enjoy working with startups and doing Pro Bono projects for Non Profits. It was hard to get any interest when our prospects thought we were beyond their budget.
3. We sounded elegant… too elegant. It felt like we had to live up to the brand and make our content stuffy, and all we wanted to do was have fun!

How do you choose your next company name?

You could use tools like namium or name mesh, or come up with your own original idea. No matter what you choose for your company’s new name, you need to have clear, strategic criteria to help you choose that name.

Our criteria for our new brand name were as follows:

1. Has to be easy to pronounce
2. Has to be relevant to our industry
3. Has to sound fun
4. Needs broad appeal
5. Must resonate with our audience

The Brand Name Creation Process

I’m not afraid to admit it. When were first assessing a business rebrand we threw a bunch of names at a wall like spaghetti. Here’s a picture of what our wall looked like…

Coming up with a brand name is tough right? Yeah, we figured that out pretty quick. When you start throwing out names like Marketing Cobra Command, SEO Ninjas, and Conversion Sharks then you know you’ve hit a wall.

The best thing you can do when you hit the wall (adding “ify” to create words like “marketify,” for example) is to take a step back. Go for a walk, focus on your clients or product, do anything but try and come up with new names!

After you’ve had some time to breathe just go about your normal business. Don’t spend more than 15 minutes per day brainstorming new name ideas. For us, we continued to add words we liked, ideas from other companies, and took to a thesaurus.

The Aha Moment!

So, what were we left with during this process? Hundreds of words we liked that:  A) sounded cool and B) described what we do.

We started to play with several different combinations to see if anything stuck. During this process we came up with the combination “Digital Astronauts.” Immediately we thought this name sounded awesome. On top of that, we loved the symbolism behind the name.

1. Digital – we’re digital marketers.
2. Astronauts – pioneers in our industry.

This was all gravy, but we didn’t want to jump into anything on impulse. After all, we didn’t want to choose a brand name and have to go through this whole process all over again.