How to Name Your Inbound Marketing Agency

Finding just the right name for your new enterprise is important – it sets prospects’ expectations, reflects your purpose and culture, and puts a virtual stake in the ground that says “This is who we are.” The best names are memorable, meaningful and simple; they transcend trends and project an image.

It’s an awful lot to ask of a few words, so we’ve outlined a few methods that might help you develop the right name for your group.

The Easy Out

This is where you throw up your hands and simply use your own name – assuming it’s not associated with a nefarious historical figure or that your name isn’t something like Dickenbohl or Schwingenmauler.

The Obvious

Like The Easy Out, this is what you settle on when you can’t come up with anything else and baptize your firm “The Inbound Marketing Experts."

The Wily Coyote

This is when you steal Wily Coyote’s dynamite-and-anvils vendor name and dub yourselves “Acme Inbound Marketing.”

The "What?"

Create your own word. This is done by taking a real word and adding a few letters to it that don’t belong, making names like Thrivent and Accenture and Squidoo.

Name Generators

Occasionally we ask ourselves what we’d have named our firm had it not already had one when we bought it. One afternoon (there was beer involved), our team came up with some additional approaches that just might work for you. We’ve outlined them here, along with a few of the names that resulted from our experimenting. Feel free to use any of these generators, obligation- and royalty-free, to put a name to the face of your inbound marketing firm!

The Hipster

1. Start with the color of the shirt you’re currently wearing. If it’s a pattern, identify it by plaid or floral or striped or abstract
2. Add the name of your first childhood pet
3. Tack on two marketing buzzwords from the lists below (first an adjective, then a noun) that indicate what you do

Adjectives        

1. Synergistic
2. Best-of-Breed
3. Bleeding Edge
4. Web-Enabled
5. Value-Added
6. User-Centric
7. Strategic
8. Plug-and-Play
9. Top-to-Top
10. Next-Gen
11. Frictionless
12. Collaborative
13. Sticky
14. Viral
15. Killer
16. End-To-End
17. Granular
18. Mission-Critical
19. Robust
20. Turnkey
21. Real-Time
22. Virtual

Nouns

1. Solutions
2. Inbound Marketing
3. Marketing 2.0
4. Strategies
5. Initiatives
6. Deliverables
7. Innovations
8. Paradigms
9. Partnership
10. Technologies
11. Web Services

Our Results:

“Red Ralph Bleeding-Edge Solutions”

“Plaid Sally Top-To-Top Strategies”

(Careful with this one. My friend Rose would have a perfectly legitimate but much-misunderstood marketing firm called “Pink Trixie Viral Deliverables” if she used this approach.) 

The Proud Local

1. Start with the adjective that best describes your founder
2. Add the name of a type of tool; shove this right up against the first word, no spaces
3. End with the name of the city in which you’re located

Our Result:

“IntenseWrench Appleton”

The Literate

1. Start with the last name of your favorite teacher (our selection: Woodman)
2. Add a Shakespeare character (Iago)
3. Truncate one or both to make a word that flows
4. Wrap it up with what you do: Inbound Marketing

Our Result:

“WooGo Inbound Marketing”

The Foodie

1. Start with your favorite type of pasta
2. Add the name of a cooking utensil
3. Add those together to make it appear to be the names of the owners
4. Add a descriptor of what you do

Our Result:

“Fusilli & Colander Inbound Marketing”

The Anagram

Use an online anagram maker to take what’s mundane and make it more edgy:

• Inbound Marketing Firm becomes Mind-Numbing Freak Riot
• Inbound Marketers becomes Bad Moniker Tuners
• Content Marketers becomes Monster Net Racket

If all else fails, use this inveterate name generator, combining the name of your first pet and your mother’s maiden name. If Weidert Group used this method today, we’d henceforth be known as “Bunkie Mausfaller Inbound Marketing.”

Well, you can’t say it’s not memorable…

Using one of the above methods, what's your Inbound Marketing firm's name?

Meg Hoppe is the Creative & Content Director of Weidert Group, a full-service inbound marketing agency based in Appleton, WI. Meg spent 15 years in traditional agencies working primarily on major food brands. For the past several years, she and her team have repositioned Weidert Group into a HubSpot Gold Level Partner, focused on providing a complete range of related services to clients across the country and overseas.