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How important is a domain name for financial companies?

When you think about financial companies, a domain may be one of the least important features for you. You may want to know more about the “spreads” and the “leverage” if it is a broker. But, like it or not, the financial company is still a company and therefore requires really good branding in order to make marketing an enjoyable process for its employees and not a nightmare.

Why bother with a good domain name?

One of the main reasons financial companies need really good domains is the fact that they are chosen most of the times for the products they feature. For example, if you have a restaurant and you decide to make it into a complete pasta oriented one, you will need to name it accordingly so that customers already know what to expect or, even better will see your restaurant appear in their search engine when they search for pasta.

The financial companies have the same idea, for example, they want to appear when somebody searches investing hence the domain investing.com, they want to appear when somebody googles Bitcoin, hence the domain Bitcoin.com and etc. All of this talking about domains have brought up their characteristics.

Domains need to be short

Some of the best domains are short because they are super easy to remember. This is sometimes a problem for companies or organizations that have multiple words in their full brand name. In this case, they always opt for abbreviations as a domain, because it would be a lot easier for users to remember and type in, than typing in the whole 4 or 5 words when they want to access it.

They need to be descriptive

For example, when you hear about a website or a company, it would be a lot easier identifying their field of expertise by just looking at the domain name. That is one of the best ways to increase traffic on the website because everything will pretty much be filtered for you. There are a lot more characteristics that you can check out here.

How much do domains cost?

Typically, domains don’t cost too much unless there is quite a large amount of demand for it. For example, if there is nobody trying to acquire a domain, you can get it for like 10$ and later resell it as a connective domain to a company.

The same thing happened with Facebook. Facebook.com was something that Zuckerberg managed to acquire without any kind of problems. The difficulties started when abbreviations as domain extensions became popular. You see fb.com was not in possession of Facebook at the time so it had to spend $8.5 million to acquire it, quite a large sum for a domain you pretty much already have.

Financial companies have it worse

Financial companies have a lot more difficulties regarding this. Because they always want their domain to be connected to the product they are trying to sell (like crypto exchanges and etc). For example, if you are a company that has the domain name Crypto.com, you are more likely to attract larger quantities of traffic on your website than a company with a branded name unconnected to the industry.

No wonder all the financial companies scramble in order to acquire a good domain name and do not shy away from high costs. Pretty much every industry related domain has a similar story.

That is why it is believed that the mentioned domain name Crypto.com was sold for about $10 million this year. If it is true it can be classified as the world's most expensive domain name.

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Comments: (1)

Ketharaman Swaminathan
Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 23 October, 2018, 15:29Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

Nice post. Domain Name is certainly a very important component of a company's branding. 

On a side note, if Crypto.com was sold, as you believe, for $10 million, it's certainly not the most expensive name, which distinction must go to Insurance.com @ $35.6M. According to this article, at least 9 domain names fetched more than $10 million. 

Konstantin Rabin

Konstantin Rabin

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This post is from a series of posts in the group:

Marketing in Financial Services

Looking at the unique challenges and opportunities of marketing in Financial Services and Fintech


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