NEUROMARKETING: The Psychological Hooks of Colors in Marketing That Make Sales Easier

Here’s the truth: Too many businesses are pushing their links, articles, videos, and imagery constantly to the web nowadays, populating it like never before. You now FEEL this. Wired Magazine says we are drowning in content and we can’t find the good stuff since there’s too much noise. Therefore, it’s a true, chaotic problem marketers have now to face due to this explosive online business trend. But the main problem? It is KILLING businesses due to lack of customer’s attention.

And Marketing is all about getting people’s attention.

That’s all that Marketing is all about.

But without attention….no money.

Therefore, making your brand stand out in the market today is almost an impossible task to accomplish, something Ethan Hunt himself would receive as a mission because the battle for customers’ eyeballs is definitely a bloodbath now. You have to win the battle for attention against cat videos, women’s pictures, car photos and many other forms of noisy content, and somehow stand out to promote your brand. So, you need to find a way to get people’s attention back in a clever way so you can keep growing your business. And fast. Otherwise, you’ll shrink and die.

That’s your business reality: How do I get EXTRA attention with smarter Marketing?

Well, thanks to a few Neuromarketing principles there’s a possible salvation.

The Psychology of Colors. Another brilliant fusion of Neuroscience with Marketing.

Here I’ll show you its true power, so let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

The basic definition about Color Psychology is the following:

Color psychology is the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior. Color influences perceptions that are not obvious, such as the taste of food. Colors can also enhance the effectiveness of placebos. For example, red or orange pills are generally used as stimulants. Color can indeed influence a person; Source: Wikipedia

And here’s the heavy-science commentary about it:

Colour is believed to be the most important visual experience to human beings. It functions as a powerful information channel to the human cognitive system and has been found to play a significant role in enhancing memory performance. Colour can be very effective in learning and educational setting, marketing, communication, or even sport. For instance, a marketing study has found that colour can increase brand recognition by up to 80%. Most advertisements use colour as one of the important element in influencing people’s attention, attitude towards the product and pressuring decision making. According to White, coloured advertisements can attract people to read the advertisement up to 42% more often than the non-coloured advertisement. This shows the importance of colour in making the information or message more attractive to the public. Source: National Center for Biotechnology Information

Awesome right? Did you read it all? I know you didn’t. That’s ok.

So changing to a more practical approach, just be honest and tell me next how you actually felt as soon as the image below stole your attention:





Original: Peterson’s Instagram

Did you feel excited? Marvelled? Happy? Impressed? Can’t tell?

Now one second. What if I mix things up and show you some contrast instead?

Better? Now you felt good somehow, right?

The fact is that Colors persuade you. They are very influential towards human behavior, forcing the eyes to pay closer attention to the message being delivered and locking people’s eyes for a few seconds whether they like it or not. A secret and very powerful weapon in such noisy world.

Something that can change a business today because it can deliver instant IMPACT along with the message itself, without losing the customer’s attention. Everything businesses need today to survive.

So we’re about to crack this code now and deconstruct another Marketing secret, my friend.

Let’s play.

DESTROYING THE MYTHS

First of all, we need to address the issue of misconceptions in this subject because there is way too much noise making unfounded claims regarding Color Psychology. This has been leading marketers and business owners to believe on neuromyths (just invented this word!) such as that a color has the power to “activate” a certain emotion in people’s brains. One color generates one specific emotion. Well, that’s not quite true despite colors do change people’s emotions.

Relax. Just give me 30 seconds to explain.

You cannot use colors as a way to influence someone’s emotions because of a these points:

people have DIFFERENT color preferences

people link colors to personal experiences

people are influenced by how the culture defines the meaning of a color

These core points influence how the color is perceived and interpreted by a person. Let me show a quick and real comment from a Psychology student just to reinforce this:

A Psychology student: “I might like purple more than you because my sister’s bedroom was purple and I had positive experiences there. Your own personal preference is determined by all the entities you’ve encountered of that color and how much you liked them.”

— Karen Schloss, psychology student at the University of California, Berkeley. Original Source: Seeker: Color Preferences Determined by Experience

Are things making more sense now to you?

