In marketing your brand, colour is one of the most important elements that will help your business to stand out. It’s what attracts your audience and gets them interested in your brand. Colour is an essential tool because it has an impact on how we think and behave. Colour directs our eye where to look, what to do, and how to interpret something. It helps us decide what’s important and what’s not. It serves as an emotional cue and affects whether your content is readable or not. Colour has meaning, so each colour adds or takes away from your message.
Poor colour choice can negatively change the impact of your message. Get it wrong, and your great content and your amazing call to action will be easily ignored.
93% of buyers focus on visual appearance and 84,7% claim that colour is the primary drawcard for purchasing a product.
So, choosing the right colours for your brand and website is extremely important for the success of your advertising.
Here are some tips and tricks for choosing your brand and site colours wisely:
- Keep your colour combination simple. Studies have revealed that most people prefer simple colour combinations that rely on only 2 to 3 colours. People like simplicity. It makes your content easier to understand if people don’t have to interpret it through many colours. Too many colours make for a confusing message.
- Choose stark, complementary colours (colours that clearly stand apart from each other) to create an easy-to-read area. This makes your text or pictures easily distinguishable from the background and therefore, more noticeable. For example, you’d want your contact number, call to action button and your infographics in a colour that stands out and is clearly noticed. These things must POP, so that your audience doesn’t have to scan through tons of information that all looks the same in search of the important part that they want.
- Choose a colour-scheme where the item is the brightest element of the design. This reduces eyestrain and focuses the user’s attention.
- Best practice is usually to choose a very light colour for the background and a dark colour for the item or text itself, or vice versa.
- Ask yourself: “Does the colour I’ve chosen fit what’s being sold?” Researchers found that the relationship between brands and colour hinges on the perceived appropriateness of the colour being used for the particular brand. In other words, is the colour appropriate for what I’m selling?
- The right colour differentiates your brand. Studies have revealed that our brains prefer immediately recognizable brands, which makes colour an important element when creating a brand identity. It’s important for new brands to pick colours that ensure differentiation from entrenched competitors. Choosing the right colour can help your brand stand out. Consider the psychological principle known as the Isolation Effect: It states that an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” is more likely to be remembered. Make sure your brand is different from your competitors and “sticks out” so that people will recognise and remember it.
How colour affects your brand.
Utilizing the psychology of colour is common in many industries including retail sales, real estate, military, auto-manufacturers and restaurants. Subtle changes in colour schemes, distribution, and arrangement can influence both sales, brand loyalty, conversion and reliability. At the end of the day, every firm has to think through how their brand colours affect customer reaction and eventual sales.
Colours are wonderful things: they can lighten up our lives and can infuse us with happiness; they can also excite us, calm us down or make us feel reassured and nurtured. Correctly harnessing the psychology of colour in advertising is a very powerful tool: when an advert has the right colour to match the services or products on offer, and one which simultaneously appeals to the correct target market, the advert will form the basis of a successful marketing campaign.
According to the Institute for Colour Research, people make a judgment about your content in 90 seconds or less. And, up to 90% of that judgment in that brief amount of time is influenced by the colours they see. So clearly, colours affect your conversion rate and help people to recognise your brand. It’s important to choose your colours carefully and stick with them consistently throughout all your branding.*
Need help with your company branding and colour scheme? Get in touch – we happen to have a degree in Psychology behind us, along with how it integrates with your marketing!
*Credits:
helpscout.com
newdesigngroup.ca