In visual marketing, color reigns supreme
92.6% of people say that visual stimulation was the reason they pushed the buy now button.
Color brings harmony.
Visual stimulation, when done correctly, engages the viewer and brings about creating an inner sense of order and balance in the visual experience.
When you have found your correct color psychology in your marketing your strategy flows, people convert, and customers are attracted to your brand.
In this article I want to talk about picking the right color for your content on social media and why it’s so important for both the reader and the creator to have this fluidity between them.
Does Color Affect Your Marketing?
Let’s talk about color in general.
In 1666, Sir Isaac Newton discovered fascinating truths about color when he researched the prism effect with light.
When pure white light passes through a prism, it separates into all of the visible colors. Newton also found that each color is made up of a single wavelength and cannot be separated any further into other colors.
This stands to reason that even when conducting color experiments, colors of all kinds can only be dissected to a certain base-point. After that, it cannot be dissected any further, even with something so powerful as light.
Color is powerful.
Colors affect your marketing because we are creatures that are in tune with the subconscious area of the brain. Emotionally, color psychology works because it affects us on a different level.
For instance, there are two camps that colors lie in.
The first camp is the warm colors like red, yellow, and orange. These colors affect us on two different spectrums.
Colors on the blue side of the spectrum are known as cool colors and include blue, purple and green. These colors are often described as calm, but can also call to mind feelings of sadness or indifference.
This means that these cool colors are tapping into the emotional side of the brain and are important to remember that even though using too many warm colors that can confuse your message; you don’t have to worry about over-using cool colors too much.
These cool colors evoke a sense of trust, tranquillity, and influence among your target market. That is why most large brands choose their colors wisely, and most use the cool color swatches.
Warm colors trigger emotions ranging from feelings of warmth and comfort to feelings of anger and hostility. One study suggested that it is important to refrain from using too much of the same color at one time. Especially with the warm colors.
Researchers have said that the color red can hinder performance in some people and their tasks. So too much of a warm color is consistent with putting people off and limiting them to what they could do on your site or social post.
However, a study from HubSpot shows us how they wanted to tweak the color of their CTA button from green, which is a friendly, non threatening, color, to red, a more dominant color like we discussed above. See the image below.
Study done by HubSpot
This research showed them that the red button outperformed the green button by 23%!
So should we use warm colors then? Seems like a lot of double talk if you ask me.
Researching this further I came to a conclusion…
The Variables
There are a lot of variables that you must think about when introducing color psychology into your marketing strategy.
Everyone is different.
Different people react to different stimuli when it comes to trigger responses. Having said that, you must understand that the person that has just landed on your page and is an outright lunatic for your content may react more suddenly than someone who has never heard of you before.
Color still affects these people though. But what I want to stress is that for some people it doesn’t have to. You’ve already got them.
This is a graphic created by Kissmetrics about different brands and their color decisions with the Buy Now button. As you will see, tweaking something as small as color scheme in your marketing can produce great results for your brand.
Study done by KISSmetrics
The Final Thought
Create a color strategy that is fluid with the message that you want people to know about your brand. Create those bridges, those small tweaks, with your colors to bring astronomical results to your marketing.
For me, the color is blue. I want people to think of someone they trust when they see my branding.
What does your color say about your brand? And, best of all, does it say the right thing?
Start experimenting with your colors on social media, in your blog posts, and see what works the best. You may be surprised at what you find out