So although colors definitely play a major role in human behavior and therefore, Marketing, Color Psychology is not an exact science on which you can blindly bet all your chips. You cannot shoot some colorful ads into your customer’s face expecting him to be manipulated into purchasing something or taking an action based on a forced emotional state, that your colors generated. Colors don’t have such mind control marketing power. They only have influence. It’s different. Colors give ADDITIONAL impact to your message.

And here’s another point you must consider to maximize impact: The Culture.

Cultural influence towards colors brings some weird but yet, accurate facts to this topic, bringing certain assumptions most marketers have been making for the past years to the ground. There are a few “WHYS” that no one has questioned before regarding color labeling, which explains why certain marketers get different results with the same ad and the same target audience.

Here’s a shocking truth.

For instance, did you know that boys were the ones that used to wear pink and not girls?

I guess not, right?

How could you, after all? And did you know that all clothing until age 6 was made of pure white? No? But let’s not stop there. Let’s confuse you a little bit more. Did you know that in Chinese culture white is the color of mourning and death while in Egypt the color for mourning is yellow and for Iran that color is blue?!

Nice. That’s great.

So what do you truly need to know about colors in Marketing is this:

FOR A COLOR TO REALLY INFLUENCE SOMEONE, IT NEEDS TO FIT ON THAT PERSON’S CONTEXT

You’ll see why I said this next.

Let’s go a little more deeper on this.

THE GENDER & AGE CALIBRATION

Gender and Age. This is important to highlight before we actually approach the marketing strategies. For those unaware, according to Joe Hallock research, hard data proves there is color preference by gender and age which makes building a more precise marketing message possible, since such information placed together with Color Psychology can deliver a more powerful marketing message.

Here’s some valuable data about this that you need to absorb for proper color optimization in Marketing:

Interesting.

Both men and women enjoy the color BLUE and usually hate ORANGE and BROWN.

Alright. But would that psychological trend remain the same once age differences are applied?

Well, take a look yourself:

It appears that blue is THE COLOR for you to win at everything and orange is what you should avoid at all costs, right? No. Wrong. Because despite these metrics, remember the myths part I’ve shown before, which you always need to consider before making any “ultimate” assumptions.

Now let’s untie the knot happening inside of your head right now.

So what can you ACTUALLY learn from all these seemingly misleading data after all?

Basically, only the following conclusions:

color preferences are influenced by gender and age

and color preferences are influenced by personal taste

color preferences are influenced by the country’s culture

color preferences are influenced by personal experiences/history

So although there’s data proving such particularities on color preference THERE’S NO EXACT SCIENCE dictating that using blue or orange or any other color will instantly generate a particular reaction on customers. Neither can you affirm that a person will instantly prefer a certain color as well. It’s all data on which you can base your actions and that explains some discrepancies in human behavior regarding color preference when you become confused with your results.

Now here is a “PS”.

I believe that in a very near future we’ll be able to know a person’s favorited color to craft a more precise marketing message easily, thanks to some big advances in technology that have been happening lately. For example, according to MIT Technology Review, Big Data experiments are being able to tell where you’ll be 80 weeks into the future, at an accuracy of above 80 percent.

Then you ask: How can they know that!? Answer: Personal data. Everything you use and see online, which Facebook Pages you like, which addresses you put on your GPS, which Netflix shows you prefer to watch etc, EVERYTHING is now being tracked somehow.

That’s some impressive anonymity destruction right there.

Therefore, finding people’s favorite colors is child’s play for this level of technology. Because add that level of personal data to a Color Sensor and a Camera That Sees Like a Human Eye and you got yourself something that you can be really scared about.

But anyway, today that’s not the case.

Now let’s get more serious about this and reveal THE REAL psychological secret behind the whole fluffy talk on how colors influence marketing.

Time to go to school.

THE REAL INFLUENCE: CONTRAST

The real psychological hook that force humans to pay attention is actually Color Contrast. By putting together two or more colors, a powerful message can be delivered without the brain having much chance to “defense itself” against your persuasive message, since it all happens in the subconscious mind, which is where Neuromarketing brutally strikes.

So Contrast is where the magic happens.

Dive deep into mixing the right colors, making them associable to your brand, your current marketing message, and the audience’s context, and you have yourself a shot at winning people’s attention faster than anything else that is in their sight.

