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The Importance of a Color Story in Your Campaigns

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Written By Ashley Nielsen

One of the most important elements to consider when telling your brand story is colour.

Your brand’s colour story is a palette of colours that evoke emotions from your customers and help your marketing campaigns stand out. It enhances brand recognition to boost brand awareness and help your business grow.

Every brand needs a colour story, whether you are a food and beverage business, marketing agency, or e-commerce company. Using the right imagery and colours to improve your brand consistency is key to ensuring someone can recognize your brand wherever you are marketing and advertising.

Importance of Colors in Marketing

Importance of Colors in Marketing

To understand the importance of a colour story, you must first learn about the psychology of colours. Essentially, different colours evoke different emotions, and this concept is used in everything from interior design to branding.

Colours are used for several reasons, including using contrasting colours to make things more readable and using different colours to trigger emotions and thoughts. For example, the colour blue triggers a feeling of trust, while red triggers a sense of urgency. 

Everything, from your website to business cards, should utilize your colour story to make a good first impression. Your brand’s colours reflect the nature of your business and tell customers how to feel when they think about you.

The colours you choose should be memorable, but you must determine the type of mood you want to convey. For example, is your brand playful or professional? Let your colour tell customers. 

Colour is the foundation of your brand identity, allowing you to visually express what your business does and why individuals should choose you over the competition. Your colour story will be used across all your marketing campaigns, including logos, packaging, products, and advertisements. 

Choosing Your Brand Colors

Remember that not every product needs to utilize your company colours if you sell products. You may have different colours for different product lines to target different customer segments, or you may choose to use your brand colours throughout your entire collection.

When using colours for your brand, choose three at most to create a good balance. There are many different colour palettes to use, including complementary, monotone, and split-complementary colours, all of which look great paired together.

However, your palette is a reflection of your brand, so it’s always best to consider your customers and how you want them to feel about your business.

What Do Colors Mean?

What Do Colors Mean?

We’ve already discussed how different colours evoke different emotions. Depending on your business, industry, and overall messaging, you may choose one colour over another based on the way they look.

However, using colours that stand out only go so far; your colour story should be used to make customers feel something and take action. Here’s more information about each of the colours you can choose:

  • Red: As we’ve discussed, red creates a sense of urgency. However, it is also associated with passion, danger, and love. Red will grab your customers’ attention and can make people feel passionate about something.
  • Orange: Orange is a joyful colour associated with playfulness and cheer. A warm colour like red encourages people to take action, although it doesn’t evoke the same sense of urgency.
  • Yellow: Yellow evokes the feeling of happiness, similar to sunshine. It is another warm colour but one that has a more relaxing and positive association.
  • Green: Green is almost always used to visually describe eco-friendliness and nature. It is associated with health, serenity, and growth.
  • Blue: Blue is one of the most popular colours used by brands because it signals trust and dependability.
  • Purple: Purple is a mix of red and blue– energy and dependability. It is typically used to demonstrate extravagance, power, luxury, and royalty.
  • Black: Black is another popular choice for brands because it exudes a sense of sophistication and luxury. It is often associated with car brands and fashion brands. However, using black can also create a sense of fear, especially when used with other colours like red.
  • White: White is a simple, clean, and pure colour that’s used for many cleaning products and healthcare brands because it pairs well with other secondary colours to evoke feelings about youth.

Now that you understand the importance of a colour story in your campaigns, you must choose the right colours.

There are many ways to do this, especially once you understand what different colours mean. However, one important thing to consider is your target audience.

Choosing the right colours can set you apart and make prospective customers take action while choosing the wrong colours can result in a negative first impression. Your colours must represent your value proposition, so selecting the right colour is key.

Consider the different meanings behind colours and the feelings you want your business to be associated with. Playful brands can choose any number of colour combinations for their colour story, while others may have to choose more wisely.

For example, a child’s toy brand can use bright, cheerful colours, while a tech company may prefer different shades of blue to exude trust. 

Remember, you’ll use these same colours throughout your marketing campaigns to provide customers with a seamless experience with your brand, whether they’re online or in person. Therefore, your colour story must be something that allows your brand to shine.

Once you’ve chosen the right colour palette, you can develop your editing style, selecting filters to enhance the palette for use across all mediums, including digital mediums like social media advertisements and print mediums like trade show displays.

A Color Story Grows Your Business

A Color Story Grows Your Business

A colour story boosts brand recognition to help engage customers while providing them with a good first impression and seamless experience no matter how they engage with your brand.

When looking at your images and marketing materials, prospective customers should be able to know where the content is coming from just by looking at your colours and other branding elements, like your logo. 

Since colour stories are used throughout all of your campaigns, you can also streamline your workflow, knowing which colours, shades, and filters you have to work with to help you create beautiful content.

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