How important is the name your language school and your language services and products, really? What if renaming your language school could improve your profits?
Should Your Language School Name Start With An A?
Once upon a time in the “dark ages” without Internet businesses were forced to use those “Yellow Pages” books and everyone looked up there when they needed help with something.
There was this old trick naming your business to start with an A – so that your business would show up always first.
The “AAA Emergency Plumber Service” was maybe not the cheapest one, but boy, since customers were in a hurry you bet that this plumber was one of the guys who made most of the money compared to “Zacharias Plumbing Services”.
Finding language schools today luckily no longer involves consulting any physical “Yellow Pages” and they are marketing dinosaurs that can be safely ignored.
(Side note: the leading provider in the United Kingdom actually still printing those on real paper stops that practice finally from 2019 and is now fully digital).
Welcome to the modern world!
Search behavior of potential new customers has become almost 100% transparent and visible with social media and search engines being the main tool how people search for information and buying using the Internet.
With people’s attention span getting shorter and shorter it has now become EVEN MORE important what the name of your company is.
It needs to be instantly recognizable and without any irritation or misunderstandings for potential customers.
Is Your Language School Name Sexy Enough?
The definition what a “sexy name” is, depends entirely on your target customer profile. If you want to teach business professionals language skills for a specific industry it is obviously entirely different as if you want to attract traveling millennials that like to book their language vacation while enjoying their summer months in another country.
Naming Your Language School For Awareness
If you language school has a very generic name you are in trouble because if people try to remember it and search for it on search engines, too many similar results will show up. “Languages Paris” would be a bad example of a generic language school name – it would actually show the best ranking OTHER language schools in Paris instead.
Such a name would be next to impossible to rank in the first positions in Google and it is nothing that someone would remember after a few seconds or even after a few minutes looking at your advertising or reading an article on a blog about your brand.
If I say “Language Frog” you immediately have an image in your head and it is very likely that you won’t forget that business name so fast. (I am not associated with the language frog company that is teaching customized Spanish language training – in fact, I came up with this phrase “language frog” and then did research online finding out that indeed such a company actually does exist.)
Or take DuoLingo – almost everyone knows that this is a free online language learning app (with a premium upgrade offer, of course!) – no matter if they like it or hate it.
Naming Your Language School For Trust
Another important aspect is if a name would help you to build trust for your desired group of customers. Take the above example of “Language Frog” – that would be unlikely to appeal to business customers that want to learn a language for a specific profession, for example like lawyers.
If that is your target market you might want to consider a very specific brand name like “LanguageAdvocate”.
So creating name just to “stand out” alone is not good enough. It needs to stand out for a specific audience.
Now if you say that you have several different audiences then you should go for the product/service oriented approach I will mention in this article later – by putting the focus on branding the products for those audiences first.
In this case, you might want to consider a language school name that is not too niche specific but also is not offending one group against the others.
Something like “Liquid Languages” (such language school does not exist at the moment of writing in October 2018, as it is actually a programming open source language created by a shopping card company).
How To Test Potential New Business Names
You won’t be able to do anything successfully without a marketing analysis and without doing some specific testing what your potential customer market might find trustworthy.
Since buying domain names can be done with a low budget, you can always create sample websites to show them to a focus group of customers that you want to win over and asking them for their honest opinion about it.
Do not use those “online usability test websites” where people are being paid to give you “their opinions”.
Do not ask befriended business professionals, ask unbiased potential customers that have no incentive to give you “warm and fuzzy compliments” instead of true and often painful feedback instead.
Make sure to do paid traffic tests (with Google or Facebook ads) as the CLICKS are the real answer if those potential customers like or dislike something.
Naming Your Language School For Social Media Reach
Naming your language school for social media reach is very important. It means that you should not have different names across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever the current flavor is. Customers are irritated if your name is “timslanguages” on one network and “languagetim” on another.
So when considering which new name to create, a search with the help of a “social media brand checker” that can tell you which social media account names are free across all popular social media networks.
Branding Is Ruling Your Business With Perceived Value
Branding is of course more than just a name but also an attractive business logo, the colors, and feel of your website and overall teaching materials, how your classrooms look like and it is about the complete experience that a language student will have with your school.
And everything has to do with perceived value. Any company without logo and a recognizable name will have a hard time to communicate why their products and services are superior (and more expensive!) than others.
The unthinkable alternative is to compete for the lowest pricing which will drive most out of business (see also my article “Are Your Pricing Your Services Too Low”.
Good Branding Can’t Fix Bad Quality Of Services
Let me state the obvious: no matter of marketing efforts including updated improved branding marketing activities such as renaming your language school and your services is a fix if your overall quality of services is bad.
Reality check: If you constantly get negative reviews and complaints, it is YOU, not your marketing who needs to get fixed first.
Maybe you are targeting the wrong customers and the complaints are based on you offering services that do not match their expectations. Then a name change can help to target the right customers and clarify the expectations.
But if you are teachers, classrooms, teaching strategies and the learning environment are not up to date, put your money there first to improve everything before fixing your marketing and your brand.
Considering To Test A New Name By Product Testing
Instead of changing the business name of your language school or services, you could do a test with a new language product that you offer instead.
Create a product or service and give it a distinct name that you can use in your marketing – and even consider to create a mini-website around that specialized offering.
If you see that customers love it and that you get the desired marketing and brand attention to it, then you can expand that name up to the point where you might want to replace this brand name for all of your products or name of your school.
Here is a “crazy example”: creating language units that are so short you can “learn them while eating a yogurt”.
So you call it “Yogurt Language Training”. You might even come up (if you would have the budget) to team up with a producer of Yogurt to print some of those lessons on the outside of yogurt cups.
It that would be successful you could create a network of ”Yoghurt Language Schools” and it could become a household name.
Considering Buying Language A School For Sale and Rename Your Network Of Schools
You also might want to read my other article about Language Schools For Sale and how to use that approach to rename your Language School network and services as a successful strategic approach.
Who Can Help You To Find A New Name?
The best way to find a new name is to work with a specialized ad copywriter or content writer that knows how to play and apply language psychologically correctly.
As always, I am here to support you with our specialized Internet marketing service packages for Language Schools that actually includes content creation, so we have the necessary contacts to writers that are able to help you with naming your brand, products, and services.