But before we go any further, you need to know the basics about colors:



Original Source: KISSMetrics

Now that you got that knowledge from the 5th grade back, you must know that colors are rarely experienced in isolation. Here’s a practical example: Your living room is a place where multiple colors are constantly exposed to you and therefore, you experience color combination practically 99% of the time. Right? Because wherever you go, there’s some form of mixed color being constantly fed to your eyes whether you like it or not, hence why beautiful landscapes steal our attention. Because of color combination.

Here’s a more explicit explanation on this:

Have you noticed how all the colors can be exposed if you pay closer attention and deconstruct the image? See why CONTRAST is what really counts here? As you can see, our brains simply absorb the influence from a colorful scenario giving us only that awesome final result from processing such colorful visuals, creating that “WOW!” level experience. Therefore, when a place is labeled as “pretty” by us, you can bet that colors definitely plays a role on it.

IMPORTANT: There are 2 preferences for color combination: Harmonious & Contrastive. Harmonious is when you mix two hues of the same color, like sky blue and dark blue. While Contrastive preference involves too different colors such as bright orange + black. There are people who prefer harmonic combinations while others prefer contrastive ones.

So basically, when you put contrast into play, the level of influence a picture, image or video has, naturally becomes a lot stronger for the human eye as soon as he sees it for the first time creating that unique feeling of comfort which we usually can’t explain. By mixing colors just like natural landscapes do, you can generate that exact same feeling with graphics and any other form of marketing imagery used for commercial purposes thanks to contrast use. This is why there are hordes of web design websites sharing color palettes, like the ones below:



Source: Dtelepathy

Choosing the right contrast enhances your marketing message because depending on which colors you use, and how you use them, the whole experience of THE SAME MESSAGE can be transformed, making your customer “feel good” without him knowing exactly why.

Everything seems to be falling into pieces now, right?

Great. Once that’s all clear and explained, let’s talk about the good stuff. The practical applicability of the Psychology of Colors in Marketing so you can learn who to outsmart the competition faster.

THE MARKETING APPLICABILITY

Since Neuroscience breakthroughs got mixed up with Marketing, marketers have been applying several techniques and principles of this mix to maximize their marketing ROI and gain substantial leverage on the marketplace. Psychology of Colors is definitely one of them. And from my personal experience, the power of colors and its use on Marketing to influence human behavior is one “neuro trick” many marketers should learn BEFORE they create ANYTHING that has a marketing goal attached to it. Any form of advertising, website, business card, imagery, poster or whatever other piece of promotional asset at all, because it truly changes the final message.

Now here’s the deal.

There are a few areas you can apply The Psychology of Colors to maximize your marketing results:

THE COMPANY’S IMAGES — Pictures, Posters, Banners, Thumbnails, Infographics and other promotional-related image types . With the exception of Infographics, all other image category has to be carefully deconstructed to extract the color combo the asset is using so you can apply the best contrast possible. This whole category is crucial for success since not many marketers optimize imagery up until a point that it matches the place where it is contextualized, like the colors used in a header image of a website matching its top menu colors, for example. Many fail to approach contrast there, to name one quick example. Marketers usually tend to choose very weak colors or colors with a weak hue for persuasion, leaving a lot of marketing power on the table in this category.

. With the exception of Infographics, all other image category has to be carefully deconstructed to extract the color combo the asset is using so you can apply the best contrast possible. This whole category is crucial for success since not many marketers optimize imagery up until a point that it matches the place where it is contextualized, like the colors used in a header image of a website matching its top menu colors, for example. Many fail to approach contrast there, to name one quick example. Marketers usually tend to choose very weak colors or colors with a weak hue for persuasion, leaving a lot of marketing power on the table in this category. THE COMPANY’S CORE — Websites, Logos, Icons, Whitepapers, Documents, Business Cards, Mugs, Pens etc . Mostly, everything related to Branding. This is where is absolutely crucial to really think things through first, before making any radical changes because you can’t play with colors very often in this area or else, your brand may be perceived by others as inconsistent, and therefore, unprofessional. As well as unrecognizable (you’ll see a test on this later with some brands). But keep in mind that there are times where making changes involving the company’s colors is exactly what a company needs to do to explode.

