Colors are crucial to your marketing and branding. You’ll utilize colors in everything from your logo to your website, ads, and more—so don’t just pick them because they’re pretty. Instead, you should plan out the colors you want to use in your branding and marketing intelligently. What is the secret to effective color choice? The answer is understanding color psychology and applying it to your advantage. Let’s get started.
Defining color psychology, and how does it work?
Color psychology is the idea that certain colors cause an emotional reaction and, by doing so, can influence our behavior. It’s not as easy as looking at red and becoming angry or seeing blue and being relaxed, but it’s almost. Research suggests that the color red corresponds with an increase in blood pressure, and blue’s color is associated with a decrease, allowing you to feel more relaxed.
Due to this effect on behavior, colors can play an important impact in the mood you create. According to Architectural Digest, this makes selecting the appropriate colors essential to set the tone for your home. Warm colors are known to be energizing and stimulating, while cool hues tend to be calming.
When it comes to your brand image and marketing efforts, the psychological impact of colors works in the same way.
This brings us to the next section.
How can you use the psychology of color to boost your marketing?
Now, let’s take a look at how you can use color psychology to improve your marketing even more and increase sales.
1. Learn the fundamentals of color psychology
Knowing the fundamentals will go a long way toward incorporating color psychology into your marketing. We discussed earlier how red could trigger awareness or anxiety, and blue has an impact on being more relaxed.
Here are a few more basic associations with colors to think about when you are making your advertisements:
- Red: Stimulates our emotional system and can cause us to feel passion, anger, danger, action, anxiety, power, and excitement.
- Orange: Brings out the child in everyone. It’s associated with enthusiasm, playfulness, friendliness, warmth, and creativity.
- Yellow: Evokes optimism, happiness, warning, joy, originality, and enthusiasm.
- Green: Great color for promoting vibrancy, youth, vigor, nature, growth, and stability.
- Blue: Associated with calmness, stability, depth, peacefulness, and trust.
- Purple: The color of luxury, royalty, romance, introspection, and calm.
For an example, notice how CryptoWallet utilizes a predominantly purple color scheme for its website, creating a more calm and luxurious feeling that can help people feel both rich and safe using their digital wallets for the security of their crypto assets. Utilizing the same color schemes in their marketing efforts could lend to similar results.
2. Begin with emotions first
In simplest terms, when choosing colors for your ads or branding, think about the type of emotion you wish your viewers to feel. Do you want them to feel fear? Curiosity? Confidence?
Once you have a clear idea of how you want viewers to feel, then you can choose the right color to improve your marketing efforts.
3. Be inspired by other brands
A great way to become more comfortable when utilizing the psychology behind color is to look at advertisements, websites, and branding from other successful companies and observe how the hues used have an affect on you.
Take Spotify as an example. Their green and black color scheme are not only aesthetically pleasing but also implies trustworthiness (green) and sophistication/class (black). This is an important combination to remember when thinking about marketing to potential customers.
4. Make sure it is the colors are consistent with your branding
If your customers remember your brand by its colors and style, you must ensure you’re using the same color everywhere. So, making sure your colors are consistent with your brand’s identity is crucial, which is why most successful companies acknowledge this.
Dunkin’ Donuts is a good example since its brand’s colors are consistent whenever they’re used in marketing—this includes orange, pink, brown, and variations on these hues. It’s the number of colors and variants that (in most cases) prevent your brand from becoming boring or two-dimensional. This brings us to the subject of having the appropriate color palette.
5. Designing your brand’s color palette
You’ll want the colors of your advertising consistent; however you don’t want to appear monotone and lackluster. The best solution is to choose a color scheme that is flexible, with some foundational standards.
If you don’t have a color palette for your brand, it’s time to create one.
Here are some popular color palettes:
- Analogous: Colors that are next to each one within the color wheel.
- Complementary: Opposite colors that make for high contrast.
- Monochromatic: Different hues of the same primary tone.
6. Remember the context of your culture
Color perception isn’t universal. Five years ago, MIT scientists discovered that the words we use to describe color could vary based on different countries and cultures.
Certain communities have three categories of colors and others can have as high as 12-wide range categories without even going into the individual color categories. For this reason, it’s essential to keep your culture in mind when incorporating an effective marketing strategy into your business plan.
7. Try adding some blue
A lot to take in? Learning the fundamentals and including the psychology of color in your workflow for marketing will require time and practice.
In the meantime, there’s a simple rule of thumb: If you’re not sure, try adding some blue.
It’s evident that blue is a calming and affluent color all over the world. It could be the reason that many of the most popular brands around the globe include blue as their logo colors. Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, American Express, IBM–the list is endless.
8. Conduct a few color tests with your audience
This may appear as if we’re fighting all of the things we’ve said before. However, the truth is that you don’t know for certain the way your audience will react to a particular color. This is the point where A/B tests are crucial.
Try using two different colors for backgrounds for your ads or buttons on your site, and determine which one your visitors prefer.
Use that data. This is the best method when trying to figure out which colors are the best to enhance your marketing.
Use Brand Kits to stay on top of brand visuals
Putting together colors that represent your brand on a daily basis is tedious place, which is why you can now save brand colors, fonts and visuals all in one place, thanks to Brand Kits.
Use Brand Kits to save your branded color hexes, which can be accessed easily whenever you’re working on your next design project.
Color psychology can be a powerful tool
It’s crucial to be aware that color psychology can affect your marketing strategy at all times. Your customers will make judgments on how well your company’s colors match the business and make them feel. With the tips provided in this article, you’ll be able to better connect with your audience and increase brand awareness.
Senior editor at PosterMyWall.
