If you’re thinking of performing a rebrand for your company in the next year, the arrival of over a thousand new domain extensions is set to offer you a fantastic new opportunity. However, with so many extensions becoming available, it can be difficult to know how to pick the right extensions for your brand’s new direction. In this post I will give you some helpful advice and tips to make this process easier.

Start with your desired outcomes

Make sure that you’re aware of the outcomes you want to achieve through your rebrand. These could include…

• Succeed in new markets
• Shift focus towards a particular market
• Reposition your brand within markets
• Increase audience awareness
• Succeed in new geographical territories
• Cater to new or developing customer needs

Write out the different outcomes that apply to your rebrand and rank them in relation to their importance.

Define the scope

Once you have defined your reasons for a rebrand, you can focus on the type of domain extension that would work best for your evolved business. For example, if one of the main reasons that your company is rebranding is because it is expanding globally, you might want to take advantage of the .international or .global extensions to reinforce this aspect of your brand.

Another issue to consider is whether you might benefit by having more than one new gTLD. If, for example, you’re in a company that is making a major move into a new market with a new range of products, it might make sense to have a dedicated website to showcase this area of your business with its own unique extension in addition to having a different gTLD for your main website.

Picking your extensions

Once you’re aware of how many extensions you’re looking for and what aspects of your brand you’d like them to present, you’re now ready to pick your specific extensions. It makes sense to have a few different options available, so you can have different bids in mind if your first choices are unavailable.

Open up a blank spreadsheet and list the different extensions you’re considering from the ones that are essential to ones that would be nice to have. Then you’ll have an effective buying approach when the ideal extensions for your new brand become available.

To help you get started, here's some examples of suitable gTLDs for different industries

Industry	Suitable gTLDs
IT	.tech, .app, .software
Sport	.football, .fitness, .run
Beauty	.hair, .salon, .spa
Food	.restaurant, .recipes, .fish
Entertainment	.club, .broadway, .movie
Travel	.hotel, .flights, .fly

As more information about the new domain extensions is released, we’ll be keeping you up to date via the blog, so you can continue to refine your decisions based on price, restrictions, successful extension applications and so on. Keep checking back for the latest!