. Mostly, everything related to Branding. This is where is absolutely crucial to really think things through first, before making any radical changes because you can’t play with colors very often in this area or else, your brand may be perceived by others as inconsistent, and therefore, unprofessional. As well as unrecognizable (you’ll see a test on this later with some brands). But keep in mind that there are times where making changes involving the company’s colors is exactly what a company needs to do to explode. THE COMPANY’S INTERACTIVE CHANNELS — Forms, Buttons, Chats, Pop-ups and other variants for direct customer interaction . This category is where marketers really like to play around, working constantly to figure out which colors can maximize conversion rates for a determined Landing Page form, Contact form, Add to Cart button etc. It’s the more common area to see conversion rate studies on which colors convert the best in the Marketingg realm.

. This category is where marketers really like to play around, working constantly to figure out which colors can maximize conversion rates for a determined Landing Page form, Contact form, Add to Cart button etc. It’s the more common area to see conversion rate studies on which colors convert the best in the Marketingg realm. THE COMPANY’S SOCIAL CHANNELS — Social Networks like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter and many others. Not many marketers give much attention about optimizing this part, which is good for those who do. Since Social Networks are a mandatory place for brands to be present today, neglecting color psychology use here only blocks a business from getting a very good amount of leads and sales.

But everything above could be summarized in 2 core structures: Imagery & Layout. But for visualization purposes, and to help your mind picture things faster like where color psychology can be applied in a brand, I thought it would be best to put things in a little more detail.

Anyway, but this is the whole scenario where colors blend in with a COMPANY.

But what about actual BUSINESS? Meaning, what marketing goals and human reactions a company can achieve once they start gaming with colors? Well, let’s answer this one fast:

GET ATTENTION — The very 1st goal of Color Psychology in Marketing is to instantly break the user’s visual pattern and steal his attention. Period. Here you must put in mind that making the customer’s eyeballs lock at your message for a few seconds with laser-like attention is the primary goal. That’s step one. Because in the world we live today, with the depressive percentage of 16% for actual readers on the web along with the fact that only 20% of web content is actually read (on average), and without neglecting the troublesome reality that users have a 15-second attention span online (or less), it’s quite safe to assume that GETTING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION nowadays is a freaking golden skill that only legendary marketers have today. So color Psychology enters to help us out on this matter, once it is applied correctly.

The very 1st goal of Color Psychology in Marketing is to instantly break the user’s visual pattern and steal his attention. Period. Here you must put in mind that making the customer’s eyeballs lock at your message for a few seconds with laser-like attention is the primary goal. That’s step one. Because in the world we live today, with the depressive percentage of 16% for actual readers on the web along with the fact that only 20% of web content is actually read (on average), and without neglecting the troublesome reality that users have a 15-second attention span online (or less), it’s quite safe to assume that GETTING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION nowadays is a freaking golden skill that only legendary marketers have today. So color Psychology enters to help us out on this matter, once it is applied correctly. MESSAGE RETENTION — The 2nd goal of Color Psychology in Marketing is to make people almost instantly REMEMBER the message you have just delivered to them. And you have seconds to make people remember you. Seconds. Hence, the need to deliver strong marketing impact within such short time window is a must today, and colors come to the rescue in this case. And this is not me talking, but Science itself, since memory retention on humans can be enhanced by 5% to 10% if you use colors on top of your message, whether that message is for educational or commercial purposes. Just remember that colors are like small steroids for memory . Use them right, and your brand will stick in people’s brains. So crafting a marketing message with a colorful approach, will naturally reinforce some core marketing principles in the customer’s mind, such as creativity, branding, and emotional intensity. All that has the power to “leave a mark”, making a brand or message more memorable if correctly portrayed by great color contrast.

