Stella Orange, WORDSMITH Marketing strategy & copywriting to make your cash register sing

How to name your thingy

I have an awesome new program—how do I name it so that people line up around the block to join it?

Every once in awhile when I was a kid, my mom treated herself to a candy bar called the Whatchamacallit.

Well, Stella’s here to tell you that it’s not only a peanut crisp coated in caramel and chocolate: it’s an epidemic spreading like a bad rash in the circles you & I travel in.

That's right, there’s a raging case of what I like to call whatchamacallit-itis going around.

In fact, if this were the Garden of Eden, we’d see Adam & Eve looking at a snake and calling it a “Venom Breakthrough.”

A giraffe would be a “Stick Your Neck Out to Greatness.”

A cat might be a “Purrmission to Relax.”

Stella loves pun-ishment as much as the next gal, but she’s playing around to prove her point: when it comes to naming your programs, you need actually convey something—

What it IS.

This is the mark of a business who has her act together, and it’s one of those small gestures that has a big, wonderful effect on turning window-shoppers into clients.

So if you find yourself suffering from whatchamacallit-itis, here’s Stella’s simple prescription (using a program for an example, so you get the idea):

1) Write a “cheat sheet.” On a 3x5 card, write the nuts & bolts of your program. The dates. The length of the classes. What they’ll learn to do in each session. How much.

2) Take a step back. What IS this, really? How will people USE it to achieve their goals?

3) Find your anchors. When I name something, I want to start with simple clarity about what it is, and what the main benefit will be. I do this with “anchor” words. In a nutshell, it’s like compound words for marketing. Take two words, push them together, and they become a stronger, more exciting idea. Revenue Breakthrough. Charm School for Sales Pages (see how it’s 2 ideas?) Suzanne Evans’ is awesome at this. Help more people (that’s 3). Conversations to Cash.

4) Once you’ve got some anchors to play with, move them around. I like to do this by moving MYSELF around, actually getting away from my desk & going for a walk. I feel the sun on my back, hear the birds singing, as I rearrange anchor words like puzzle pieces and mutter under my breath: what are you? What are you?! Until the name comes.

5) Top it all off with a "grounding word." Program. Workshop. Session. Course. Teleseminar. Series. Event. These are clues that signal to readers the length and format of what you’re talking about. Bonus: you can use this as a pronoun in your marketing (e.g. “the program”… “the 5-day retreat”… “the call”).

How this works: One of my clients is a social media rock star who’s launching an online training forum for VAs and OBMs on more advanced marketing strategy, so they can go back and help THEIR clients ramp up their online marketing. The working title was “Business In A Box”—because she wanted her students to know that they could take what they learn and turn it into a lucrative business, even if they didn’t have one to start.

Which is a fine selling point for her sales page, but can you see how it kind of gets in the way of conveying the actual awesomeness of her program?

So we renamed it Marketing 3.0 University. Because that’s really what it IS, and she’s already using messaging about “mainstreet” in her brand and marketing. Towns have universities, and smart VAs and OBMs are looking for training in the next wave of marketing. Cool, right?

(Once her page is up, I’ll post a link so you can see how we did it.)

Got a bad case of the whatchamacallits? Be brave and post what you’re working on –and want help with—on Stella Orange’s fan page, and let’s see what we can come up with. I'd love to help! Oh, and mighty thanks to yiukeung's flickr photostream for the contraption.