How The Right Color Palette Can Help You Attract More Online Customers

by Kiara Kingston

Over the course of the last year, the world of e-commerce has reached new heights. As a result of the global coronavirus pandemic, more and more businesses have transferred the bulk of their everyday client interactions and customer transactions onto digital formats.

The global online marketplace has seen huge growth and as a result, digital marketing strategies have become more important than ever. Having a great digital marketing strategy (or not) can mean the success or failure of any company’s endeavors.

But with so many ways to potentially reach customers online, from social media feeds to google advertising, how can a company ensure that their brand stands out from among the rest?

One important- and perhaps surprising- element that should feature prominently in any digital marketing toolkit is, quite simply, color. In this article, we will take a look at how color can boost your company’s online presence, the ways in which color can help tell the story of your brand identity, and how to choose which colors best represent your company online.

How Color Can Boost Your Company’s Online Presence

As mentioned briefly above, digital marketing is no longer limited to any one particular format. These days, in fact, half of the time people spend on the internet takes place on their smartphones. And about 90% of the time spent on smartphones is spent using various apps. That means that however you are packaging and promoting your brand online, your online presence will have to be adaptable to many different formats. And that’s where color can play an important role. How?

Think of a brand like Coca-Cola. Their ads strike a powerful chord with casual viewers and people quickly scrolling through their phones. Viewers instantly recognize what company they are interacting with, and the repeated exposure to the same branding reminds potential customers of the power and presence of that company.

The reason people can so quickly and easily understand that they are looking at a Coca-Cola ad is in large part due to the color palette. The iconic red (either a red background with white cursive text or red text) is a simple and instantly recognizable symbol that carries with it all the weight of the Coca-Cola brand. The same thing applies to the yellow arches of McDonald’s, the particular blue of the Facebook logo and background, or the pervasive blue and yellow of the IKEA brand.

How Color Can Tell The Story Of Your Brand’s Identity

The companies listed above are all examples of brands that have successfully utilized the potential of color in their branding and design to achieve the best results in brand recognition. The way this works is simple: the more that people interact with your brand, the more they will recognize that the color palette you choose in your logo and branding represents what you do- and how you do what you do.

And the more familiar they become with those qualities, the more likely they are to remember your company when they are in need of those particular products or services. It’s all about creating a sense of comfort and trust in the familiar and emphasizing the qualities your brand would like to promote.

So as you choose the colors that can represent your brand’s identity across a wide variety of digital platforms, you will want to carefully consider what kind of story you are trying to tell. Sit down with your team and make a careful assessment of your company’s core values and narrative identity. What kinds of adjectives would you like people to think of when they think of your brand? Here are just a few to consider: authentic, elegant, home-made, eco-friendly, political, cozy, fashion-forward, trendy, vintage, classic, comforting, luxurious, affordable.

In order to keep your brand designs consistent and on-point across platforms, make sure that everyone on your marketing team is coming from the same perspective. You can note down the core values and adjectives that describe your company and post them prominently in your workplace (either in person or online). Come up with a good one-sentence description of what your company is all about, and then use that to help craft the right visual identity.

How To Choose Your Colors

Studies have shown that color can have huge effects on the psychology of your viewers. So drawing from the descriptive words and phrases that your team has already agreed upon, you can research the psychological effects each color may have on viewers. You might be surprised by just how powerfully a change in color can shift the whole feeling of your ad campaign.

Red can cause feelings of love, passion, and warmth. But it can also make people feel irritable or angry. Blue is commonly used as a calming color, but depending on the context can also evoke a nautical theme, patriotic elements, or technical professionalism. Combining different colors can create new meanings as well. Play around with applying different filters to your logo and ads to help figure out which latent meanings might be best revealed by each color combination.

As you brainstorm to find the perfect color combination to represent your brand, you may want to try creating a mood board for inspiration. Use a collage website like Pinterest, or simply pin up a huge corkboard in the office where team members can cut out and print relevant images for inspiration. Having that shared visual reference point can help hone your search for the perfect color combination for your brand.

Another helpful approach is to assemble various images from other companies you admire, both in your field and outside your field. Create an inspiration folder of successful ad campaigns that you hope to emulate, so you can figure out how the color palette they have chosen helps to support and boost the power of their ads. Add to this folder a collection of ads from similar companies to yours, so you can start to hone your understanding of how the field your company belongs to is often represented visually. Try to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t work from your competitors, then use that information to perfect your own campaign.

Final Thoughts

Once you have decided upon your visual color identity, it can be applied to text-based content, videos, graphic design, and photographs. That way viewers will be able to see who you are and what you do quickly and easily, whether you are boosting brand awareness, attracting new clients through YouTube ads, promoting your social media posts, or any other form of digital marketing.

Kiara Kingston is an experienced blog writer for Cell Phone Deal who enjoys writing and learning about the ever-changing world of eCommerce. She loves exploring creative ways to bring fresh content to her readers. Kiara lives in Florida with her family and pup Eddie.