The 2nd goal of Color Psychology in Marketing is to make people almost instantly REMEMBER the message you have just delivered to them. And you have seconds to make people remember you. Seconds. Hence, the need to deliver strong marketing impact within such short time window is a must today, and colors come to the rescue in this case. And this is not me talking, but Science itself, since memory retention on humans can be enhanced by 5% to 10% if you use colors on top of your message, whether that message is for educational or commercial purposes. Just remember that . Use them right, and your brand will stick in people’s brains. So crafting a marketing message with a colorful approach, will naturally reinforce some core marketing principles in the customer’s mind, such as creativity, branding, and emotional intensity. All that has the power to “leave a mark”, making a brand or message more memorable if correctly portrayed by great color contrast. INCREASE CONVERSIONS — The final goal of Color Psychology in Marketing is getting more SALES or LEADS. Period. So although everything else is beautiful and pretty, what truly counts is making people convert and buy. That’s the end goal. After all, there’s no reason to play without being paid, right?

Alright.

Now let’s approach a few marketing variations using Color Psychology on the areas I have presented to you above. I’ll highlight a few ways that a brand can power up its own marketing just by putting colors on top of almost everything that is related to business.

THE COMPANY’S IMAGES

By natural design, we as humans consume 90% of information through visuals which makes imagery a powerful resource that cannot be ignored when shouting your crazy marketing message to the market. The key strategy, though, is to apply color contrast — as I said before — to maximize engagement levels as soon as someone sees your image.

So here are a few GOOD examples from a few brands that worth highlighting.

The BE EXTREME:

The color combination BLUE + PINK + BROWN + WHITE gives you a good feeling instantly, due to color contrast. But that is all mostly thanks to the header image, because if everything was just an one-color-scenario, things wouldn’t be so persuasive leaving us with a boring website. To exemplify, let’s take a look at the same image without good color combination:

OH MAN! That was disgusting!

Anyway, failures apart, this makes pretty obvious to us that without colors the SAME website loses its persuasive marketing impact instantly, which would increase bounce rates, conversion rates and every other metric that business owners cares about. And with everything that involves the influence of colors messed up, the brand would have to rely on the back of content marketing alone to do all the heavy lifting.

Not good, not good.

But since we are talking about pictures, let’s go a little bit deeper.

Here’s a great photography website theme that does this color marketing thing the right way:

Have you noticed how pictures actually influence the overall experience through color combination without your perception on what’s the secret? So here’s another revelation for you:

Impressive, right?

What about posters then? Which option catches your attention more?

THE OPTION #1:



OR THE OPTION #2:



Do I need to deconstruct the colors like I did with the photography website?

Probably not. Because by now I believe you have already understood the whole concept behind this, which is great. You’re a fast learner. Now let’s move on and make things even more explicit.

Time to address something more brand-related.

THE COMPANY’S CORE

A Marketing study has found that color can increase brand recognition by up to 80% and other sources have reinforced that 60% of the time people will decide if they are attracted or not to a message, based on color alone. Once again, this reinforces the importance of setting the best colors from the beginning, before your start pushing your brand onto people’s eyes everywhere in the marketplace.

So here are the important points to consider to upgrade your overall marketing message:

Website Layout

Business Cards, Logos

Brochures, Documents, Whitepapers

The Website is one of the main assets a company has today because it is the face of the business. Therefore, it is one of the main parts on which a brand can gain benefit from, if they apply the right color combinations because users perceive the value of a business through colors as well. I told you not to neglect this, didn’t I?

But it gets “worse”. Users go beyond, making more hardcore assumptions that don’t reflect the reality of the business behind the website based on colors. For instance, did you know that people consider a website trustworthy by also evaluating if it has appropriate color scheme? That’s right. A few colors can influence the LEVEL of trustworthiness your company has just by color scheme alone. That’s harsh, my friend. Change a gray for a green here and there and you got yourself a marketing problem.

Just to make things easier to assimilate on this color scheme fact, let me ask you this:

WHICH COLORS BELOW REMIND YOU OF THE ARMY AND

WHICH ONES REMIND YOU OF CORPORATIVISM?

What would be your answer?

I guess you already know, right?

This is how the color scheme can change the influence of your marketing. So in this case on which I used Corporate as an example, thanks to all other corporate companies that choose the palettes from the left to brand themselves, people’s subconscious minds would associate immediately almost ANY brand with those colors to a corporate brand.

Almost instantly.

