Color Theory In Digital Marketing
opens IMAGE file Can you imagine if the McDonald’s “golden arches” were purple instead? It’s hard to imagine, right? We have deep connections to color, whether we think about it much or not. A brand communicates a specific idea about the company or product, and often this is done without words. Color is often one of those nonverbal clues about a brand that people use to make judgments and observations about the brand. In fact, color is arguably the most important of those clues. People absorb color cues before they absorb anything else. If it’s important to care about the colors in your branding for your logos, website and business cards, it is then just as important in your advertising campaigns.
Any good email marketing campaign or banner ad needs to have a color scheme that matches the color identity of your brand. Let’s take a quick minute to explore the basic connotations that people have with different colors.
- Red is often associated with energy, war, strength, and power, as well as passion, desire, and love. This color is a bold color that will make a statement!
- Orange represents enthusiasm, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation. This color invokes a lot of energy and excitement!
- Yellow is often associated with food. Bright, pure yellow is an attention getter, which is the reason taxicabs are painted this color. Yellow can be a stimulating color, but can also be overwhelming to the eye. Be careful how you use this color, as it can fade when placed on a white background.
- Green often symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness and health. Dark green is also commonly associated with money and finance. Businesses wanting to instill security often will turn to colors in the green family.
- Blue often associated with depth and stability and is often popular in business branding. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, and intelligence. Dark blue is associated with depth, expertise, and stability. Blue is the preferred color of corporate America.
- Purple is often associated with royalty and therefore often conveys wealth and extravagance. It symbolizes power, nobility, luxury, and ambition.
- White symbolizes safety, purity, and cleanliness. White has a fresh, clean feel to it, and carries a positive connotation, as opposed to black.
- Black is a very strong color that symbolizes strength. Black is also associated with elegance and darkness.
- Gray is a nice happy medium between white and black. It has a polished, professional feel to it, without being as bold as black.
Were you picturing your brand’s colors as you read through these descriptions? What insights did you gain from looking at the connotations with color and those colors in your brand? Hopefully, you understood some basics about what colors work well for you and what don’t work. Understanding basic color theory will help you and your brand be a bigger power house and effective brand in your world.
Consistent colors and branding in email campaigns and digital advertising campaigns will increase brand recognition and increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. At Data-Dynamix, we strive to educate our media partners and clients to make any digital marketing campaign as effective as it can be. That often comes down to the details associated with artwork used in ads.