What Are Brand Guidelines?
Brand Guidelines, which are sometimes called a style guide, are a list of internal rules for your team to follow when writing or displaying anything your customer would see about your business. Brand Guidelines are made to create consistency and continuity of your messaging and marketing materials. Brand Guidelines are also meant to evolve over time, so remember to keep your document updated.

Why You Need Brand Guidelines
If you have multiple people in your organization that create content of any type you absolutely need Brand Guidelines. If you have posters around the club with different colours, fonts, logos on them you absolutely need Brand Guidelines. Everyone in your organization should be using a version of the same font for everything from email to handbooks to newsletters.

CK Golf routinely creates and/ or further develops Brand Guidelines at the start of any marketing work we do for a golf course. There are a number of items that we consider but these usually include:

  • Target audience (defining your ideal customer)
  • Messaging (how we want your customer to feel)
  • Brand fonts (or family of fonts)
  • Brand colours (primary, secondary)
  • Logos (multiple usage formats)
  • Word marks (with out an image)
  • Text formats (how you write)

Below is a screen shot from a document that we have created as part of Brand Guidelines for other golf courses (we blacked out the name of this course that we worked with):

Here are a couple of other screen shots from other Brand Guidelines we have created.

How You Can Get Started Creating Brand Guidelines
Mission statements and core values are often a good place to start but we also like to think about who your target customers are. This may differ from who your current customers are. Establish what kind of person you want your customer to be. This will help start to shape your brand guidelines. Next, think about the tone you want to display to your customer – traditional and professional or maybe young and playful. These will help you decide what fonts, colors, tone and formatting makes sense for your club.

Text format are always the hardest to make consistent (see the numbers example attached). Formats also include date/ time, phone numbers, URLs, etc. If you are really ambitious you can also add in a sales and marketing check list to your guidelines to make sure that all your staff know what questions to ask before they publish or create something.

The finished product should be a PDF document that your can share with all of your team.

For more information about Brand Guidelines, send Tara an email ([email protected]) to set up a conversation. Let us help you establish Brand Guidelines for your team.

We, Jeff and Tara Ciecko of CK Golf write two blogs, one is our 19th Hole Blog where we share personal experiences and the other an Industry Blog where we comment on general business and internet marketing best practices, sales strategies and give golf industry related opinions. We have owned CK Golf  for 12 years and provide business services to the golf and other industries. As of July 31, 2016 our life and our business became ‘location independent’. Our 19th Hole Blog is about the places we visit and the things we do. If you have any questions or comments, or happen to be in the same location as us please reach out and contact us anytime.

Related Posts