The market indoctrinated people’s minds on “What colors a Corporate company portrays” by displaying the same colors repeatedly, over and over, through several brands that don’t like to be very creative. But let’s use images again to prove this. Just take a quick look below:

ORACLE’S WEBSITE:

MOBIL’S WEBSITE:

Now let’s break the pattern…

Are you seeing where colors fit in now in your company’s structure?

Therefore, a simple color scheme is crucial for generating more conversions, increase customer’s engagement, and also, to strengthen the Brand’s identity. This is why changing the company’s color scheme changes its familiarity, because as you may have realized by now, color is an important part of a brand’s identity.

SO IMPORTANT, that these data below may surprise you (as it did to me a while ago):

#1 COLOR — Color is the 1st visual component people remember about a brand

Color is the 1st visual component people remember about a brand #2 SHAPES — Shapes/Symbols come right afterwards

Shapes/Symbols come right afterwards #3 NUMBERS — Numbers come next

Numbers come next #4 WORDS — And finally Words

Source: Color Matters

So this means that on your website, people will remember the colors first, then all shapes and symbols, then all numbers and in the end, the words you use to communicate. Hmm….Interesting.

Let’s validate this information with a test.

And you’ll be the one tested. Yes, you. Just tell me what brands come to mind when you look at the right OR left image:

I bet you instantly associated the right logo to Google or the left one to Yahoo!

That’s ok, no need to admit that to me. Let’s do another quick test to truly validate if color plays such a big role in the company’s core.

Here’s a brand test for you that the guys from Truly Deeply created:

The answers

01. Heineken

02. Adidas

03. Toyota

04. British Airways

05. BP

06. Google

07. BMW

08. Vodafone

09. Ford

10. McDonald’s

11. Coca Cola

12. Olympic Games

13. Microsoft

14. IBM

15. Nike

16. Pepsi

17. GE

18. Qantas

19. Nokia

20. Virgin

How well did you go? Don’t worry, because it’s not entirely your fault if you failed to remember some brands because the brands that are really good at marketing their colors to the world, will get remembered with more ease. Almost instantly. For example, everybody remembers the colors of McDonalds or Pepsi because strong, consistent color use in marketing/branding leads to such level of brand identification.

This is why a company’s website, logo, whitepapers, business cards and everything else that promotes the brand needs to be put to the color psychology test, to validate its level of persuasion as much as its level of identity. You need to know what kind of message you’re instantly sub communicating with your brand’s colors.

Alright, now let’s get to the part marketers care the most.

Conversions.

THE COMPANY’S INTERACTIVE CHANNELS

By Interactive Channels I refer to buttons, forms, chats and every other form of “direct” communication between a visitor and a website. So this is exactly where marketers usually put their creative fingers on, over and over, trying to figure out ways to boost their conversion rates just by changing colors on such channels.

But basically, what many fail to realize, is that a color’s ability to influence conversions is actually connected to the context (space) on which is being used, instead of being connected to the color itself. This is supported by cognitive research where there’s a phenomenon known as the Von Restoff effect, which states the following:

VON RESTOFF EFFECT: WHATEVER STANDS OUT GETS RECOGNIZED AND EASILY RECALLED, AND WHAT BLENDS IN GETS IGNORED

Well, from what I can see so far I believe this guy Restoff was smart because he’s definitely right. Whatever color you push to people’s eyes that is not in the middle of the environment, stands out. And gets attention.

Let’s make a simple test once more.

I’ll count to 5 and you’ll say where are the buttons in the image below.

Took too long, my friend.

Let’s start over. Now honestly tell me how quickly you found the buttons:

Probably 300 milliseconds this time, right? Instead of 2 minutes.

This is how colors actually affect conversions in Marketing, by using it to create contrast which draws people’s attention in seconds. And this was just one example, there’s also the option to highlight other parts as well, like what I did with the form:

And to finish strong with a few original and GOOD examples, here’s how the guys at Slack do it:

And here’s another clever use of color contrast in action:

And finally, why do you think pop-up boxes darkens the background?

Pure use of contrast.

So this is how colors can actually influence conversions dramatically. By using contrast.

Well, now you have a good idea on how to treat your interactive channels in the future.

Time to show you a bit more of color psychology in marketing.

But this time, on Social Media channels.

