PI Magazine Article: 4 Branding Basics for Process Servers

Your brand is often the first thing people notice about your company. It represents you and gives potential clients an immediate impression of your professionalism, your creativity and your attention to detail. This is why so many large corporations employ entire teams to define, grow and protect their brands. Whether you are an individual process server or private investigator, or if you run a large firm, you should be just as concerned about enhancing your brand as the large corporations are.

The best brands are memorable. You can look at a high-quality logo and immediately grasp that it stands for an established company that has a clear identity. Companies with strong brands share them across all of the company’s marketing and communications so that anyone who visits their website, calls or e-mails receives the same message.

To help you create strong, memorable, and consistent branding for your process serving firm, we have put together this easily accomplished list of branding basics for process servers. You can take care of most of these things in one day if you set aside time, or you can break it up into achievable chunks. But within a week, you can easily have a branding campaign for your firm that tells potential clients, “This is the process server for me.”

1. Make Your Brand Visually Appealing
Your mission is to design a brand that catches people’s eyes and sticks in their minds. You can accomplish this by creating a logo that captures your company’s personality through cohesive color combinations, compelling fonts and striking images. Keep in mind that a quality logo doesn’t have to be overly detailed; some of the most-recognized logos of all time were simply one letter displayed in a catchy font and colors.

Unless you are or know a talented graphic designer, you may want to hire someone to design your logo. The logo can be a valuable asset to you for many years to come, so it pays to make sure it displays ample professionalism and creativity.

2. Come Up With a Catchy Slogan
If you were to describe your process serving firm in one sentence, what would that be? This question is a great jumping-off point for crafting a catchy slogan that captures the essence of your firm in just a few words. Once you have an answer, you can reshape the sentence if necessary to be catchy and memorable. Your slogan can be combined with your logo or used separately to convey to potential clients why they should consider you over other process servers.

To come up with a good slogan, here are a few more questions to ask yourself:

• Do you want to mention the geographic area where you serve papers?
• Do you want to mention your company name in the slogan?
• Which aspects of your services separate you from competition?
• When you’re talking people into using your services, what sales points do you offer?
• How would your most-satisfied clients describe your services?

If you answer those questions, you should have a solid basis for a good slogan. Make sure that you keep it short (maybe around 10 words) because people tend to have short attention spans. Don’t be afraid to come up with several slogans and run them by your friends and co-workers to see which one they prefer. Once you are completely satisfied with your new logo and slogan, you might want to trademark them to officially protect them from infringement.

3. Maintain Brand Consistency Across the Company
Once you have a logo and slogan that you’re pleased with, it’s time to get them in front of potential clients. For this task, you should adorn all of your marketing collateral with your new branding. Ensure that all colors are the same across marketing materials, and that there are no other variations between them.

Items that should contain your logo and slogan include:

• Business cards
• Websites
• Brochures
• Online ads
• Social media profiles
• Pens, coffee cups, T-shirts or any other promotional items

4. Incorporate Your Brand During Communications
Along the same lines as having all of your marketing materials feature a consistent brand, you should ensure branding consistency when you communicate with anyone outside of your business. This same rule applies to employees or co-workers, as they share responsibility for growing and protecting your brand. Everyone in the organization should be on the same page regarding how your process serving firm is portrayed in writing or verbal communications.

During daily communications, you should make sure that your branding is reflected accurately in these areas:

• E-mail signatures – No matter which e-mail client you use, you should be able to set your e-mail signature to automatically include your logo and slogan. Set this feature up once and you won’t have to mess with it again.
• Letterhead and invoices – You can have your printed communications decorated with your logo and slogan as another way to showcase your brand to clients or prospective clients.
• Social media – When your company uses its social media profiles to post updates or communicate directly, it helps to have everyone in the organization use the same account. This means that every communication will feature your company name and logo.
• Phone calls – Branding consistency extends even to phone calls, because your office should have a uniform way of answering the phones when it comes to new callers. Even if it’s just something like, “XYZ Process Serving, how can we help you,” people will remember if they receive the same greeting from multiple employees.

Conclusion
Keep these branding basics in mind as you review your current branding or establish a branding campaign for the first time. Many big corporations change their branding strategies occasionally because they have better ideas or they need to adapt to changing times, so you shouldn’t be afraid to go in a different direction. Have fun getting creative with your branding campaign and we look forward to seeing what you come up with.