THE COMPANY’S SOCIAL CHANNELS

This part is quick and easy to digest. Well, what you need to know is that Social Media is no different than every other channel I spoke before, so I’ll address a few examples through imagery just to prove a point on how color applicability matters for social growth. Although I’ve explained everything regarding this subject, it’s better to make it a bit more explicit on social use so the difference of practical use of this marketing technique gets more obvious to your eyes. And your mind.

QUICK OBSERVATION: Why do you think most big social networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook use neutral background colors such as Gray and White (except on buttons)? That’s right. So it doesn’t ruin the users’ messages through contrast, and neither their harmonic messages as well.



INSTAGRAM

I’ll ” target=”_blank”>use mine as an example because, well, I haven’t seen any other Instagram account like mine until this day I’m writing this article. And that’s good news. But anyway, I’m a guy who enjoys CONTRAST. I’m not the person who digs Harmonic colors because it simply doesn’t draw my attention much.

So basically, I used the psychology of colors on my Company’s Instagram as you can see below:

It worked out pretty well.

My intent with this approach was to INSTANTLY SHOCK a person who is seeing my Instagram for the very first time using the colors combined. That way, I would generate an incredible experience as soon as they landed their eyes on my imagery. This is also why that, if you pay close attention, I NEVER use all dark colors OR all bright colors on all slots. Never. I mix them to create a good level of contrast because that’s how I deliver instant impact with my brand.

Works beautifully.

But anyway, Instagram is just one point.

Let’s open your vision a bit more.

YOUTUBE

Since videos are a very big deal for businesses today, using the psychology of colors wisely can bring great benefits. For instance, if you create video content thinking on how the colors in your video will impact the Youtube’s feed to users, you can maximize your CTRs and therefore, views.

Example?

I did a search on the keyword: “Gary Vaynerchuck”.

Now I ask you:

WHICH VIDEO DRAWS YOUR ATTENTION INSTANTLY

JUST BY LOOKING AT THE IMAGE?

I personally clicked on that video the first time I saw it on listings. This is how powerful color psychology is if you apply it right. And yes, I know what you’re probably thinking. Surely, you cannot control what other brands are publishing on their channels, which therefore can end up blending you in depending on which colors they choose to use, making you lose that heavy impact if someone copies your colors or use something that simply doesn’t match with yours.

That’s alright. But many brands are not even aware of this.

Besides, if your brand strategically thinks on this in a way that almost every search with your company’s name, results in a well-combined color scheme portrayed by each of your videos, then you’ll get A LOT more attention.

That’s pure human behavior folks.

People love colors.

But let me address a different point which has one intent: HOLD PEOPLE’S ATTENTION.

From that point, if people clicked on a video, what will help to maintain the person engaged is the colors of the overall environment of the video, which includes the background and the colors of the person’s clothes (if there’s a person on the video).

Therefore, there are a few explorable ways for using colors to hold people’s attention, such as:

Gary Vaynerchuk uses a RED SHIRT in the middle of a white background.

What does it do? Focus the user’s attention on him. A basic trick many have been using for years since the videos trend started to become more popular online.

But here’s another approach I prefer more, this time from Patrick Bet David:

The ENVIRONMENT seems comfortable, thanks to the colors used. Because the way the books and everything else falls into place along with his clothing, helps you stay for longer periods of time due to this comfortable visual image.

That works.

Personally, I’ve bounced from several videos in the past specifically because the color combination was too unbearable for me to keep watching. Therefore, the right colors do make you stay on a video for longer periods of time.

Alright? Simple, my friend.

With this, both Imagery and Video were covered which are the two type of medium you can apply to every other social network possible so you can have better results in your Marketing. So once you start applying this whole color principle into your business and in your branding strategy, things will grow faster. Promise.

CONCLUSION

The Finale: Keep in mind that Psychology of Colors is ANOTHER Marketing weapon in your arsenal, but it doesn’t define business success by its own forces. There’s still the need to provide value and generate content that engages people. Always. Because otherwise, this principle is 100% useless since nobody likes having their attention stolen by a neuromarketing technique just to see something “bad” in the end. Capture attention, but deliver. Always deliver.

Alright?

I Hope this helps your business, my friend.

Go make your color changes now.

Take care.